Paul Auster died on April 30 after being the voice in my ear for a month. I had only recently finished his massive novel 4321, using an approach I learned from my wife to preserve momentum on very long books. (It is almost 1,100 pages.) By taking up an audiobook alongside a physical volume and alternating between the two as circumstances require, the...

The region, we’re told, extends from the deserts of Sonora to the straits of Tierra del Fuego, encompassing 7.7 million square miles that are home to 660 million people who share two Latinate languages: Spanish and Portuguese. What complicates the picture is that many in that vast expanse also speak Nahuatl, Quechua, and hundreds of other tongues. But...

Welcome to the first installment of a new column where Millions readers can sound off on the books they’re currently reading. Tell us about what you’re reading—hot takes always welcome—and you might just end up in next month’s column. * Giles Goat-Boy by John Barth (1966) I wanted to celebrate Barth’s life by exploring more of his work, and am...

A hiker who sets out from the half-timbered German village of Schrierke intending to scale Brocken Mountain—the snow line still visible at the last dusk of April when the clover blooms crimson, the vetch is already blue, and green leaves are again on the elms and sycamores—might experience the “specter” associated with that peak, wherein backscatter...

What is the point of memoir? And why might an author choose to process their life experiences through that particular form instead of, say, fiction or poetry? In this conversation, debut memoirists Shze-Hui Tjoa and David Martinez reflect on what the form means to them and their respective books, The Story Game, an interrogation of memory, childhood,...

We’re attempting to unravel the tangled web of literary influence by talking with the great writers of today about the writers of yesterday who inspired them. This month, Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli, author of such books as Lost Children Archive and The Story of My Teeth, explores the new translation of Juan Rulfo’s landmark text Pedro Páramo. ...