Lily Meyer
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Writing about topics as diverse as race, sexual assault, Hurricane Harvey, and art history, Lacy M. Johnson's essays are together a philosophy in disguise — equal parts memoir, criticism, and ethics.
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Argentine writer María Sonia Cristoff wants to be honest: She won't shape her subjects' narratives or take control of another person's story. This is both the book's great strength and great weakness.
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Frances de Pontes Peebles' new novel about two women in Brazil — and later Hollywood — who take the music world by storm can sometimes slip into corniness, but it's a genuinely exciting read.
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Laura Van Den Berg's new novel follows a woman who runs into her ostensibly-dead husband at a Cuban film festival. It operates in symbols and layers, leaving readers disoriented, but fascinated.
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Lara Feigel's new book is a combination memoir and celebration of the writer Doris Lessing — whose famous distaste for convention led her to exclaim "Oh, Christ," upon winning the Nobel Prize.
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Rebecca Kauffman's new novel centers on a group of friends who reunite after a funeral, and spend an evening together. It's a deceptively simple story with a powerful message: Accept your feelings.
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Luis Alberto Urrea's latest, based loosely on his own brother's death, follows the members of a vibrant Mexican-American family as they deal with grief and impending death — but also celebrate life.
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Daniel Alarcón's new story collection is an empathetic look at isolation, whether due to migration, loneliness or poverty. His mix of kindness and distance makes the stories land like a gut punch.
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As an adult, the Colombian painter Emma Reyes lived in Paris and befriended Frida Kahlo. But in a series of autobiographical letters, she describes a childhood of grinding misery and poverty.
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The title piece in Mexican master Juan Rulfo's The Golden Cockerel is a good story with a simple point: Life is short and then you die. It's the sketches and fragments that come after that amaze.