Elif Batuman's Either/Or was published in 2022. The novel follows a young woman named Selin, who is in her sophomore year at Harvard University sometime in 1996. Selin is struggling at Harvard as her struggles begin to influence her school career,...

Kali Fajardo-Anstine's Woman of Light was first published in May 2022 by One World. Fajardo-Anstine's novel tells the story of a young woman named Luz “Little Light” Lopez, a tea leaf reader and launderer who is forced to fend for herself after...

William Butler Yeats's "Byzantium" originally appeared in his 1932 collection Words for Music Perhaps, and Other Poems. In this enigmatic work, an unidentified speaker enters a transcendent, fantastical space—the city of Byzantium. Here he...

The Republican party is broken, argues Robert Draper in his 2022 book Weapons of Mass Delusion. The leaders of the Republican party, like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, and Madison Cawthorn, have made hysteria a...

Climate change isn't a new area of concern, writes author and scientist Geoff Dembicki in his 2022 book The Petroleum Papers. Dembicki says that oil companies knew as far back as the late 1950s about the dangers that climate change posed to...

White Noise was published in 1985 to great critical acclaim; it won the National Book Award and, more importantly, opened up DeLillo's oeuvre to new readers. More than anything, it established DeLillo alongside Thomas Pynchon as one of the most...

Afterlives is British Noble Prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah's work of historical fiction first published in 2020, but widely published in 2022. Gurnah's novel is set in the first part of the 20th century (until approximately 1950) and...

Susan Straight's Mecca was published in early 2022 by publishers Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. A work of historical fiction inspired by Straight’s fascination with the American West, Mecca tells the story of a man from California named Johnny Frías....

The Book of Goose is a novel published by Yiyun Li in 2022. The novel tells the story of two teenage girls in France dealing with a Europe completely transformed by the events of World War II. Agnès and Fabienne grow up within the sort of carefree...

Julia May Jonas' Vladimir was published in February 2022 by Simon & Schuster. Jonas' novel tells the story of a female English professor whose husband is currently under investigation for his alleged affairs with former students, some of whom...

If I Survive You, Miami-based author Jonathan Escoffery's short story collection, was published in 2022. The stories, which are interconnected and tell the story of the same family, examine the impact of racism, bad luck, and financial disaster on...

Signal Fires, American author Dani Shapiro’s novel about one fateful night in 1985, was first published in October 2022. On that aforementioned fateful night, three teenagers begin to drink heavily. After they are finished drinking, one of the...

We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Modern Ireland is an Irish author and journalist Fintan O'Toole's personal history of Ireland from 1958 to the modern day. O'Toole was born in Ireland in 1958 and witnessed the country change...

For Linda Villarosa, who is a regular contributor to the 1619 Project, Under the Skin: The Hidden Toll of Racism on American Lives and the Health of Our Nation (published in 2022) is personal. As an author and activist, Villarosa is deeply...

Farrar, Straus, and Giroux published strangers to Ourselves in September 2022. Aviv's nonfiction book explores the relationship between culture, society, and how mental illness and how society treats the mentally ill. She does this by telling the...

Gitanjali (or "Song Offerings" in English) is Bengali author and poet Rabindranath Tagore's poetry collection, first published in Bengali in 1910 and in English in 1912. There are 156 or 157 poems in Gitanjali (scholars have not yet decided how...

Mia P. Manansala's debut novel Arsenic and Adobo was published in May 2021 and quickly gained critical acclaim. The story follows Lila Macapagal, a young woman who returns home to help save her aunt's failing Filipino restaurant after a painful...

Ed Yong has devoted his career to learning more and writing about the natural world—including humans and the animals that live inside of it. Yong's second book, called An Immense World (which was published in 2022), is about animal senses....