Her work sees little point in exploring happiness, productivity, or self-understanding. Her focus is the void.

In Jenny Erpenbeck’s masterly “Go, Went, Gone,” a retired academic befriends asylum-seekers in Berlin.

How Nebraska’s landscape inspired the great American novelist.

Thanks to my parents transplanting me often from one ethnic mix to another, I’ve become something of a code-switching connoisseur.

Flannery O’Connor on race and religion in the unreconstructed South.

Those Hemingway wrote, and those he didn’t.

Zora Neale Hurston, American contrarian.

While the literary world awaited a second novel from Ralph Ellison, his early work became the forefront of black intellectual debate.