Ledia Xhoga’s debut novel, Misinterpretation, follows an unnamed Albanian woman adrift in present-day New York City, a translator and interpreter plagued by an unshakable feeling of alienation.

We were sitting around the kitchen table in the Birkerts-Focht apartment on Magnolia Street in Cambridge, discussing the work of our contemporaries. Someone quoted Yeats: “I don’t know which of us will succeed, but one thing I know for certain: there are too many of us.” It was the eighties...

Dear Fady, […] haunts me. It has haunted me since I first read it, bending over my desk near midnight, bathed in the amber glow of my lamp, and beside me, a cold, forgotten cup of cinnamon tea.

Early in Juan Cárdenas’s novel The Devil of the Provinces, a student asks the book’s protagonist, known only as “the biologist,” if God endows every living being with its own special purpose.

This edition of the folio contains three essays that have helped me process this dark moment. George Estreich says in his review of Jessie Van Eerden’s essay: “The best writing crosses a gap”—whether one of distance across a political border or one between two people at a restaurant. Of the gap on my mind of late—that between the alive world and the no-longer—Monika Cassel writes of poems by Hannah Baker Saltmarsh and Mark Irwin: “Like our hands, these poems’ nets grip briefly, then let go.”—Rachel Mennies, AGNI Reviews Editor

Under the stewardship of Reviews Editor Rachel Mennies, we’re looking for roughly 1,500-to-3,000-word review essays that lift us to your singular inquiry-driven vantage: show us what your chosen book reveals to you that only you can show. Begin new conversations; bring us along for your investigations...