In late summer 2005, I disembarked in the city of Mostar after a three- or four-hour bus ride from Dubrovnik, the vaunted pearl of the Adriatic in neighboring Croatia. The wars that had dismantled Yugoslavia . . .

In 1964, John Berryman sat in Abbott Hospital in Minneapolis, recovering from an alcohol-fueled East Coast reading tour, and sketched out a plan for The Dream Songs . . .

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.

Agua-viva means jellyfish in Portuguese. More often than not, we don’t see jellyfish, we feel them: they sting our legs or arms, they burn our backs and stomachs, their acid licks at wounds that we never knew we had.

It was in one of our long-ago conversations that I first heard about Joan Wickersham’s immersion in what she called her Vasa project, a most unlikely-sounding undertaking . . .

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 . . .