Amazing Grace
The Southern writer’s religious zeal was off-putting to a lot of her peers, but a newly discovered prayer journal reveals why she needed God in her writing
Jen Vafidis is the deputy editor of Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Vice, The Rumpus, and Guernica. She lives in Brooklyn, NY. Follow her on Twitter @jenvaf.
Miracle of Miracles
What is it about Sholem Aleichem’s stories of a poor milkman in the shtetl that has audiences bewitched for nearly 50 years after the smash musical debuted on Broadway? Jen Vafidis on a new cultural history of Fiddler.
Citadels
From the Haitian master Edwidge Danticat’s new novel to the social history of the U.S. capital during the Civil War.
Neighbors
From a novel of Brooklyn neuroses to what happens when evangelicals take over an Alaskan national park.
Eccentrics
From a 1980s literary superstar’s return to a study of American trailblazers with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.
Fiction Only
From a book steeped in all the strange junk that we’re obsessed with in the contemporary world to a novel of the Cold War experience told through ghost stories.
Diaries
From a young girl’s real-life diary of her time in a concentration camp, to John le Carré’s new novel taking on the war on terror.
Renata Adler
Renata Adler only wrote two novels, but they establish her as the chronicler of an ossified generation unable to move forward. By Jen Vafidis.