The experience of reading How to Disappear and Why is difficult to describe. The book defies easy categorization and like other exceptional, ambitious art, frustrates attempts to reduce it to a summary. But even as I call the book ambitious, I’m reminded of how the essays within it resist that by taking the reader through a deeply personal journey that includes exorcising ambition.

Trains are linear. And while Without Terminus is written in lyric prose lines, it is nonlinear—a hybrid book-length work of lyric nonfiction, memoir, autocriticism, and visual poetics. Ostensibly, Chaun Webster’s collection is “about” his grandfather Reginald, who worked for years as a porter on a Pullman sleeper car, laboring while others rested, laid to rest mere months after he retired, tired, without ever receiving his pension, which was denied his widow. And yet Reginald is but one embarkation point—a hub for an exploration of the history of trains, of transport, of Black enslavement and Black labor—as history itself is nonlinear. Webster’s train of thought spirals backward and forward in time and space, transporting us through photos and records real and imagined, literature, expanding into a dream-time of meetings, and narrowing into the dissection of sentences that parse in branching fractals or reiterate into palimpsestic non-sense, as in one page-spread where Webster takes the clause “ST. PAUL MAKES YOU WONDER ABOUT THE DRAW TO NAME CITIES AFTER SAINTS OF MEN” in large print across the facing pages, then responds to syntactical chunks below the clause so that in one place “St. Paul makes you wonder” derails into “how time / spills from / the body / collides / with it,” while “To name” lists family members “Jerry & / Reginald & / Regina— / to name / a collision / happening / over and / over and / over and,” before those names get printed and overprinted until they are a no-longer-legible blur of black ink.

Julija Šukys often refers to the distinction made by noted Canadian archival studies scholar Terry Cook between an “archive” and an “archives”: the former represents the repository that encapsulates the ongoing work of the latter. An ‘archival essayist’ like Šukys doesn’t merely seek order among assembled materials of an archive but must look beyond the documents into the realm of ideas, with an orientation that is metaphorical and philosophical. “We… come quietly in the wake of such tragedies… to give meaning to such tragedies,” she writes.

Erica Stern’s memoir, Frontier, tells a story so multi-layered that it’s hard to place it in a category with other memoirs. Part memoir, part fictional wild west story, part research/history, Frontier goes back and forth between nonfiction—Stern’s birth story and research/reportage on historical atrocities in childbirth—and fiction—a story she imagines, seemingly as an escape from the brutal reality of the memoir’s present.

America’s purported War on Drugs began more than fifty years ago, yet today it’s still easier to procure fentanyl than methadone, a gold standard treatment for opioid use disorder. That contradiction is not incidental — it is the result of decades of political choices — and it is the tension that haunts Melody Glenn’s Mother of Methadone: A Doctor’s Quest, a Forgotten History, and a Modern-Day Crisis (Beacon Press 2025). As overdose deaths remain higher than pre-pandemic levels, Glenn’s excavation of methadone’s history and her own uneasy entry into addiction medicine arrives at a moment when the United States is moving towards renewing the 1970s-era War on Drugs playbook. 

As children, our parents’ lives are largely hidden from us. We’re only allowed to see the surfaces: their work clothes hanging in the closet, indecipherable paperwork left lying on the counter, muffled, one-sided phone conversations behind closed doors. Veiled by secrecy, it’s tempting for children to wonder whether their parents themselves traffic in secrets. However, for Margot Singer, the question of whether she’s the daughter of a spy is neither a metaphor nor a fantasy. In the title essay of her remarkable 2025 collection, Secret Agent Man, Singer seeks to answer whether her father, a Porsche-driving consultant who traveled to the world’s most exotic cities, was in fact an agent for the Mossad, the Israeli national intelligence agency. Born in Czechoslovakia and raised in pre-Israeli Palestine, her father’s accent was “a mixture of German and Czech and Israeli with a vaguely British lilt.” Though he proudly proclaimed that “he never worked for anyone but himself and never for more than nine months out of every year,” he was often overheard speaking in hushed and hurried tones, returned home from his business trips abroad with such trinkets as “Nigerian sculptures, Japanese kimonos, a fur-covered Ethiopian drum.” Given that several of the most famous modern spies—Valerie Plame, Andrei Bezrukov, and Miles Copeland—also worked as consultants, the prospect that Singer’s father’s work was also merely a front for espionage was too glaring not to consider.