We’re charging into the new year reading slim volumes with grand ambitions. These books and their authors look to visual art, science, medicine, and history to pull literature—and with it the reader—in a new direction. We’re reading deeply in order to carve and reclaim human stories from disease, politics, the simplifying narratives of recorded history, and a monolithic literary canon. In 2016, read to embrace the “exquisite ache” of complexity with us!

Recommended:

I Watched You Disappear by Anya Krugovoy Silver, Charmed Particles by Chrissy Kolaya,  High Dive by Jonathan Lee, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art by Julian Barnes