Ilana Masad
Ilana Masad is a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and criticism. Masad is the author of the novel All My Mother’s Lovers and is co-editing a forthcoming anthology about The Bachelor franchise. Her new novel, Beings, comes out in September 2025.
Illuminating Care
Courtney Gustafson’s book, Poets Square: A Memoir in Thirty Cats, about saving feral cats is also a book about saving one another.
Past, Present, and Future
In How We Know Our Time Travelers, Anita Felicelli considers the body as a conduit of time.
Cultural Evolution
In Real Americans, Rachel Khong reconfigures the family saga.
Slipping Between Estrangement and Belonging
Novelist and critic Ilana Masad considers dramatic tensions that arise not only in Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans, the California Book Club March selection, but in her previous novels as well.
Time’s Arrow
In Amanda Churchill’s The Turtle House, a young woman and her grandmother forge an unexpected bond.
The Persistence of Memory
In her first novel, Shoot the Moon, Isa Arsén plays around with time.
World’s End
Ramona Ausubel’s The Last Animal is a novel of grief—and hope.
The Inexpressible
Author Ilana Masad examines the experience of being nonbinary within the context of the gender inquiries set forth in Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts.
The Maid in Héctor Tobar’s Southern California Novel
The Barbarian Nurseries delineates tensions in an Orange County household and effectively departs from the tradition of the post–World War II suburban social novel.
Prelude of ‘A Paradise Built in Hell’ Argues for Altruism
Rebecca Solnit counters the dominant narratives around human behavior during disasters.