Henry Kissinger (1923-2023) began taping conversations—for recordkeeping and for his memoirs—as soon as he was appointed national security advisor in 1969, continuing after he was appointed secretary of state and stopping only when he left office in 1976. Conversation, even from educated speakers, is ungrammatical, repetitious, and cliché-ridden, so journalist Wells, author of Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg (2001), provides introductions, summaries, and, now and then, a straightforward transcription. He has converted seven years of taping into nearly 600 pages of text, and few readers will yearn for more. Richard Nixon took office in 1969, having promised to end the Vietnam War by the 1972 presidential election. The minutiae of negotiations leading to the January 1973 peace agreement occupies most of the text, and readers will be no less frustrated than the American public during the process. The Middle East has been a graveyard of reputations, but Kissinger did not lose points because powerful blocs supported whatever side he favored at the time. Ironically, the administration’s greatest accomplishment, opening relations with Red China, receives only a rare mention because, working furtively, participants avoided the telephone. Nixon does say that his China policy bothers liberal critics: “Oh, this drives ’em nuts, Henry.” Although occasionally entertaining—and no doubt an important primary source for scholars—many of these conversations will be a slog for the general reader who might expect fireworks but will encounter mostly complaints, tactical advice, abuse of rivals and the media, and an obsession with leaks.

As an intelligence assistant who analyzes sexual behaviors across New York City, Alita Melusine knows that love is an afterthought in the modern age. Yet she can’t help but yearn for an all-consuming love of her own, and she thinks she’s finally found it with Kaveh Shamez—that is, until she meets his mother, Claire, whose immediate disapproval and possessiveness strain their relationship. As tensions rise between Claire and Alita, however, Kaveh refuses to intervene, leading the younger woman to ruminate on the well-intentioned (though often misguided) advice she’d so often relied on from her late friend, Jean. Still reeling from Jean’s sudden death, she reflects on memories of sailing through the Greek islands together with him, all the while wondering what he would say of her current situation. Meanwhile, the narrative slowly reveals Claire’s perspective through interspersed snippets that reveal a complex psyche, shaped by a preoccupation with comic books and disappointment over the rejection of her astrophysics thesis, among other unhealed wounds: “My thesis was rejected on account of my theory of Venus’s alien civilization. My father…blamed the comic books as fueling such fantasy.” At the novel’s core is a meditation on how to love like Venus: For Alita, it is a desire to be idolized, and, for Claire, a volatile response to suppressed pain that she struggles to conceal. Pitsirilos has crafted a compelling exploration of what it means to be human, weaving together themes of artificial intelligence, environmental degradation, mother-son relationships, and the difficulty of modern love. Although the narrative can feel momentarily disorienting at first, its structure clarifies as it unfolds, moving fluidly between timelines and perspectives in a way that will ultimately reward engaged readers. Alita and Claire, in particular, stand out as fully realized characters with richly imagined backstories and psyches to guide their emotional arcs. The vivid prose further immerses readers in Alita’s story as she describes a heavily polluted Aegean Sea or Claire’s haunting personification of Venus.

These stories cover a wide array of experiences, locations, and characters, all in Provincetown, Massachusetts. One story about the Feast of Saint Bonaventure follows multiple, different characters throughout the evening, showing readers what the Feast means to each of them. Some characters have supernatural aspects; Luna, the “Queen of Land’s End,” is a trans woman who’s lived in Provincetown since the late 1800s who acts as kind of a guardian angel for locals, but also for the town itself. Without her, who would keep the tides in sync? Throughout, the various players are funny and vibrant, but sometimes they really do feel like fictional constructs than real people. They serve as representatives of a vibrant mix of communities, but the stories sometimes read more like parables than complex portraits. Provincetown is the real focus, and the tales are strongest when they talk directly about the locale; readers get to know its festivals, its summer routines, its struggles during the offseason, and they learn something about its past and how climate change encroaches on its future. López takes a great care to represent Provincetown in all its diversity; the majority of his attention is focused on cis gay men, but there are stories here about lesbians, trans and nonbinary people, and straight people, too; their cultural backgrounds are also varied, with special focus on the Latine community. In “Scenes From Commercial Street,” the narration discusses how white Provincetown still is: “Mexicans and Jamaicans haul garbage, mow lawns, and sand floors, but there is not a single person of color running an arts institution or major businesses.…Despite these realities, people of color are part of Ptown, and they find Commercial Street as intoxicating as everyone else.” This collection portrays that intoxication, and these realities, with passion and care.

Sepúlveda presents this book (translated from Spanish by Denise Kripper) as a memoir written by someone identified as Ilse, a woman raised and brutalized inside Colonia Dignidad, the real-life Chilean cult and torture camp founded by the German Chilean minister Paul Schäfer. Ilse recounts her removal from Germany as a child and her transport to the colony, where Schäfer and his accomplices dissolved family bonds and enforced obedience through forced labor, surveillance, confessions, and physical and sexual torture. Sepúlveda renders daily life with exacting, excruciating detail. Central to the account is the colony’s medical regime, mostly overseen by Dr. Strätling, a former Nazi doctor with a wooden leg. She drugged women and men, forced gynecological procedures, and carried out sexualized torture under the guise of treatment (“Dr. Strätling applied electricity to a part of my body I didn’t know existed”). Ilse recounts the relentless violations of her body and those of other women in a flat, clinical register that offers no relief. The narrative tracks the colony’s deep complicity with Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship and its shifting relationship to the outside world, including its role as a weapons manufacturer and a detention and torture site for the regime. The narrative ends with Schäfer’s arrest in 2005, when Ilse was 54. Only in the acknowledgments do readers fully grasp that this harrowing testimony is fictional, framed by the author as a memoir. As an artistic project, the book is devastating in its depiction of suffering, but its power raises ethical questions—the degree to which it draws on specific historical testimonies is unclear from the brief acknowledgments, risking a manipulation of readers’ trust and an appropriation of survivors’ authority. Comparisons with works such as Leila Guerriero’s The Call (2024), a rigorously reported portrait of torture survivor Silvia Labayru under Argentina’s military dictatorship, are unavoidable and unsettling.

In the pre-dawn moments of February 24, 2022, Oceanheart and her husband were “jolted awake” by the sound of explosions in their city of Dnipro, in eastern Ukraine. A call to her mother confirmed the author’s “worst fears”: War had begun. “War feels like a relic of history or a plot in a movie,” Oceanheart writes, and she and her family struggle with their new reality. While she had previously spent her days studying for a master’s degree in psychology, identifying the best pediatricians for her daughters, and watching Downton Abbey, Oceanheart’s priorities abruptly shifted to fulfilling basic human needs—competing with neighbors for “scarce food supplies” and filling her bathtub with water for doing dishes and flushing the toilet. Initially, Oceanheart invited her mother and younger brother to shelter in their two-bedroom apartment to escape the worsening danger in their hometown of Bakhmut. Eventually, her father joined them, but the strain of wartime cohabitation provoked a painful rift between the families. Later, Oceanheart and her husband, Artur, make the difficult decision to move to the United States, where they can stay for two years under “humanitarian parole.” Although the author’s prose can feel overly formal at times, and the dialogue can be somewhat stilted, the memoir’s strength lies in its intimate domestic details. Rather than focusing on military movements or geopolitical explanations, Oceanheart captures small moments: entertaining children in the dark during nightly blackouts meant to avoid becoming bombing targets, and her daughters’ terror at firecrackers during their first Fourth of July celebration in North Carolina. Particularly affecting is her heartbreak at realizing that the war “had woven itself into the fabric of their childhood.”