Readings

Reading The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri, Durga Chew-Bose felt a long-abiding familiarity with the novel’s premise—one she recognized from her father’s stories—and with the author, a first-generation Bengali writer who was raised on the East Coast. Here she discovered how it is to read when the emotional stake is not strictly your own.

Empress Dowager Cixi—the mother of modern China, according to a new biography by Jung Chang—poisoned her son. Was she just doing her job?