As wild and wonderful as Marvel Comics characters’ superpowers might be, their back stories are always grounded in reality.

And reading poetry, like the books in our 2018 poetry review, can be a great way to not make perfect sense of a thing, but to just be with a thing.

Andre Dubus III is the author of House of Sand and Fog and a memoir, Townie. A complete collection of his father’s short stories has just been published.

With this Fall Books literary issue, we offer writers and texts that we certainly feel are best read closely and conscientiously.

Americans work an awful lot. But what are we doing at the jobs we believe are so important?

My ultimate cure? Book club.