This isn’t just another biography about James Baldwin, acclaimed writer and civil rights activist. In Baldwin: A Love Story, Nicholas Boggs set out to explore James Baldwin’s life and works through his intimate relationships: his mentor, the painter Beauford Delaney; Lucien Happersberger, a Swiss painter who was Baldwin’s lover and muse; and his collaborators, actor Engin Cezzar and the French artist Yoran Cazac. “From the very beginning,” Boggs writes that he knew this book was “a love story.”

In this new collection of essays, Haitian American novelist Edwidge Danticat mixes personal narratives and reporting to explore environmental issues, colonialism, motherhood, and more. Danticat’s essays start back with her childhood in New York City when she knew very little English. Then she moves forward to the COVID-19 virus and recent events in Haiti, connecting her personal experiences to more global concerns.

Best-selling and critically acclaimed novelist, essayist, and short-story writer Zadie Smith has a new essay collection coming out in late October. Smith’s essays cover a wide range of topics that have captured the author’s attention lately: films like Tár, Queen Elizabeth II, Michael Jackson, Toni Morrison, political issues on both sides of the Atlantic, and much more.