Some of the best novelists in the Americas and Europe have written about chess—yet one of the best chess novels, Chess Story (published in German as Schachnovelle; also known as The Royal Game) by Stefan Zweig, was written by an otherwise less than superlative author.

There is a preternatural precision to Hernán Diaz’s every syllable, word, phrase and sentence.  No room to spare.  He doesn’t let you breathe.  What’s more, he is a writer capable of conceptual translation.  He can turn the banal into the fascinating.  He can reduce the complex into the basic.  He can even make the gruesome majestic.

A friend’s ten-year-old son recently came up to me at a party to ask, “You’re from Russia, right?” Sensing caution in my assent, the boy hesitated before asking the next question, clearly trying to phrase it in a way that wouldn’t cause offense but would express his curiosity. He finally came up with, “It’s a very violent place, isn’t it?”

When I first moved to New York, I spent hours walking around the city. I had no idea where I was, so everything counted as a discovery.

Most of us at Epiphany are no longer in school, so we’ve moved away from required reading to reading that is individually urgent. Here are the books we’re enjoying these days, from coming-of-age novels to true espionage, and beyond.

Lorrie Moore famously said that "a short story is a love affair." Since May is Short Story Month, we're taking the opportunity to look back on some of our literary love affairs.