Speculative fiction remains one of my favorite descriptive terms for genre fiction. Attributed to sci-fi legend Robert Heinlein […]

The words of Franz Kafka will likely provide cold comfort to those who already know and understand the black American experience firsthand—those for whom the disaster and the suicide that Kafka references may be familiar to the point of being banal. To those of us who do not share the exact same experience, but who might know it from some kind of family resemblance—people from the Latino/a community, who find themselves marked for scrutiny, or the Arab-Americans, South Asians, and other brown people who also know what it is like to inhabit a body that is marked as dangerous or Other—it feels like a song hazily remembered but recognizable.

The flimsy, Ballantine paperback edition of The Lurking Fear and Other Tales, an oddball collection of short stories […]