Join The New Republic for a livestream of our Salon book series featuring author Lynn Steger Strong and Laura Marsh, TNR’s literary editor, as they talk about Want, Strong’s new novel.

Grappling with motherhood, economic anxiety, rage, and the limits of language, Want is a fiercely personal novel that vibrates with anger, insight, and love. Elizabeth is tired. Years after coming to New York to try to build a life, she has found herself with two kids, a husband, two jobs, and a Ph.D.—and now they’re filing for bankruptcy. As she tries to balance her dream and the impossibility of striving toward it while her work and home lives feel poised to fall apart, she wakes at ungodly hours to run miles by the icy river, struggling to quiet her thoughts. When she reaches out to Sasha, her long-lost childhood friend, it feels almost harmless—one of those innocuous ruptures that exist online, in texts. But her timing is uncanny. Sasha is facing a crisis, too, and perhaps after years apart, their shared moments of crux can bring them back into each other’s lives.

In Want, Lynn Steger Strong explores the subtle violences enacted on a certain type of woman when she dares to want things—and all the various violences in which she implicates herself as she tries to survive.

Join TNR’s literary editor, Laura Marsh, and Nicholson Baker as he reveals his latest book, Baseless, as part of our virtual Salon series.

Ten years into researching a book about the possibility that the United States used biological weapons in the Korean War, Nicholson Baker was frustrated and disheartened. In the course of his research, he had become deeply disillusioned with the process of Freedom of Information Act requests. He had been forced to wait years in some cases, while other requests were answered only with documents rendered inscrutable, or even illegible, by copious redactions. Rather than wait forever, with his head full of secrets about government atrocities committed by his own country, Baker set out to keep a personal journal of his obstructed research instead. He began documenting his correspondence with the government administrators who are charged with responding to, and thus stymying, his requests. The result is one of the most original and daring works of nonfiction in recent memory, a singular and mesmerizing narrative of the history of some of the darkest and most shameful secrets of the CIA and the U.S. government—all willfully concealed, to some degree, despite the existence of the FOIA.

In his preternaturally lucid and unassuming style, Baker unearths stories of CIA programs involving weaponized insects and the deliberate spread of Lyme disease; dangerous military experiments carried out on unsuspecting American citizens; and devastating chemical munitions designed to inflict terrible harm on innocent civilians in far-flung countries. At the same time, he shares beautiful anecdotes from his daily life in Maine, feeding his dogs and watching the morning light gather on the horizon. The result is an astonishing and utterly disarming story about waiting, bureaucracy, the horrors of war, and, above all, the deadly secrets the U.S. government keeps from its citizens.