Rhoda Feng
Rachel Aviv. Photo © Rose Lichter-Marck When she was six, Rachel Aviv was hospitalized for not eating. Doctors concluded that she had anorexia, but now, decades later, in her new book, Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us, Aviv is questioning that diagnosis—and many others. Her debut book concerns itself with people who occupy the “psychic hinterlands, the outer edges of human experience, where language tends to fail.” Strangers to Ourselves is that rare work that both elevates and remakes the form of writing about medical ethics. Each chapter is informed by Aviv’s meticulous reporting 
Bernardine Evaristo. Photo: Jennie Scott Novelist Bernardine Evaristo is the consummate traveler, having led a peripatetic life since her teens. This adventurousness extends to her creative work, much of which starts off in one genre, only to end up in another. The Emperor’s Babe, which tells of the life and times of Zuleika, a young Sudanese woman who is “a nobody wanting to be somebody,” was conceived as a series of poems, but was eventually published as a verse novel incorporating unrhymed couplets. Blonde Roots has roots in a short story commissioned by The Guardian. Girl, Woman, Other, a