In 2015, the author Marlon James was in Londonhawkplay, where he had just won the Booker Prize for his novel “A Brief History of Seven Killings.” Holed away in a hotel room after the ceremony before he flew home to Minneapolis, the characters for a

The Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s mystifying 1955 novel “Pedro Páramo” is, at least in the English-speaking world, most often invoked for its influence on Gabriel García Márquez. But admirers of the book (Susan Sontag famously among them) have long c

The Mekong giant salmon carp is four feet long and weighs 66 pounds. It is so elusive — recorded only 30 times by scientists — that they nicknamed it the “Mekong ghost” for the Southeast Asian river that was its habitat. The evolutionarily distinct