If you’ve attended an American elementary school in the last 30 years, you’re probably fairly familiar with Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic speech, “I Have a Dream,” delivered at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

The march, held 100 years after Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, was capped by King’s powerful speech, setting the tone for a national movement for Civil Rights as the country’s own identity was in flux. The march was a turning point, merging the demonstrations for racial equality concentrated in southern states, with widespread discontent in the north, to a full, national movement.

Interestingly, the most iconic part of the speech, which most people remember, was not exactly prepared. The resounding finale to his speech (a version of which was delivered in Detroit two months prior) was improvised at the end of his prepared remarks about the unfulfilled promise of economic freedom for people of color. The speech breaks from the central theme of the event — economic opportunity and equality — to sketch a broader vision of a nation where people are not “judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Nevertheless, his words galvanized the 250,000 attendees and the millions of others watching from afar. Right there, King set the agenda for the next several years of activism. The sentiment behind his speech still echoes decades years later, especially as people continue to fight income inequality, police brutality, and workplace discrimination.

The urgency of now

The march was a peaceful demonstration following months of unrest across the country. Earlier that summer, Alabama Gov. George Wallace fought against admitting black students to the University of Alabama, civil rights activist Medgar Evers was assassinated, and riots popped up in several cities. But even then, some (including the Kennedy administration) said a march would accomplish little, and that equality would come in due time:

This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.

In the era that followed, King’s sense of urgency not only colored the movement for racial equality, but for that of gender equality and LGBTQ rights. Waiting for the majority to come around on these issues without challenging the status quo, as King said, is a losing tactic.

The need for allies

Instead, King draws on the building excitement of the movement to welcome and recruit others:

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

Fast forward five decades, and King’s words on the importance of allies remains key to change, whether it’s white allies standing up for the fair treatment of people of color, male allies for women and gender equality, or cisgender and straight allies for LGBTQ rights.

"We cannot be satisfied"

King then goes deeper, giving the harsh and very real examples of what people of color were fighting against then (and in some cases, are still fighting against):

There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: “For Whites Only.” We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.”

Many have said King’s declaration that sweltering August afternoon was a spark, not only for the movement, but for others who sat on the sidelines watching all the protests, sit-ins, boycotts and riots for the last decade.

And while the March on Washington was initially worrisome for the Kennedy administration, the White House embraced it. Two months before the march, President John Kennedy announced his plans for a civil rights bill as the country bubbled in the turmoil caused by Evers’ murder and race riots that ensued.

After King’s momentous speech, followed by even broader continued activism, President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Watch the full speech below:

Every year, the National Book Foundation celebrates the best of American literature by handing out the National Book Awards. And every year (okay, every year since 2014), we here at Vox read all of the finalists to help smart, busy people like you figure out which ones you’re interested in.

Traditionally, there have been 20 finalists total, spread evenly across four categories — five in fiction, five in nonfiction, five in poetry, and five in young adult. But this year, the National Book Foundation has expanded its scope and added a brand new category to recognize literature in translation, for a total of 25 finalists.

Here are our thoughts on the 25 finalists, with the winners at the top of each category.

Fiction

The Friend by Sigrid Nunez — WINNER

Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend is a powerful meditation on love, loss, and grief. The protagonist, who is never named, is a writer who loses her longtime best friend, a fellow writer, when he takes his own life. After his death, she finds herself responsible for the care of his Great Dane, Apollo, when his third wife no longer wants the dog. Over time, the woman bonds with Apollo as a way to deal with the grief of losing her friend, and says that having the dog is like having a bit of her friend with her.

But she ultimately becomes almost single-mindedly obsessed with caring for the animal, neglecting her friends and letting her life slowly unravel as she becomes more and more isolated from the rest of the world. Apollo becomes her coping mechanism, her outlet for channeling the overwhelming grief she has yet to process.

The Friend, which is full of literary references and beautiful prose, is also a tribute to the potential power of humans’ relationships with their pets. The dog in this story becomes so significant, so important to its protagonist’s journey, that he remains the only named character in the entire book. It’s also a sad story, one about loss and mourning. But if you believe in the power of animals to help heal, don’t miss it.

—Nisha Chittal

A Lucky Man: Stories by Jamel Brinkley

The nine stories in Jamel Brinkley’s A Lucky Man involve men unmoored — from parents, from spouses, from lovers. They are, quite often, men forced to raise themselves or their siblings, due to absent fathers, or haze-devoured mothers, or younger brothers who just need someone to step up. They are impetuous and needy and empty, crying out for something to fill a void that’s always existed, even if they struggle to name it.

Truth be told, this makes the book a touch repetitive when read all at once. The stories’ themes recur so frequently that the individual tales can feel like glosses on the same handful of relationships and conflicts. But as standalone stories, all the pieces in A Lucky Man offer exquisitely crafted glimpses into the lives of black men and boys living in New York.

Brinkley’s talent for choosing precise images and details that perfectly exemplify his characters is especially clear in “J’ouvert 1996,” in which a teenage boy’s forced outing with his younger brother slowly goes sour, and in the book’s titular story, in which a middle-aged teacher finds himself accused of a crime he committed — but not in the way his accuser thinks he did. This is Brinkley’s first collection, and if his talent for exacting vivisection of his protagonists continues, he’ll be a talent to reckon with.

—Todd VanDerWerff

Florida by Lauren Groff

Florida is just as much a character in Lauren Groff’s latest story collection as it is a setting. The state’s humid air and the threat of lurking, dangerous swamp creatures are a constant presence. The protagonists, much like Groff’s representation of Florida itself, seem to straddle a contentious line between wilderness and civilization. Humidity is oppressive, but air conditioning is artificial; snakes and gators are dangerous, but so is the suburban sprawl that threatens their habitat.

The stories themselves aren’t quite supernatural, but they’re undoubtedly otherworldly. Most start out similarly: A protagonist is introduced in a seemingly placid suburban scene, and then disaster — usually of the natural variety — strikes. Some are reminiscent of post-apocalyptic fiction, and yet the calamities Groff describes are familiar to anyone who has spent time in the Sunshine State.

Hurricanes, power outages, sinkholes, and the possibility of death by reptile all play a part. But these threats are less interesting than how the protagonists respond; they work best as a backdrop through which each character can reflect on their fears, both existential and immediate.

Even once you’ve figured out the pattern, though, Groff’s stories are far from formulaic. The only real certainty is that the storm will eventually pass.

—Gaby Del Valle

Where the Dead Sit Talking by Brandon Hobson

The scope of Where the Dead Sit Talking stretches from death (as made clear by the title) to adolescence and gender, from dysfunctional families to the United States’ foster care system, from Native American culture to the seeming inescapability of dusty, rural 1980s Oklahoma. But it’s all connected by the idea of the devastating, sometimes sneaky havoc that trauma leaves on our lives.

Brandon Hobson’s bleak novel tells the story of a 15-year-old boy named Sequoyah who, after his single mother is put in prison for drug charges, finds himself in the care of Harold and Agnes Troutt, a pair of foster parents who are already caring for two other teens. Sequoyah bonds with Rosemary because of their heritage (they share Native American ancestry) and the fact that they’re both survivors of abuse.

But is this bond healthy? Is it an unhealthy attraction? Does it cross into infatuation? Is it a twisted fantasy?

The more we learn about Sequoyah, and the rage and trauma roiling beneath his skin, the darker the answers become. Hobson’s prose is as intense as it is precise, and the results are unnerving. Sequoyah is a survivor, but not all survivor stories are triumphant. Some, as Hobson reveals in Where the Dead Sit Talking, are a deep tragedy.

—Alex Abad-Santos

The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai

Two parallel plot lines — one set in 1985 and another in 2015 — hurtle toward convergence in this devastating examination of the US AIDS epidemic.

The first — and the stronger — of the two storylines zooms in on a group of friends composed predominantly of gay men in Chicago during the ’80s. Members of the group grapple with how to navigate a world where person after person they know dies of AIDS while the government is more than comfortable turning a blind eye. Scenes from the novel chronicling everything from dissatisfaction with a partner to petty work politics read like their own contained dramas until the reader is sharply reminded of how the backdrop of AIDS looms over any and all decisions, big and small.

The book’s second storyline focuses on how one woman copes after her brother and several of her friends are killed by the disease. It follows her on a quest to Paris, where she attempts to rebuild her relationship with her daughter, who also saw her life acutely marked by her mother’s losses.

The two subplots are clearly tied to one another by common characters and a shared pain, but their real connection lies in the striking point both end up making about the tragedy of lost potential — and whether it can ever be recovered.

—Li Zhou

Nonfiction

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart — WINNER

Everyone’s heard of the heaviest hitters of the Harlem Renaissance: Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Bessie Smith, and so on. These artists, thinkers, and activists solidified black America’s stake in broader American culture, demanding equality through their work — just a few decades removed from ancestors who would have probably been enslaved, undereducated, or perceived to be worth nothing more than “the help.”

Alain Locke, though, isn’t quite a household name. He was a professor of philosophy who established his voice during this historical era and was dubbed its “dean,” despite not earning some of the same acclaim as some of his peers. Jeffrey C. Stewart’s comprehensive biography of Locke is a surprisingly gripping read — I’ll be honest, I was taken aback by its heft when I first picked it up. But Locke’s life story, beginning as a young black man who was born to a middle-class family in Philadelphia, and who was especially close with his mother, is compelling right from the beginning.

Stewart, a professor of black studies at the University of California Santa Barbara, not only covers Locke’s work as a top black intellectual of his time but also gives us a window into who Locke was as a complex man full of conflicting points of view on race, sexuality, art, integrity, and equality.

Locke’s 1925 anthology, The New Negro, functioned as a celebration of his era in black art, intellect, and society. This biography plays the same role for Locke himself. It’s full of insightful details attributed to big names and small.

It almost feels silly for me to frame him this way, but had Locke been alive and in his prime today, it would be easy to picture him the darling of both black and gay Twitter, with thoughtful, eye-catching books about #BlackExcellence on the New York Times best-seller list and essay upon essay in the most celebrated news outlets of our time.

—Michelle Garcia

The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation by Colin G. Calloway

Most people who’ve taken an American history class in high school or college likely know, or at least knew, the basics of the relationship between the nascent United States and the world’s other great powers in the wake of the Revolutionary War. Far less attention is paid, though, to relationships with other leaders who were equally important and consequential: the American Indians who controlled the vast swaths of territory that the founders hoped their new country would one day occupy. 

Colin G. Calloway’s The Indian World of George Washington is a magisterial correction to this omission, putting Washington’s life in a context too often forgotten — from Washington’s first foray into Indian diplomacy as a 21-year-old, trading a “string of wampum and a twist of tobacco,” to the president who saw his nation’s future in lands that still belonged to the Indians. Washington’s sobriquet among the Iroquois was “town destroyer,” and Calloway’s work makes clear the ways it was well-founded both in his time and later: Washington took many first steps down a path to cultural genocide. 

But the real achievement of Calloway’s detailed and nuanced portrait is its illumination of the ways early American history and American Indian history are intertwined — juxtaposing the birth of one nation, as his title has it, with the twilight of many others.

—Libby Nelson

American Eden: David Hosack, Botany, and Medicine in the Garden of the Early Republic by Victoria Johnson

Depending on who you are, the primary appeal of American Eden — ostensibly a biography of David Hosack, who founded the first (spoiler alert: failed) public botanical garden in the United States — is in one of the following. It’s fresh gossip on Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr (and other members of the founding generation) through the eyes of the doctor who attended their duel. It distills the Enlightenment-inflected sense of discovery and mastery that inspired Lewis and Clark and a generation of natural scientists who were determined to learn everything about the newly Europeanized American continent. It’s a cautionary tale about how hard it is to build civic institutions so they’ll last. It’s a book about a really, really ambitious garden.

Author Victoria Johnson treats all of these subjects with equal levels of archive-spelunking enthusiasm. The prose initially comes off as deliberately breezy in the style of Stephen Greenblatt, but once Johnson gets the opportunity to slow down and show off her research, each paragraph pops open like an overstuffed but delightful cabinet of curiosities — an appropriate metaphor for the scientific polymathy (or perhaps dilettantism) of the Enlightenment gentlemen she’s writing about.

For non-gardeners, the lists of plant names can get a little tedious (though they’re easy enough to skim). And Johnson’s language can get almost too vivid when she’s describing 18th-century surgical techniques in detail; you will never forget what a hydrocele is after reading this book. Yet it’s worth reading not just because it’s fun historical nonfiction, but because it’s a reminder that knowledge doesn’t simply accumulate over time like silt: It has to be deliberately collected, preserved, and appropriately funded.

—Dara Lind

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh

In the form of a letter to her unborn daughter, Sarah Smarsh recounts her family history in a smart, compelling book that seamlessly toggles between the state of the US economy and her own family struggles. By intertwining the Homestead Act, the farm crisis of the ’80s, and Ronald Reagan’s presidency with her own family history, Smarsh is able to give concrete examples of how American policies facilitated a disdain for those who don’t have money.

Heartland presents life as a poker game, where one player is the government and the other is white working-class families. What cards you’re dealt determine whether you get shelter, food, and education.

Smarsh is refreshingly aware that she can only speak to the experiences of the white working class, and sometimes only those of white working-class women. Born to a teenager who was born to a teenager, she articulates the disproportionate burden that poverty puts on women, and how this affected her own view of motherhood. Many of her stories live at the intersection of being poor but also being perceived as a walking womb, and are told in a matter-of-fact way that is void of judgment or sentimentality. Though the result does not always read smoothly, it offers an intimate but measured look at the cyclical nature of poverty.

—Aditi Shrikant 

We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights by Adam Winkler

It is deeply shocking that We the Corporations is not boring. The book is primarily a literature review of 300 years of Supreme Court majority rulings on corporate personhood, preceded by a history of pre-Revolutionary War trading company charters. And yet, four chapters in, we’re knee-deep in a dramatic conspiracy against the Constitution. (By chapter six, we’re “handling dynamite.”)

Adam Winkler, a constitutional law expert at UCLA and the author of Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America, has no interest in his own opinion. Instead, he stands back, using McGraw-Hill language but pairing it with vicious, cool timing and framing to expose the history of the highest court of the United States as one smeared with banal, capitalist corruption and what amounts to petty, unforced treason on the part of self-interested, self-aggrandizing men.

In the process, he illuminates how the best, most basic tenets of the Constitution — the 14th Amendment’s attempt to promise that all people live free from discrimination, the First Amendment’s guarantee of freedom of the press — were contorted to award rights to businesses, far more often than they were actually invoked to protect anyone else.

By the time you get to 2000 and Citizens United, the notorious Supreme Court case that bludgeoned democracy by putting an end to virtually all limits on corporate campaign financing, it feels like nothing more or less than a stupid-obvious epilogue, hundreds of years in the making.

—Kaitlyn Tiffany

Poetry

Indecency by Justin Phillip Reed — WINNER

Justin Phillip Reed’s debut poetry collection, Indecency, is an unflinching exploration of power, race, sexuality, gender, the personal and the political.

He presents the true indecencies of Americans’ racism and other violence on the national scale — and in the daily personal attempts to navigate a system that cannot be won.

He deconstructs whiteness, taking on the voice of indifference: “No one / is responsible while we have the luxury / to see ourselves as infinite ones, ocean / of individual possibility.”

And throughout, he shows what it feels like to be seen as a body to be used, as in the poem Consent (“he’s into a groove that / is darkly reminiscent of crossways and rolling stops”) and in this finale of The Fratricide:

How can we tell ourselves apart for you. How can
we help you to tell us apart. How can we help
you to tell us apart. How can we help you to tear
us apart. How can we help you. You tear us apart.
How can we tear us. You help us apart. You help
us part. How can we tear you. How can we tear
you. How can we help us to tear you apart.

—Susannah Locke

Wobble by Rae Armantrout

The term “language poetry” does an admirable job of somehow making poetry — that famously inaccessible genre — sound yet more instructable. (That’s even before you find out its “real” name is L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry.)

But I’m here to tell you there are many pleasures, even conventional ones, to be had in celebrated language poet Rae Armantrout’s new collection, Wobble.

Like her peers, Armantrout is interested in muddying the relationship of poet and reader. But she cites plain-spoken Williams Carlos Williams (he of the recent spate of “This Is Just to Say” memes) as perhaps her foremost influence, and she fully exploits the same dizzying possibilities of spare lyricism and short, broken lines.

Armantrout’s poems are never difficult for difficulty’s sake. Wobble’s opening lines could hardly be any more universal: “‘What made this happen?’ / you ask every time.” The poet goes on to muse about causation but pauses on a sure-footed image of a “crown of leaves … sifted by wind … brightening into rust-red / at the tips.”

Wobble is timely, too, with a keen sense of the language and excuses of violence, both old and new. Lips “smack” in the Garden of Eden; Rapunzel’s hair is let down, “solicitations / never meant for you.”

Not everything is so weighty; Armantrout gets in some good ribbing of everyday foibles: She notes wryly that “Humans / photo-bomb the planet” and that “There’s a lot going on in / ‘the’ / zombie apocalypse.” In the book’s titular poem, fate rests on an errant satellite broadcasting “World’s Smallest Pets.”

“Sometimes I wish I had a job where I could be quiet, maybe as a jeweler cutting stones,” Armantrout has said of the sometimes wearying prospect of teaching poetry. Let’s listen in while we can.

—Tim Williams

American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin by Terrance Hayes

Terrance Hayes’s American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin is a collection of poetry that could only exist in the America of right now — a book of poetry that concerns itself again and again with living in Donald Trump’s America, and particularly living in Donald Trump’s America in a black male body. “Something happened / In Sanford something happened in Ferguson,” Hayes writes, “And Brooklyn & Charleston, something happened / In Chicago & Cleveland & Baltimore…”

To create a work so anchored in a moment runs the risk that it might one day, when “right now” becomes “back then,” seem ephemeral. But Hayes’s work is too energetic, too vital, too specific and original and vivid for that; it is anchored in its time, rather than contained by it.

This is a book with one sonnet that begins with Maxine Waters and another that dwells on the particular and peculiar skin tone of the president (“Are you not the color of this country’s current threat / Advisory?”) — subjects that might seem ripped not just from the headlines but from Twitter tropes. And Hayes’s writing, in its urgency and originality, is the antidote for a thousand tired tweets.

And not all of the poems are ripped from the headlines; a few lines about Jesus’s imagined sister — “she was in her / Forties the first time she turned water into wine. / A late bloomer, she began a small wine business” — rolled pleasingly around my head like a marble for days.

To echo the words of another American poet who chose assassinations as a topic, Hayes’s work is large; it contains multitudes. His sonnets are vital and unforgettable, anchored by their sense of place and time rather than contained by it.

—Libby Nelson

Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen

I keep trying to wake up. I keep getting things wrong.

I’m ready to feel better.

Before Diana Kho Nguyen’s brother killed himself, he cut his likeness out of family photographs. His absence, both literal and figurative, fills the pages of Ghost Of.

Each day I want my hair short. And the next day, the opposite.
Each day I want my hair long, and the next day, the opposite.
Each day is the next day, and its opposite.

Nguyen’s poems replicate a grieving brain. Some thoughts are magical (“Are you a blacksmith where you are, bending iron, love bending you”), some cynical (“Nature makes mistakes”), some unfinished, some punishingly repetitive. They are thoughts that morph and meld, but never let you be:

I am glad that you are dead, I am glad that you are dead, I am glad that you are glad that you are I am glad that you are I am dead that I am dead glad that you are dead glad that you are dead are you dead I am dead

She crams some stanzas into the jagged, narrow, negative space left by her brother in those family photographs, and formats others to preserve the empty space. In interludes called Gyotaku, after the Japanese art of fish printing, the shapes repeat over and over again until they become something else, text illegible, images crowding the margins.

Are you still a person with a brother, if that brother no longer exists? If not, what are you?

Why is Nguyen is still here, enjoying meals, listening to music, feeling the air move around her, when her brother is … where, exactly? (“When I am nothing, I am going to miss the groceries here,” she writes).

What do you do with this void in your heart?  

Ghost Of says: You fill the space with words, because words are all you have left. You turn the words into fish and make them swim off the page. You write it all down, and wait to feel better.

—Kate Dailey

Eye Level by Jenny Xie

Jenny Xie’s Eye Level, which has already won the Walt Whitman Award for debut poetry collections, is a master class in shifting perspectives. Roaming from Hanoi to Kerkyra to Manhattan, Xie’s language veers between precise imagery, with the details of the world rendered in intimate close-up, and elegant aphorism, zooming out to take in a universal truth from a wide shot.

In “Phnom Penh Diptych: Wet Season,” Xie starts small and tender, with the details: “And how combed through, this rain! / The riled heat reaches the river shoal before it reaches the dark.” There’s a softness to her imagery, a kind of bewildered affection for the world — but she goes cold and clinical as her perspective sweeps outward and she turns to aphorism. “I wake up one morning to find beauty suspect,” she writes.

Over the course of her slim collection, Xie explores what it’s like to be a Chinese immigrant in America, and to be a Chinese American traveling through Asia. “Can you fix this English?” a restaurant owner asks her, and so, “I translate what little I can, it’s embarrassing.” But this is not an interior book: Xie keeps her readers firmly outside of her head, at eye level, watching the world. And with her sweeping, exact language, watching the world with Xie is nothing but a pleasure.

—Constance Grady

Translated Literature

The Emissary by Yoko Tawada, translated by Margaret Mitsutani — WINNER

Set in a post-apocalyptic Japan, this strange little gem of a book follows 107-year-old Yoshiro as he struggles to care for his great-grandson Mumei. In the wake of some unspecified nuclear catastrophe, the country’s children and elderly have diverged to the point where they’re almost different species: Mumei’s generation was born frail and sickly, while Yoshiro’s generation finds itself hale, healthy, and unable to die.

This probably makes The Emissary sound like a sci-fi novel, but it’s harder to categorize than that. Yoko Tawada’s matter-of-fact realism and lighthearted humor emphasize the surreal elements of the story by contrast, like they’re happening in the real world. And with a government in the undefined near future embracing nationalistic policies and suppressing its citizens’ language, the novel feels disturbingly contemporary.

For most of the story, there’s no real plot — just a series of vignettes about the characters’ daily lives peppered with beautifully bizarre imagery, where the morning light is “yellow as melted dandelions” and Mumei’s “baby teeth drop out one after another like pomegranate pulp.” But then, literally eight pages from the end, we learn something about the titular Emissary Association that retroactively links all those loose vignettes into an actual narrative. Honestly, I’ve never seen a novel do anything like this before, and when it happened, I threw the book across the room in joy.

—Trevor Barnes

Disoriental by Négar Djavadi, translated by Tina Kover

As Disoriental begins, our narrator Kimiâ Sadr is sitting alone in a fertility clinic in Paris. She is trying to get pregnant. She is also thinking about her father Darius, and about how he refused to take the escalators in Paris — because escalators, Kimiâ explains, were for “you, obviously. You, the ones who were going to work on that Tuesday morning in April. You, the citizens of this country, with your income taxes and compulsory deductions and council taxes.”

The two strands of thought — children and citizenship — seem separate, but as Disoriental continues, they weave themselves together until it becomes clear that for Kimiâ, they are inextricably linked.

Tina Kover’s translation from French is lively and complex, with Négar Djavadi’s rich, elegant sentences shining through. Together, they tell the story of the Sadr family, beginning with Kimiâ’s great-grandfather in Iran and extending through Kimiâ’s hypothetical unborn child in Paris. But Disoriental is also the story of Kimiâ herself, and how she left Iran at the age of 10 to come to Paris, and how in the process, she was dis-oriented, in both senses of the world: She was disoriented, confused; and she was dis-Oriented, so that she lost her Persianness.

“To really integrate into a culture,” Kimiâ explains, “I can tell you that you have to disintegrate first, at least partially, from your own. You have to separate, detach, disassociate.”

As the book goes on, however, it becomes clear that if Kimiâ can just do the task she has set out to do — if she can just have a baby, despite the fact that she is gay — then she won’t be quite as detached from her old culture as she thought. She’ll just be reinventing her relationship to it.

—Constance Grady

Love by Hanne Ørstavik, translated by Martin Aitken

Hanne Ørstavik’s Love was first published in Norway in 1997, a tale of desire and neglect that seamlessly switches perspectives between a mother and son. Vibeke and her son Jon, who have recently moved to a remote part of northern Norway, are spending their evenings separately the night before Jon’s ninth birthday. Jon goes out to sell raffle tickets for a school fundraiser to the neighbors, and encounters a number of strangers — some more unsavory than others. Vibeke goes to the library, hoping to see the man she’s attracted to, but finds that the library is closed, and ends up at a carnival instead. It’s less of a plot-driven story than one about the ways that loneliness and longing both create the distance between its characters and drive them toward their dark conclusion.

As translated from Norwegian by Martin Aitken, Love is a compelling, spare novel; an anxious mood hangs over Vibeke and Jon’s story like a thin, cold cloud. Both mother and son pursue the things they most desire — safety, warmth, a sense of security — in ways that are both doomed and deeply felt, particularly in the starkness and minimalism of Ørstavik’s translated prose. It’s the sort of book you want to gulp down in a sitting, enfolded by a blanket, sinking into the gray need we all feel to be loved.

—Alissa Wilkinson

Trick by Domenico Starnone, translated by Jhumpa Lahiri

Dolcetto o scherzetto — treat, or trick? In his latest work, famed Italian author Domenico Starnone does not give us an option; rather, he sends us on a trip filled with trickery, whether that’s of the mind, of art, of human relationships, or, better, of our own self.

In this poignant translation by Jhumpa Lahiri, Starnone details the brief encounter between Daniele Mallarico, a brilliant yet faded book illustrator, and his 4-year-old grandson Mario, on the former’s visit to his childhood home in Naples. Left alone by Mario’s parents, who head to Milan to mend their broken marriage under the guise of attending an academic conference, the two start off on the wrong foot but quickly try to adapt to each other’s ways.

Their relationship, perfectly captured by Starnone’s precise writing, gives the novel a rich foundation to allow for a juxtaposition of the old and the new, the rigid and the silly, while also providing readers with moments of pure comic relief, marked by the characters’ signature, witty stichomythia.

But on a deeper level, Trick challenges us to reflect on our own mortality, as evidenced by Daniele’s own grudges with his past and present, and to decide: Is there time to play one last trick with life?

—Stavros Agorakis

Flights by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft

Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights is epic in its scope and mission. Her novel has a narrator — a nameless woman who wanders the world with no apparent destination — whose journey is punctuated by several disconnected vignettes that take place across the world and through time, from centuries ago to a surreal near future. 

This journey through space and time has an unsettling and disorienting effect. Flights reads as a sprawling, surreal meditation on what it is to be alive in an increasingly transient world. The ability to vanish from one place and move on to the next becomes the object of a new field of study: “travel psychology.” In the book’s more humorous scenes, experts in this fictional field give lectures in airports to passive travelers waiting to board their planes. 

It is the fixation on the mortal body in Flights that is most striking; bodies are fetishized, taxidermied, reduced to their parts and preserved in glass jars in museums. In one story, a Dutch anatomist discovers the Achilles tendon by dissecting his own amputated leg. And there is an injustice to being reduced to a body. A female character reflects on the sexism of becoming invisible as she ages; in a series of letters, a woman pleads with the emperor of Austria for a proper burial for her late father, an African man whose body was skinned and stuffed and put in a racist display. 

In Flights, mobility is what helps us transcend these imperfect vessels. There are vanishing acts throughout the novel, like when the wife and child of a man inexplicably disappear while on vacation on a tiny Croatian island. But if we vanish — by death or otherwise — what remains of us if not our bodies? Tokarczuk offers a clue by way of her narrator: what we have written down. 

—Laura Bult

Young People’s Literature

The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo — WINNER

Elizabeth Acevedo is an established slam poet, and her debut novel, The Poet X, takes the form of an extended free-verse poem winding its way through a coming-of-age narrative set in modern-day Harlem. The book begins as the purported journal writings of high school sophomore Xiomara Batista. But as Xiomara wrestles to embrace her independence and nascent sexuality in the face of a censorious, extremely religious mother, The Poet X eventually reveals itself as a rhythmic literalization of a young woman finding her voice.

Many of the book’s supporting players are familiar ones from the young-adult canon — the supportive but polar-opposite best friend, the domineering immigrant mother and apathetic father, the improbably tender love interest, the unusually with-it teacher who changes the course of our protagonist’s life. But they’re given new shape through Xiomara’s/Acevedo’s free-flowing verses, which merge spoken-word and hip-hop tropes with an appropriately teenage plainspokenness.

The Poet X travels a narrative that’s so well-trod by contemporary YA that it borders on cliché, but its highly expressive approach to the language of emotion gives it a personal-epic vibe that’s all its own.

—Genevieve Koski

The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge by M.T. Anderson and Eugene Yelchin

Exceptionally clever, The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge all but begs you to immediately reread it upon finishing the first time, so well handled is a late-in-text reveal. The actual story — an elfin historian (the Brangwain Spurge of the title) becomes the first emissary in years sent to the goblin kingdom, where he’s met by a goblin archivist named Werfel — is a bit thin, the oft-told tale of opposite numbers learning they’re not so different after all once they’re forced to spend a lot of time together. But the method of telling reveals surprising depths.

In essence, The Assassination of Brangwain Spurge is told in three voices. Author M.T. Anderson handles the text, which includes frequent letters from the spymaster who is hoping to use Brangwain to figure out the source of the goblins’ magic. It also contains third-person segments, told from Werfel’s point of view. Meanwhile, illustrator Eugene Yelchin offers beautiful, woodcut-like drawings depicting Brangwain’s dispatches from the goblin kingdom, extracted from his thoughts and beamed back to the elves via a magic spell.

If you’ve guessed that this is a way to play around with ideas about prejudice and perception, you’re right. But it’s not as if the world doesn’t need more stories about how to overcome our prejudices and inaccurate perceptions, and Anderson and Yelchin structure their lesson in such a way that you’ll likely find yourself paging back through the text to notice all the clues they’ve sprinkled throughout about just how inaccurately Brangwain and Werfel understood each other until it was almost too late.

—Todd VanDerWerff

The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle by Leslie Connor

The Truth as Told by Mason Buttle is an exceptionally warm and sweet-hearted book — as warm and sweet as its main character. Poor 12-year-old Mason is an easy target for bullies: He’s big for his age; he lives in a falling-apart old farmhouse with his grandparents, while everyone else lives in a ritzy housing development built out of the family’s old farm; he’s highly dyslexic; and he sweats too much, so that he constantly admonishes himself, “Don’t be a gross-out.”

But despite the fact that every day after school, the other boys in his grade pelt Mason with lacrosse balls or apples, Mason refuses to let himself become mean-spirited or cruel in response. He’s a genuinely nice kid, and he’s willing to fight to protect those who need it, like a smaller boy in his grade, or a dog.

Which makes it all the more heartrending when it slowly becomes clear (and it’s clear to the reader long before it’s clear to Mason) that the police believe Mason had something to do with the tragic death of his best friend the year before. Mason’s friend died when the ladder to his treehouse collapsed underneath him, and now the cops keep asking Mason pointed questions about how he built the ladder and whether Mason would ever want to play a practical joke on someone with said ladder. Mason doesn’t understand why they keep asking him at all. He told them everything he knew, didn’t he?

Yet even though Mason must clear his name with the cops, this book is not a detective story or a mystery. It’s the story of Mason Buttle trying to protect the people who matter to him and find a safe space for himself in a world that keeps trying to hurt him — and Mason is such an instantly lovable character that there’s nothing to do but root for him to survive.

—Constance Grady

The Journey of Little Charlie by Christopher Paul Curtis

The Journey of Little Charlie is a cunningly sophisticated middle-grade novel, one that hides the trauma and horror of its content beneath a sprightly and charming voice. The story is told by 12-year-old Charlie Bobo, a white boy living in South Carolina in 1858, and he is a likably plucky kid who narrates everything in full-on old-timey Southern dialect. “I’d seent plenty of animals by the time I was old ‘nough to start talking,” he begins, and you know immediately that you’re in for a sunny story of country hijinks.

But then Charlie’s father dies, and to pay his debts, Charlie is forced to work for the odious Cap’n Buck, an evil plantation overseer and slave catcher. Cap’n Buck at first tells Charlie that they are headed to Virginia in order to retrieve $4,000 stolen from Buck’s employer, but it gradually becomes clear that what Buck actually has in mind is catching a family of formerly enslaved people who ran away 10 years before — a family that was worth $4,000.

Charlie is a product of his time and place, and as The Journey of Little Charlie begins, he has no particular qualms about slavery as an institution. But when he is pushed to participate in it actively, to become complicit in depriving a family of their freedom, he finds himself rapidly reevaluating the legitimacy of a practice he has always accepted without question. Crucially, Christopher Paul Curtis allows Charlie to reach his epiphany without ever losing sight of the personhood of the black characters whose freedom Charlie threatens: They are complex figures in their own rights, not just props for Charlie’s personal growth.

—Constance Grady

Hey, Kiddo by Jarrett J. Krosoczka

Jarrett J. Krosoczka has the magical skill of capturing the joy, warmth, and uncertainty of being a kid and melding it all into a Hey, Kiddo, a touching graphic memoir. There may be moments where it feels like Krosoczka watched you grow up and captured the tiniest of details about your childhood — the smell of comic books, the color of your best friend’s shirt, the voice of your favorite teacher — and recorded them in his story.

Then there’s the part that’s a little more painful: the stuff you can only see as an adult, and may never be able to fully leave behind.

Hey, Kiddo reveals how Krosoczka slowly came to realize that his mom was addicted to drugs and that the way he grew up wasn’t the way that kids are supposed to grow up. The details of things we take for granted, like his surprise at how his grandparents feed him, are heartbreaking to readers who don’t share Krosoczka’s experiences.

It’s with those details that Krosoczka evokes a relatable yearning to understand everything about our parents, and the impossibility of that desire. There are some things about the people who gave us life, regardless of our relationships with them or how close we are with them, that we’ll never fully know.

And though Krosoczka’s mother’s circumstances changed his life, Hey, Kiddo is about how love — all different kinds, from all the people in his world — made it so that those circumstances didn’t define it.

—Alex Abad-Santos

The Queen of Soul has been laid to rest.

Fans flocked to Detroit on Friday to pay respects to legendary singer Aretha Franklin, who died August 16 at the age of 76. The funeral service was a gathering of family and friends, as well as musicians, politicians, activists, and prominent African-American clergy, who mourned the death and celebrated the life of one of the most revered performers in American popular music.

“Nothing sounded better to me than the way my grandma sings. Her voice made you feel something,” said her granddaughter, Victorie Franklin. “You felt every word, every note, every emotion in the songs she sang. Her voice brought peace.”

The homegoing service, at Detroit’s Greater Grace Temple, was undoubtedly fit for royalty. Franklin lay in a glistening golden casket before thousands including dignitaries, contemporaries, and fans from her adopted hometown and beyond. Former President Bill Clinton, former Attorney General Eric Holder, actress Cicely Tyson, the Rev. Al Sharpton, and music executive Clive Davis were among the roster of speakers during the service.

Also fitting for such an influential musical artist, several performers paid tribute to Franklin, including Ariana Grande, Stevie Wonder, the Clark Sisters, Faith Hill, Chaka Khan, Smokey Robinson, and a full gospel choir.

“I’ve been watching the celebration of your life from everywhere and I’ve been doing interviews from everywhere from all over the world,” Robinson said in his sendoff to Franklin, who’d been his longtime friend. “In fact, the last one I did was from Brazil and the station that I was talking on covered all of South America. So the world is celebrating you. And the world is mourning you, and the world is going to miss you.” Robinson then sang a somber rendition of his song, “Really Gonna Miss You.”

Throngs of people hoping to catch a final glimpse of the star lined the streets around the site of the day-long service, which began Friday morning and continued well into the early evening.

Here’s a glance at Franklin’s final sendoff.

In a world where the Simpsons joke that Donald Trump would be our president has actually come true, it sort of makes sense that we’d consider our highest-grossing box-office hero for the job, too. 

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson’s return as the King of Summer officially begins Friday with the release of Skyscraper, which promises to be a true thrill ride filled with physics-defying stunts. In his return comes a revelation a year in the making: due to time constraints, Johnson will not run for president — at least not in 2020.

Talk of Johnson’s potential political cachet reached a fever pitch last year after an entertaining GQ cover story by Caity Weaver, in anticipation of Baywatch and the third season of his HBO series Ballers. With interest in Johnson seemingly higher than ever, and with politics influencing everything under the sun, the profile’s headline itself plainly proposed “Dwayne Johnson for President.”

The central question had become whether a beloved celebrity and nearly (nearly) infallible box-office draw could wind up in the White House. Even Johnson was in on the joke, as he and Tom Hanks buddied up during his Saturday Night Live monologue to announce they were running together for president.

Sure, at one point in time, this sounded like a ridiculous question: A hulked-out former pro-wrestler with whom America fell in love for his over-the-top action movies and laying the smackdown on his opponents in the ring, for political office? Give me a break. 

Then again, who doesn’t like Dwayne Johnson? Literally name one person who doesn’t like him at least a little. It’s scientifically impossible.

The transition from celebrity to politico is not insurmountable — actress Cynthia Nixon is currently betting on that. And on the flip side of the political-popularity association, some politicians gain a certain level of celebrity that either catapults them into office, or keeps them there. 

Does this mean that The Rock is perfect for public office? Maybe. But he’s also one of the few entities most Americans can actually agree about. That’s because Johnson has done a fine job of keeping his more controversial political beliefs to himself — there’s nothing for half of the country to disagree with him about.

So why would we want to waste him on politics?

The Rock has been cultivating an unwavering fan base for two decades

For those of you who didn’t obsessively tune into WWE programming every night of the week in the 1990s, let me quickly catch you up. The Rock gained popularity in what’s known as the WWE’s “Attitude era,” which is where you get your Stone Colds and your Chynas. This was a time of huge personalities for pro-wrestling.

After his less-than-stellar introduction as a third-generation wrestler, then his turn as a heel — that’s a bad guy — The Rock emerged as a wise-cracking, endlessly entertaining, astoundingly athletic star of a golden era of pro wrestling.

From 1999 to 2002, the arena would erupt every time he was called to the ring. His face practically popped off every Megatron from Wooster, Massachusetts, to San Diego, as he spouted the best smack talk in the business.

With the crack of “Can you smellllll what The Rock is cookin’!?” blaring over the loudspeaker at the beginning of his entrance music, every fan rose to their feet as though the president was entering Congress to deliver the State of the Union. In the background of every Rock match, cameras flashed from the cheap seats to ringside, hoping to catch the moment that the People’s Elbow came flying down on an opponent.

As he truly lived up to his label as “The Most Electrifying Man in Sports Entertainment,” Hollywood came calling. The Rock stole the show as Scorpion King in an otherwise forgettable Mummy movie, to the point where he got his own spinoff. Then came Saturday Night Live, on which he made his fifth appearance as host in 2017. Then came more TV. More movies. Starring roles. Sequels. Franchises.

Eventually, people who wouldn’t be able to name a Pay-Per-View match beyond Wrestlemania knew Johnson as an action hero who used to be a wrestler. His electric personality fit in perfectly with his film characters, and once he was able to dial back the over-the-top wrestler persona, you get what we know today: a funny, humble guy who eats like a beast and works out like, well, two beasts. 

As Weaver notes in her profile, Johnson’s outspoken in his respect for military service members and veterans. He loves his family. He talks openly about how hard he works, whether it’s in the gym, or on a movie set, or for charity. Plus there’s no ignoring that the star sounds like a leader with a campaign slogan: “More poise, less noise,” as he said on the Tonight Show.

Minus some policy talk, you might say he’s been cultivating a version of himself that’s similar to that of an emerging politician, tweeting and Instagramming glimpses into his life that make him seem accessible — like someone you’d want to have a beer with. Aside from hammering opponents on health care, for example, isn’t that how politicians (or anyone, really) make a name for themselves now, anyway?

Over the years, Johnson’s earned a built-in base of millions of unwavering fans. Yet despite his life being an open book, there’s also very little we really, truly know about how he thinks. 

Wait, what, exactly are The Rock’s politics?

By now we know Johnson’s political stances are quite mysterious, and he admits in Weaver’s profile that he’s kept it that way for a reason. Especially with a nation so politically fractured, opening up on potentially unpopular opinions could lose him fans and potentially harm his career. And even relying on flat stereotypes to guess where he comes down politically isn’t that easy.

Think about it, what do you really know about The Rock’s politics? He’s getting acquainted with feminism, has clearly stated he dislikes the Muslim travel ban, and played gay in a movie before it was cool, so he must be somewhere on the left, right?

But he spoke at the 2000 Republican National Convention, he loves, loves, loves the troops, and seems, in his movies at least, comfortable with guns, so maybe he’s on the right? He opted not to endorse either presidential candidate back in 2016, and hasn’t publicly said how he voted. He is exceedingly cautious in how he criticizes Trump, which could be either because he doesn’t want to alienate Republicans, or to prevent Democrats from appropriating his statements as a rejection of the president.

There’s also the matter of his race — let’s face it, especially after a black man was elected president and the tumult of the 2016 election, race plays a factor in politics. Johnson is black and Samoan, and comes off as ethnically ambiguous, a blank slate upon which anyone can project whatever they see — or whatever they want to see. In the GQ profile, Johnson jokes that “white people often guess he is ‘… Greek?’” with Weaver going on to note, “In other words, pretty much anyone can find themselves, or a slightly tanner or paler version of themselves, in Dwayne Johnson if they look hard enough; appearance-wise, he has a hometown advantage everywhere on earth.”

All of this is makes up Johnson’s appeal. He’s both superhuman and down to earth. He works incredibly hard and is rewarded handsomely for it. He’s sought out for political endorsements and starring roles in movies. He’s the living, breathing American dream: rich, influential, and beloved by all four quadrants of movie-goers. 

As David French of the National Review asserted in his cover story about the star last year, Johnson is the celebrity Americans need. At a time of deep political polarization, where Facebook has become a minefield for anger, only one man can drive an upside-down, tricked-out American muscle car into the hearts of America and make us whole again.

Perhaps that’s why we shouldn’t waste Johnson on politics. Yes, it all sounds fun now to have a president who was once half of the most delightfully mismatched tag-team champion duo, The Rock ’n’ Sock Connection. Sure, Ronald Reagan and Jesse Ventura provided blueprints for how entertainers can have second lives as politicians, while Barack Obama and Bill Clinton have used the power of celebrity to harness political influence. 

However, there’s no avoiding the two things that would inevitably undermine a Dwayne Johnson presidency: politics and policy. We’d have to know what he really thinks, and we’d have to experience how he’d make his policies happen. Are we really ready for that? His lack of hard political experience doesn’t necessarily mean he would be bad in office. But do we really want to risk losing America’s most beloved action star — one of the few ideals most people can agree on, in such a polarized era no less — to see how he’d govern?

This isn’t to say he should never run for political office. As Johnson said, and as his longtime friend Hiram Garcia has reiterated to Vanity Fair, the star takes this prospect very seriously. “I have so much respect for the position,” Johnson told reporters at the premiere of his film on Tuesday. “It’s something that I seriously considered. What I need is time to go out and learn.” Besides, being a good public servant doesn’t require one to enter politics. As Johnson already knows through philanthropic efforts, being a good citizen isn’t only about running for office.

Still, he’s positioned himself as the upstanding, hardworking everyman with values instead of political stances. What happens when Johnson’s luster wears away thanks to the partisan bickering inherent in a political career? All we’d be left with is another guy in a suit (perhaps with the sleeves torn off?) with likely measured political ideas.

So will we see Johnson-Hanks at the 2020 Whatever National Convention? Nope. But it would be a hell of a lot more entertaining to watch it play out on a movie screen than in real life.

President Donald Trump announced on Monday night that Brett Kavanaugh, a judge on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, is his choice to replace retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. With the announcement of Kennedy’s retirement and now Kavanaugh’s nomination, abortion rights watchers have been sounding the alarm that Roe v. Wade, the nation’s landmark 1973 abortion rights decision, is in a fragile state.

Over his three-decade tenure, Kennedy has been the swing vote keeping federal abortion rights mostly intact. And if the right case makes it to the Supreme Court, the Trump-nominated replacement to Kennedy and four other dependably conservative justices could overturn Roe v. Wade and jeopardize legal abortions in the United States.

Yet in many regions across the country, the end of Roe is essentially already here.

The rollback of abortion access in some states has been taking place for the better half of the last decade. After the 2010 elections ushered in a wave of conservative governors and state lawmakers, more than 400 state laws have been passed to restrict abortion access in some way, according to Rachel Sussman, Planned Parenthood’s national director of state policy and advocacy.

If Roe v. Wade is overturned, states can individually decide whether abortion will remain legal and how accessible it will be. While services in blue states like California and New York will probably remain intact, they most likely will not in states like Mississippi where abortion is already restricted. (In Mississippi, abortion is illegal after 15 weeks of a pregnancy, and only one remaining clinic offers the procedure.)

And it’s not just Mississippi. Twenty-one states, including North Dakota, Georgia, and Oklahoma, adhere to a 20-week ban. In some states, burdensome requirements for abortions mean extended wait periods for women seeking the procedure. Legal limitations like extended waiting periods have been placed on medication-based abortions. Certain states restrict private insurers from covering abortion, while other states require women to undergo counseling before having an abortion. 

“It is certainly true with the Kennedy vacancy, access to abortion and Roe v. Wade are on the line,” Sussman told Vox. “And certainly losing Roe would make abortion access impossible in close to 20 states. But there are women today living under regimes where access to abortion is impossible.” 

Access to clinics has been on the decline for years

Documentaries and news articles have long chronicled the diminishing number of abortion clinics in the South and West. Six states — West Virginia, North Dakota, South Dakota, Mississippi, Wyoming, and Kentucky — each have only a single remaining abortion clinic. And Kentucky could very well become the first state without any abortion clinics at all. The state’s conservative governor has lodged a federal lawsuit against EMW Women’s Surgical Center, Kentucky’s lone clinic because its doctors do not have admitting privileges at local hospitals should a patient require a transfer.

Many of the restrictions on abortion are, in fact, waged against clinics and providers. Eleven states require abortion providers to have practitioners with admitting privileges, meaning they must have ties to a hospital that patients can go to in an emergency. While the requirement seems commonsense, doctors often find it difficult to maintain the minimum number of admitted patients or they live too far from the hospital to qualify.

Some states impose regulations on an abortion clinic’s distance from a hospital, the size of procedure rooms, and even the width of corridors inside. Strict requirements like these would have severely cut down abortion access across Texas if it weren’t for the 5-3 Supreme Court decision of 2016 in Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt, which deemed such regulations an undue burden on clinics and women seeking abortions. 

Even states with multiple clinics leave some populations underserved. The Lancet published a study last year examining how far women of reproductive age needed to travel to find the nearest abortion clinic. Across the US, the median distance a woman has to travel to reach an abortion clinic is 11 miles, but that’s generally because abortion clinics (and people) are concentrated in urban areas. Still, as Vox’s Anna North reported last year, women in large swaths of the United States are sometimes forced to travel hundreds of miles for an abortion. 

Abortion access is being incrementally scaled back

Getting to a clinic, however, does not guarantee access to an abortion. Twenty-seven states require a woman seeking an abortion to wait a certain amount of time, typically 24 hours, before the procedure can take place. Some of those states require the woman to make two separate trips for the procedure. 

Additionally, 43 states prohibit abortion after a certain number of weeks into a pregnancy. With each year comes even tighter timelines. During their past legislative sessions, Mississippi and Louisiana each banned abortion after 15 weeks. (That’s still several weeks before a fetus would be considered viable if born prematurely, according to a 2015 study published in the New England Journal of Medicine.) While Mississippi’s law was immediately challenged in court, it lines up with Gov. Phil Bryant’s 2014 declaration that he would work “to end abortion” in his state. In Louisiana, performing an abortion for someone after 15 weeks of her pregnancy comes with a prison sentence of as much as two years. Kentucky, pending a legal challenge, may limit the types of abortion procedures available to women who are more than 11 weeks pregnant. Iowa’s governor signed a bill banning abortions once a fetal heartbeat is detected, which can be as early as six weeks into a pregnancy.

Dr. Jamila Perritt, a fellow with Physicians for Reproductive Health that advocates for contraception and abortion rights, outlined for NPR earlier this year how such a short window of time creates a barrier for many women who seek abortions. 

”The likelihood that an individual can miss her period, get a pregnancy test, then make an appointment to see an abortion provider, take time off of work if she’s working, find child care for her other children, get in to get her abortion and have all of that done prior to a six-week time period is absolutely unrealistic and unreasonable,” Perritt said. 

Abortion restrictions like these, Sussman reiterated, have a particularly high impact on people of color, undocumented people, and low-income earners, especially those with hourly wage jobs. That’s all the more jarring if you consider that, according to the Brookings Institution, low-income women are “more than five times as likely than affluent women to experience an unintended pregnancy.”

But is Roe really in jeopardy?

On the campaign trail, Trump vowed he would nominate anti-abortion judges and that Roe would “automatically” be overturned. With Kavanaugh on the bench, the future of Roe would either be safe, according to groups like the American Family Association who say his views are not conservative enough, or in peril, according to politicians like Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) who has already declared she would oppose his nomination to guard the potential overturn of Roe.

But there are nearly a dozen cases in federal courts right now that could, if brought before the Supreme Court that includes Kavanaugh, potentially upend the precedent established by Roe 45 years ago, according to Planned Parenthood. Even if Roe isn’t overturned outright, replacing Kennedy will affect abortion rights, “not so much because it will bring about the immediate reversal of Roe v. Wade but because it makes it more likely that the Supreme Court will give the states more room to decide what regulatory constraints on abortion are valid,” Carol Sanger, a Columbia law professor, told Vox’s Li Zhou this week.

Nonetheless, 67 percent of the US public does not want the case overturned, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation poll conducted before Kennedy’s announcement. Among women of reproductive age, the figure is 74 percent.

Despite public opinion, states across the country have been paring back abortion access or preparing for the overturning of Roe. According to the Guttmacher Institute, 17 states have laws on the books that would rescind any remaining abortion rights if the decision is overturned. In other states with majority-Republican legislatures and conservative governors, similar restrictive laws could come quickly.

Nonetheless, Sussman said, “there are states out there that have declared that they’ll fight tooth and nail to ensure that access to abortion in their state is not only protected but that they’ll defend it. There are a lot of states working proactively — they’re setting up their states to codify Roe’s protections. This won’t be a one-sided story.”