Rachel Aviv and Hafizah Geter

Strangers to Ourselves is the first book from The New Yorker’s Rachel Aviv, a collection of reporting and memoir that questions how we understand ourselves in moments of crisis.

“If, as James Baldwin writes, ‘the purpose of art is to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers,’ then Aviv’s reportage becomes literature; not just because of the nimble pivots in her prose, the way her syntax unseats our expectations as deftly as her stories do, but because of her restless integrity,” wrote Leslie Jamison. “Aviv explores her subjects not as diagnoses but as fully dimensional characters—full of yearning, self-questioning, heartache, savvy, and hope.”

In her lyrical debut memoir, The Black Period, poet Hafizah Geter recalls her parents’ lessons on the art of Black revision to form a new personal and collective history, addressing the systems of inequity that make life difficult for non-able-bodied persons, queer people, and communities of color while capturing a world brimming with potential, art, music, hope, and love.

“Hafizah Geter is a genuine artist, not bound by genre or form,” wrote Tayari Jones. “Her only loyalty is the harrowing beauty of the truth. This is a work that interrogates as it both mourns and celebrates.”