In the United States, at least, February is a time for remembering — the feats of Black communities in America, the lives of its greatest presidents, the plight of a single large frightened rodent, even love itself (and its various totems that you’re expected to purchase).

Whew, that’s a whole lot of remembering to pack into the shortest month of the year. So, if only for the next few weeks, you have our permission to forget your guilt-inducing backlog of books and just dive right into the new stuff — which includes highly anticipated new releases from Michael Pollan, Tayari Jones and the late Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa.

Autobiography of Cotton, by Cristina Rivera Garza, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney — Feb. 3

Rivera Garza won the Pulitzer Prize for 2023’s Liliana’s Invincible Summer, a “genre-bending account“ of her sister’s life and murder that blends elements of memoir, investigative journalism and history. Autobiography of Cotton is the second book from the Mexican author’s backlist to receive an English translation since her Pulitzer win, and it shares a characteristic disdain for compartmentalization. This time she weaves in enough historical fiction to warrant calling this Autobiography a “novel.” But that label doesn’t fit either, as this hybrid account of ill-starred cotton farmers in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands also contains enough historiography and personal family history — among other disciplines — to again twist its would-be shelvers into pretzels, in a good way.

Biography of a Dangerous Idea: A New History of Race, from Louis XIV to Thomas Jefferson, by Andrew S. Curran — Feb. 10

There’s a curious thing that happens with ideas. Often it’s the most historically contingent ones — and occasionally the most pernicious — that claim to be eternal, universal or “self-evident.” In this new history, Curran, a scholar of the Enlightenment, offers a fascinating reassessment of that heady era of Western philosophy: how its towering thinkers came to invent the very idea of race as we know it today, and how that biological balkanization of humanity came to be passed down, quite misleadingly, as some sort of eternal truth.

A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness, by Michael Pollan — Feb. 24

Few journalists have spent as much time as Pollan thinking about the kinds of stuff we put into our bodies. The author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma has considered food intensively from every angle — how it’s grown, cooked, processed and consumed — as well as substances such as caffeine and mind-altering plants. Now, the “reluctant psychonaut” is training his gaze on thinking itself. His new book probes our understanding of what it means to, well, understand — a concept that’s as crucial to our notion of what it means to be human as it is elusive and downright paradoxical.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

I Give You My Silence, by Mario Vargas Llosa, translated from the Spanish by Adrian Nathan West — Feb. 24

“Each book, for me, has been an adventure,” Vargas Llosa told NPR just hours after he won the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature. Perhaps it’s fitting that the fruit of his final adventure, I Give You My Silence, reaches English-language readers only after his death last year at age 89. While he was alive, the Peruvian author (and activist, presidential candidate and alleged literary feuder) wasn’t often associated with silence. Vargas Llosa’s last novel centers a professor seeking the soul of his country in music. Published in Spanish in 2023, the book is now being brought to English readers by way of Adrian Nathan West, who also translated 2021’s Harsh Times.

Kin, by Tayari Jones — Feb. 24

“Every true story is in the service of justice. You don’t have to aim at justice; you just aim for the truth,” Jones told me in 2019, just minutes after her previous novel, An American Marriage, won the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Judging just from back-cover synopses, Kin, Jones’ first novel since that portrait of love caught in the grinder of mass incarceration, would seem more concerned with character and the complexities of friendship than Justice with a capital J. But as Jones herself warned, such distinctions can be misleading. Here a single relationship between two black women, rendered with Jones’ care and capabilities as a writer, becomes a prism through which to view a complex generation in the American South.

Brawler, by Lauren Groff — Feb. 24

Groff has previously proposed the idea of a “triptych” of novels, of which Matrix and Vaster Wilds would be the first two parts. “The third one is killing me, actually — I’m dying, it’s murdering me in my sleep at night,” she told NPR’s Andrew Limbong in 2023. To be clear, Brawler is not that third novel; it is instead Groff’s third short story collection, and her first since Florida, a 2018 National Book Award finalist. The new collection’s nine stories paint the world in vivid hues, as seen from the angle of a high school swimmer, a mother, an heir, among others. But also, here’s hoping, at least for Groff’s sake, that her work on that other, unfinished novel has moved past the ol’ “murdering me” phase.

Pageant Winner Kayleigh Bush
Miss America Went Down The Toilet

Published
February 11, 2026
1:00 AM PST

Almost a decade after her father’s death, legal scholar Dorothy Roberts still had 25 boxes of his research that she had yet to sort through. When she moved from Chicago to Philadelphia, she brought the boxes — and finally opened them.

Roberts’ father, Robert Roberts, was a white anthropologist who spent his career at Roosevelt University in Chicago. The boxes contained transcripts of nearly 500 interviews he had conducted with interracial couples across the city, including interviews with couples who were married in the late 1800s, all the way to couples who are married in the 1960s.

“They were absolutely fascinating,” Roberts says of the transcripts. “I learned so much about the racial caste system in Chicago, the Color Line, the Black Belt.”

Initially, Roberts saw the project as a chance to finish her father’s work, but as she examined the documents, she learned more about her own family — including the fact that her mother, Iris, a Black Jamaican immigrant, had assisted in her husband’s research.

“When I got to the 1950s interviews, I discovered that my mother was conducting all the interviews of the wives, while my father conducted the interviews for the husbands,” Roberts says. “Finding out that my mother was involved … created curiosity I had about my family, about their marriage, and then I began to think about how it related to me and my identity as a Black girl with a white father.”

In her new book, The Mixed Marriage Project: A Memoir of Love, Race, and Family, Roberts dives into her parents’ research and her surprise at learning that she was included as participant number 224 in the files. She also shares her own thoughts on interracial relationships.

“My father thought that interracial intimacy was the instrument to end racism, and I think it’s really flipped the other way,” she says. “We end racism when we will see the possibility of truly being able to love each other as equal human beings.”

Interview highlights

The Mixed Marriage Project, by Dorothy Roberts

Simon & Schuster

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On white European immigrant women marrying Black men in the early 20th century

These were immigrant women coming from Europe who had no familiarity at all with the racial caste system in Chicago. … So when they marry Black men, in fact, they thought that marrying an American citizen would help them assimilate into American culture. So they had no idea … that if they married a Black man, it would do the opposite to them. They would be lower in their status than they were as white immigrants. And so many of them would say, “I found out that I had to live in a colored neighborhood. I had to leave my white neighbors. I had left my family in order to marry this Black man and move into the Black Belt. I now couldn’t even tell my employer my address, because if they found out my address, they’d know I must be living with a Black man.” Why else would a white woman be living in the Black Belt?

They were afraid they would lose their jobs, and many reported that they were fired as a result of their employer finding out that they were married to a Black man. They were met with stares when they got on the streetcar. Many said that if they were going on a streetcar in Chicago, they would go on separately and pretend they didn’t know each other so that no one would know that they were married.

On the difference between her father’s and mother’s notes in the project 

My father, much to my horror, was very anthropological in terms of the physical traits of the people he interviewed. He wrote about the “Negroid traits” and whether the child had any trace of “Negroid blood” and that sort of thing. Again, remembering he was doing this in the 1930s.

My mother was much more interested in the personality traits of the people she interviewed and what their furniture looked like and her own emotions. And there’s just so many delightful things. The way in which she interacts with the children when she’s interviewing the wives — there’s a lot more attention to what the children are doing. I can’t remember a single interview where my father really describes the children’s behavior. He describes their physical appearance, but my mother would describe their behavior and their interaction with the mother. All of that is part of the interview and her notes, and she writes it almost like a screenplay. It’s really, really wonderful to read.

On the fetishization of interracial intimacy and biracial children 

There was this visceral feeling I felt whenever a Black man, a Black husband, would talk about his preference for being with white women. These ideas that interracial intimacy has an extra excitement to it. It has an extra titillation to it — that kind of idea came up in many of the interviews — and I just have a very visceral revulsion at that kind idea, a sort of a fetishization of interracial intimacy and also of biracial children. The idea that whitening children makes them more attractive or makes them more intelligent or more appealing, more lovable. And whenever that came up, I just, sometimes I had to just throw the interview down because I couldn’t stand that kind of thinking.

On her decision to identify as Black in college and hide her dad’s whiteness

I now regret that I hid the fact that my father was white, that I denied him that part of my identity or denied the reality that he was part of my identity. … I think I very wrongly believed that if they knew my father was white, I somehow wouldn’t be as much an integral part of these groups, that they might feel differently about me. …

I realized by the end of working on the memoir that I am a Black woman with a white father [and] I should not deny all that my father contributed to my identity. I would not be the Black woman I am today, I probably would not have done the work against racism and against the demeaning of Black women, I would have not done the [work] to uplift Black women if it weren’t for my father and all that he taught me. And I need to appreciate and acknowledge all that my father contributed to the Black woman I am today.

On what this project has taught her about love and race

It showed me more powerfully than anything I’d ever read before how the invention of race, the lie that human beings are naturally divided into races, can erase the very ties of family. … In my own case, my father’s younger brother, my uncle Edward, disowned him when he married my mother. And even though he lived in the Chicago area and I had cousins who lived there, I never met them because of this rift, this divide between my father and his brother.

Working on the memoir also made me realize that all the work I’ve been doing throughout my career was trying to answer this question of, what does it take to love across the chasm of race? That’s what these couples are telling us, even the ones who were still racist. … They’re telling us what it takes to challenge and dismantle structural racism in America. And so, to me, these interviews persuaded me even more that we can believe in our common humanity. We can overcome the seemingly unbreakable, unshakable shackles of structural racism. But it can’t be simply by pretending that the sentiment of love or even loving someone across the racial lines will do it. We have to see the work that it’s going to take to do that.

Anna Bauman and Nico Gonzalez Wisler produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.