Our annual fiction issue is out today, bringing together a collection of celebrated and emerging literary voices. This year, we’re presenting a mix of stories and memoirs that meditate on the theme of family. The issue features an exclusive first look at Jonathan Franzen’s new novel—still in progress—which is a sequel to “Crossroads,” from 2021. Also, in fiction by Annie Ernaux, published in English for the first time, a girl discovers her talent for storytelling by spinning tales that terrify her young charge. A story by Jamil Jan Kochai takes place at a rowdy gathering of Afghan refugees in California, where a newly widowed woman tells a surprising story from her past. And fiction by Taiye Selasi provides pointed instructions for how to navigate life and love in the shadow of a mother who believes she owns you. Online, you can read interviews conducted with each of the authors.

And in a series of brief memoirs: Anne Enright recounts her mother’s insistence on extreme honesty and considers the meaning of integrity in an age of predatory capitalism; Miriam Toews recalls living on the edge as a broke twenty-six-year-old journalism student and mother of two; Han Ong writes about severing ties with his entire family when he was twenty; Joseph O’Neill reflects on growing up in a family that was constantly moving; and André Alexis remembers lively conversations around the dinner table, which connected him to his homeland, Trinidad.