Books

“The first living man I ever fed to the lake was still screaming when I carried him down.”

So begins the confession of Slamet Darsawening — a name that means safe, given by a father who died coughing sulfur, spoken over a son the mountain would claim anyway.

In the Tirtawangi highlands of eastern Java, the volcano called the Rahang — the Jaw —...

The needle is cheap. The recovery is forever.

Renata Vasquez is twenty-eight, a nail technician from Hialeah with steady hands, $1,100 in savings, and a body she fought for — 122 pounds lost, and loose skin left hanging where the woman she wanted to be should have started. The clinics quoted her surgery at more than she makes in a year. The...

Francesca Ravelin has spent her career caring for people other clinicians struggle to reach. A home visit in the Nevada desert should take one afternoon.

The referral describes an elderly woman, suspected hoarding, and a son who has finally asked for help. Wendell Brask answers the phone promptly. He knows his mother’s medications. He is waiting...