Marcos Gonsalez reviews Alejandro Varela’s debut novel The Town of Babylon. Andrés, the novel’s gay Colombian-American protagonist, returns to suburbia and muses on identity, race, and the prejudice and hierarchy that constitutes America.

Alex Skopic reviews Max Haiven’s Palm Oil: The Grease of Empire, out now from Pluto Press. The grotesque history of this ubiquitous commodity offers a lens onto the environmental and human costs of imperialism and industry.

Alexander Billet reviews Cynthia Cruz’s The Melancholia of Class, a work of memoir and cultural criticism that examines the inflections of class, assimilation, and loss on independent art.