In the five far-ranging, multipart essays that make up her profound, often piercing new book Thin Skin: Essays, Jenn Shapland moves between numerous weighty topics—turning a curious eye upon everything from capitalism to nuclear power to climate change to personal identity—and draws connections only to tear them apart in her exploration of “the idea of our utter physical enmeshment with every other being on the planet.”

“To dig in the earth disturbs and destroys, but it also unearths, aerates,” Shapland writes. “To what extent is my own research a form of extractivism, a digging and unearthing that is painful to me, to the people I interview, to the people I tell about what I learn, to you?”

Despite this pain, Shapland dons a tall stack of writerly hats—historian, memoirist, naturist, harbinger—and sets what she discovers against the backdrop of her own life, as in her critically acclaimed My Autobiography of Carson McCullers. Sometimes there is affirmation of her lived experiences; more often, such personal application raises additional questions about what she and we have been taught to be correct, true, acceptable.

In the titular “Thin Skin,” Shapland shares that a dermatological condition requires her to “build up my skin each day to face the world,” but New Mexico, where she lives with her partner, Chelsea, and their cats, has caused her sensitivities to flare. No wonder: Multiple fascinating, devastating interviews discuss Los Alamos National Laboratory and the poisonous radioactive waste that now lurks within the state’s beautiful landscape. And in “The Toomuchness,” she examines her own culpability in perpetuating capitalism, gazing at her jampacked closet and its resident moths as she considers, “Why is private property, accumulation, the only way to see our relationship with the world?”

Shapland interrogates other aspects of the personal and the political throughout, such as in “The Meaning of Life,” where she asks why having children is still a societal default, pointing out that “children are part of the system that entrenches us in capitalist striving and labor production and endless competition.” As in all of her Thin Skin essays, Shapland challenges readers to broaden their perspective and perhaps even join her in being thin-skinned, in order “to feel keenly, to perceive things that might go unseen, unnoticed, that others might prefer not to notice.”

Harvard historian Jill Lepore says that she “never set out to study history. I only ever set out to write. The history I read bugged me.” Now she pursues both history and writing with great intelligence, boundless curiosity, a relentless pursuit of facts and concern about very important subjects. Her books include the bestselling These Truths: A History of the United States and Bancroft Prize-winning The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. Since 2005, she has also been a staff writer at The New Yorker where most of the essays in her dazzling new collection The Deadline originally appeared.

Many of these essays concern the relationship between what has happened in the past and how it relates to the present. In “Battleground America,” Lepore discusses the complicated history of the Second Amendment while in “The Riot Report,” she focuses on the numerous special commission reports that have been published over the years and how little has come from them.

In “Drafted,” an essay published last year, Lepore writes: “Beginning in the summer of 2022, women in about half of the United States may be breaking the law if they decide to end a pregnancy. This will be, in large part, because Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito appears to have been surprised that there is so little written about abortion in a four-thousand-word document crafted by fifty-five men in 1787. . . . There is nothing in that document about women at all. Most consequentially, there is nothing in that document—or in the circumstances under which it was written—that suggests its authors imagined women as part of the political community.” Of course, “Legally, most women did not exist as persons.”

Lepore considers this while also spending time in other essays investigating such varied topics as why King John affixed his seal to what became known as the Magna Carta, whether mission statements for organizations are just “baloney” and the history of the term “burnout.” Lepore went to both Republican and Democratic conventions in 2016 and shares her impressions. There are perceptive discussions of the lives and ideas of Mary Wollstonecraft, Rachel Carson, Eugene Debs and Herman Melville. Whether the subject is technology, law, culture, bicycling or children, her insights hold our attention. Overall, this is an outstanding collection, sure to be enjoyed by a wide range of readers.

Lovers of Colm Tóibín’s novels (among them Brooklyn, The Master and The Magician) might not know that the Irish author is also a longtime essayist. A Guest at the Feast gathers recent essays that show his full range.

A Guest at the Feast is divided into three sections: personal essays, essays examining the power of the Irish Catholic church and the papacy, and literary essays. The collection’s first essay, “Cancer: My Part in Its Downfall,” opens without fanfare: “It all started with my balls.” Detailing his bout with testicular cancer, Tóibín turns a close eye to its vicissitudes—what he cooked when he couldn’t taste anything, the tedium of chemotherapy, the complications he endured—making the subject funny, fresh and moving.

Part two draws on Tóibín’s youth in a repressive 1960s Ireland, attending a boarding school led by priests later convicted of sexual abuse. His reported essay “The Bergoglio Smile: Pope Francis” offers a more complicated view of the pope and his failures to oppose Argentina’s authoritarian military regime when Francis was a young Jesuit leader. Part three includes an essay on novelist Marilynne Robinson and the way her novels encounter religious belief. “How do you create a religious or a nonsecular protagonist in a novel without making a dog’s dinner out of the book?” he asks, leading the reader through a quick parade of modernist efforts (T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, among others) before settling into Robinson’s novels Gilead, Home, Lila and Jack. This essay, in particular, is a marvel.

But the title essay, “A Guest at the Feast,” is the book’s highlight. This long personal essay (or short memoir) roams through the small Irish town of Enniscorthy, where Tóibín grew up, offering anecdotes about the townspeople and his family, including two about his mother, who was unafraid to confront one of her son’s bullying teachers and who read banned Irish novels in the 1960s. By turns conversational and poetic, the essay also shows the first glimmers of Tóibín becoming a writer. Describing a train journey between Enniscorthy and Wexford, he writes, “In that silvery still afternoon light, for several miles you see no roads and hardly any buildings, just trees and the calm strong river.” 

A Guest at the Feast is a collection that will remind readers of Tóibín’s power as a writer of more than just memorable fiction. His cleareyed, considered critiques of powerful people and vivid personal essays can make readers long for a place they’ve never seen.