The Books Briefing: Books From Our Fathers

This Sunday, families in the United States will celebrate fatherhood—a role that, like motherhood, carries the weight of personal and cultural legacies both poignant and fraught. In Laila Lalami’s novel The Other Americans, a young woman wrestles with complex feelings of grief, fear, and resentment after her father, a Moroccan immigrant, is killed in a hit-and-run. A short story by Saul Bellow examines a son’s relationship with a father who both trained and betrayed him.

The writer David Giffels’s father didn’t often speak about emotional topics—but