Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in Forty Questions

Like the manifestos we highlighted here a few weeks ago—Timothy Snyder's "twenty lessons" about tyranny and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's "fifteen suggestions" about feminism—this little book by Mexican American novelist Valeria Luiselli starts with a number. In her case, though, the "forty questions" don't come from her, but from the U.S. government, from the intake questionnaire given to undocumented minors by a federal court in New York where Luiselli, while working her own way through the bureaucracy of American immigration, volunteered as a translator for children who had, like hundreds of thousands of others, undertaken a harrowing journey from Central America to throw themselves on the meager mercy of the American dream. Luiselli doesn't have answers to those questions, just her testimony and that of her young respondents, which may make her manifesto the most powerful of them all.