Araceli Ramirez, the heroine of Héctor Tobar's new novel, The Barbarian Nurseries (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), is a nanny who finds herself accused of kidnapping her charges, when she is, in fact, taking them to their grandfather. This conversation centers on the way our concept of racialism enables us to make explosive incidents out of what are really good intentions gone wrong.
Read an excerpt from The Barbarian Nurseries.