The versatile novelist moves away from the heavier themes that won him a brace of Pulitzer Prizes in Harlem Shuffle, a heist caper starring a mostly-upright furniture salesman with a criminal streak.
Writer Margaret Renkl's sense of joyful belonging to the South co-exists with her intense desire for Southerners who face prejudice or poverty finally to be embraced and supported.
Cassandra Khaw's new novel follows a rag-tag band of criminals who have to pull together for one last heist — but in their hands, what could be an ordinary tale becomes visionary sci-fi adventure.
Atticus Lish's book opens a disturbing window into a teenager's battle to save his mother, our broken healthcare system — and the power that humans have to inflict harm on one another.
On 9/11, it was impossible to connect the dots for adults, nevermind children. Here are some books that can help kids try to understand that fateful date 20 years later.
These books provide a detailed accounting of events that have defined the U.S. role in the world in the first part of the 21st century. None makes for cheery reading, but all offer sobering lessons.
Shruti Swamy has won awards for her short fiction; The Archer, her debut novel, is a coming-of-age tale inspired by the graceful, precise storytelling of India's ancient Kathak dance form.
Laurent Binet seems to genuinely want to know to what extent conquest and the cruelty it inevitably produces are reducible, redeemable, or escapable. He also plainly wants to play around.
In On Freedom's allusive, blunt, funny essays, the author of The Argonauts and The Art of Cruelty tries to imagine freedom as it exists in the contemporary contexts of art, sex, drugs, and climate.
More than an autobiography following a strict chronological path and detailing all major events, this book focuses on the role of art in the U.S. poet laureate's life and her development as an artist.
While the story of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising is well-documented, pockets of Jewish resistance surfaced in smaller ghettos across Nazi-occupied central-eastern Europe too. Zhetel is one such place.
Ye Chun's new story collection Hao takes its name from a Chinese word meaning "good," or "everything's OK" — but the characters in these stories are sick, afraid, out of time, and anything but OK.
Lauren Groff digs deep into the past with Matrix, based on the real-life writer Marie de France. Little is known about the real Marie, but Groff gives us an ambitious, complex, striving woman.
What appears to be a simple, awful police killing turns out to be much worse in Cadwell Turnbull's new No Gods, No Monsters, set in a world where monsters and magic are real, and none of it is pretty.
Author Hilma Wolitzer, mother of Meg Wolitzer, tackles the ups and downs of a long, not always happy marriage in her excellently named new story collection, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket.
