In framing Tomine's life trajectory via professional and personal setbacks and moments of mortification, The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist becomes mesmerizing, funny, and deeply honest.
Alaya Dawn Johnson's new novel is set in New York on the eve of World War II, in a world where a few lucky (well, not that lucky) people are gifted with "saints' hands," that give them strange skills.
Smith began Intimations: Six Essays at the onset of the pandemic and finished it shortly after George Floyd's killing. Although only 100 pages, there's something worth quoting on virtually every page.
Nicholson Baker's book misses the mark in an aim to take readers on a quest to discover if the U.S. used biological weapons developed in the '50s — and to examine the failings of public records law.
Anne Applebaum writes in Twilight of Democracy that heir to fears and hatreds, even advanced societies are straining under repeated blows: protracted war, economic disruptions, migration, a pandemic.
Maggie O'Farrell's new novel confronts a parent's worst nightmare: The loss of a child. In this case, it's Hamnet, the real-life son of William Shakespeare, whose death may have inspired Hamlet.
In his new memoir, the TV icon reflects on his cancer diagnosis and presents brief, sometimes compelling glimpses into his history, as he aims to convince the world he's just an average guy.
Set in a Dublin maternity ward in 1918, the novel captures a city devastated by a pandemic. By diving into the terrors of the past, Emma Donoghue presciently anticipates the miseries of our present.
Though their stories encourage gawking, at least one throughline sticks after reading Sisters — the ugly deal these women have made with a movement that is ultimately ambivalent toward them.
S.A. Cosby's latest is being marketed as a crime novel — but that crime is the least important element in this wrenching story about race, family, and the temptation to take that one last job.
Stephen Graham Jones's new novel follows the aftermath of an elk hunt gone wrong and one man who's haunted by it — literally. It's a story of revenge and sorrow, but also identity and tradition.
Pretty in Pink meets Sliding Doors in this what-if story. High-schooler Emelia gets the chance to go back and change one decision in her past — but then she has to learn to live with the changes.
Europe's favorite cartoon Gaul has bopped plenty of Romans, but he's never really hit big in America. A rebooted version of Asterix, with a new translation from the French, is aimed at changing that.
Asako Serizawa's new novel is a tangle of interlocking stories about several generations of a Japanese family, beginning in 1868 and going all the way through to an imagined future in the 2030s.
Hana Tooke creates a memorable villain, Matron Gassbeek, who menaces the feisty orphans of The Unadoptables in the grand tradition of awful authority figures like Miss Trunchbull and Viola Swamp.