Mai Nguyen's debut novel centers on the family of Tuyet and Xuan Tran, Vietnamese refugees who settle in Toronto. It simmers with questions about work, class and generational divides.

Shoes and accessories designed by Aurora James sell for hundreds, even thousands, of dollars. In Wildflower, James details how hard it was to get here and the imbalanced economics of high fashion.

Most novels set in bookshops are heartwarming paeans to bonds forged among readers. The Door-to-Door Bookstore by Carsten Henn and Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa are no exception.

As we roll into the dog days of summer, these three YA novels move beyond being beastly — as their protagonists transform into the creatures that lie within.

Ford brings his Frank Bascombe saga to an end in Be Mine, while Moore weaves together a fragmentary Civil War plot with an off-kilter vision of the afterlife in I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home.

Actor Laura Dern and her mother Diane Ladd have always shared a profession. But when Ladd was diagnosed with lung disease, the two started sharing so much more. Their new book is Honey, Baby, Mine.

It is easy to act as if fiction and history were separate. But they cannot be completely divided. Jenny Erpenbeck's Kairos and Oksana Lutsyshyna's Ivan and Phoebe help readers connect with time past.

Each week, guests and hosts on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour share what's bringing them joy. This week: Beware the Woman, Dungeons and Drag Queens, and the DVD menu of The Social Network.

Ricardo Alberto Maldonado will become the almost-90-year-old academy's executive director and president.

Brandon Taylor's The Late Americans is a sexually-explicit, cynical novel about young people striving. Such Kindness, by Andre Dubus III, grapples with injury, addiction, masculinity and loneliness.

Gottlieb, who died June 14 at 92, edited Joseph Heller, Toni Morrison, John le Carré and, for more than 50 years, Robert Caro. We listen back to an interview with Gottlieb from just a few months ago.

While not a new concept, Garrett Neiman makes distinct contributions to the conversation; as a rich white man, he has insider's access to that population — and doesn't shy away from self-indictment.

Dan Solomon's YA novel The Fight for Midnight takes place during former Texas state lawmaker Wendy Davis' filibuster of a bill that would restrict access to abortion. The protagonist is a teen boy.

Jenny Xie's new novel dives into how "strange, infuriating and precious" mothers can be to their daughters.

A young student in East Berlin falls in love with a much older writer in the run-up to the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is a love story and a rich portrait of people watching their country disappear.