'The Emperor of Gladness' is a beautiful novel about hard work and found family
Ocean Vuong's sweeping new novel centers on a depressed 19-year-old college dropout who becomes the caregiver to a widow with dementia.
A filmmaker in Nazi Germany strikes a deal with the devil in 'The Director'
When do compromises turn into full-blown capitulation? Daniel Kehlmann's new novel draws on the true story of German film director G.W. Pabst.
Supermarket displays of oranges will never look the same after reading 'Foreign Fruit'
In her new hybrid memoir, Katie Goh unravels the multitudes citrus fruit contains, in lockstep with mythologies of colonialism, inheritance, and identity.
This Hollywood memoir is an expertly mixed cocktail of history and family drama
Matthew Specktor grew up the son of a famous Hollywood agent. In The Golden Hour he serves up family saga, cultural criticism, fictionalized biography, history and lament for a vanishing world.
What connects Fredéric Chopin, Marcel Proust and Jim Morrison? A final resting place
The Secret Life of a Cemetery is a paean to the renowned Parisian cemetery, Père Lachaise. There, 10,000 visitors a day seek the graves of some 4,500 notable figures.
This terrifying horror novel proves: Nothing is old if you make it new
Nat Cassidy's wildly entertaining novel is a superb example of how to work with clichés. When the Wolf Comes Home might sound like a werewolf novel — but it's an entirely different animal.
AI eavesdrops on your sleep in this nightmarish 'Dream Hotel'
Laila Lalami's dystopian novel centers on a woman who's been incarcerated because an algorithm flagged her as a crime risk. The Dream Hotel paints a grim picture about the ways our data can betray us.
This new story collection is marvelous — if a bit meandering
Lydia Millet's characters in Atavists interact and have little dramas of their own — the author's talent is on full display here. Not every story is strong, but they work well together.
Joan Didion leaves one more piece of writing to faithful fans
Didion's book is an intimate chronicle of the author's struggle to help her daughter, even if it meant digging into her own long-unexamined neuroses.
These 2 funny books give readers a reason to smile in tough times
Dorothy Parker's posthumously published collection is Poems; Camilla Barnes' debut novel is The Usual Desire to Kill. Both affirm: sharp humor can be grounded in pain.
10 books we're looking forward to this spring
A famed graphic novelist returns! A Southern-gothic crime-thriller inspired by The Godfather! An extremely in depth biography of Mark Twain! And more!
Karen Russell's 'The Antidote' is an American epic — and well worth the wait
Russell has published excellent short story collections since her 2011 debut novel Swamplandia!, but this is her first novel in nearly 15 years. It follows a "Prairie Witch" in Dust Bowl-era Nebraska.
New 'Hunger Games' prequel reminds that sometimes past truths aren't visible
Sunrise on the Reaping recounts the 50th annual Hunger Games, telling the story of Haymitch Abernathy. It's themes and events conjure images of today's U.S. political climate.
'The Buffalo Hunter Hunter' is a horror masterpiece from Stephen Graham Jones
The prose is gorgeous and the plot is complex. The author of The Only Good Indians returns again with a spellbinding yarn about one of the bloodiest, most significant parts of the nation's history.
From pointy hats to murder of innocents, 'The Story of Witches' revives the past
Willow Winsham's new book on witches, past and present, offers a fun, fast, well researched historical summary that is also a stunning work of art.
'Last Seen': After slavery, family members placed ads looking for loved ones
Formerly enslaved people would placed ads in newspapers hoping to find lost children, parents, spouses and siblings. Historian Judith Giesberg tells the stories of some of those families in a new book.
After a tragic accident, a widow faces a lifetime of what-ifs
Live Fast won France's top literary prize in 2022. Brigitte Giraud's haunting book revisits the death of her husband in a motorcycle crash 20-odd years earlier.
Tony Horwitz's widow Geraldine Brooks writes a beautiful memoir of grief
Horwitz died suddenly in 2019 while on a book tour. In Memorial Days, Geraldine Brooks grieves her husband — and also reflects on the life she might have lived had they not met.
'Coming to New York' stories are alive and well in these two new books
Kay Sohini's graphic memoir, This Beautiful, Ridiculous City, tells a story of migration and redefinition. Gay Talese gathers many of his great pieces about the city in A Town Without Time.
Secrets feed on time in the masterful novel 'Mothers and Sons'
Adam Haslett's compelling novel focuses on the strained relationship between an asylum lawyer and his mother. It's a beautiful appreciation of the all-too-human mess of life.
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