Fresh Air's book critic says her 2017 list is chaotic in a good way. "These books zing off in all directions: They're fresh, unruly and dismissive of the canned and contrived."
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Escape from the holiday whirl with three tasty romances, featuring a duke with an epic library, a young girl finding herself in the big city and a proper lady finding love where she least expects it.
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A central figure in 20th century poetry, Pound was also an outspoken fascist. In The Bughouse, Daniel Swift investigates whether or not the poet's politics and madness matter to his work.
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This season's secret weapon in literary banter will be Mrs. Caliban, a peculiar, wonderful, overlooked 1983 novella by Rachel Ingalls, about a housewife whose life is upended by a suave frog monster.
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Wilson — the first woman to translate The Odyssey — has created a fresh, authoritative and slyly humorous version of Homer's epic that scours away archaisms while preserving nuance and complexity.
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Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier's book is part memoir, part history of the development of VR, and an unexpected but welcome comparison of the promises of VR with those of artificial intelligence.
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Sydney, the teenage protagonist of Charles Forsman's new graphic novel, has all the usual problems of her age, plus one: She's telekinetic. And it quickly becomes clear that her story is a grim one.
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Arthur Herman's new book zooms in on Vladimir Lenin, Woodrow Wilson, and the vast, conflicting historical forces they embodied — and which came to a head in the fateful year of 1917.
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Susan Sontag once called author László Krasznahorkai the "contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse," but his new book — while disturbing — isn't as hopeless as that might lead you to think.
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Previously, American comics fans would've been lucky to discover French artist Nicole Claveloux in old issues of Heavy Metal magazine. Now, her delightfully weird work has been compiled in a new book.
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Christopher Frayling's new celebration of Frankenstein is half art book, half scholarly study, tracing the famous monster's path from page to stage to screen, just in time for his 200th birthday.
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Molly Tanzer gives us a seductive, alternate version of Victorian England in her new novel — by turns smoky and smutty, wondrous and louche. And then, embedded carefully in that world, demons.
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From real-life, seaweed-carrying dolphins to fictional singing seahorses, animals in these new books can excite the mind, says anthropologist Barbara J. King.
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Harvard professor Richard F. Thomas teaches a popular class on the importance of Bob Dylan, and now he's turned it into a book, full of stories, personal history and the occasional comparison to Ovid.
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Maya Jasanoff weaves together biography, history, literature and her own travels in a new book about the globe-trotting author. Reviewer John Powers says Jasanoff's portrait of Conrad is terrific.
French graphic novelist Julie Maroh — author of Blue is the Warmest Color — is back with an earnestly sweet collection of vignettes about love, kept from being saccharine by her skill with faces.
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Kevin Young's new book puts forth an instantly convincing pairing of race and hoaxing — both a "fake thing pretending to be real." But he loses readers' trust with knotty, overly aphoristic writing.
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Richard Baker is an established voice in military science fiction; his latest, Valiant Dust, kicks off a new space adventure series. But it's hampered by shallow characters and cultural blindness.
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Weir returns to a successful formula in his new book — action and adventure in space, with a snarky voice and plenty of reader-friendly science — though this time the story moves to a moon colony.
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In Erdrich's new novel, fetuses seem to be randomly devolving and a new religious government is rounding up pregnant women, forcing them to give birth in prison-like hospitals.
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