Jim Crace's superb new novel is a trickster — it seems to be a bittersweet tale of late-life love, but then it becomes a meditation on gentrification and the toll poverty can take on human beings.
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Critic Maureen Corrigan says Tommy Orange's novel, which centers on a cast of native and mixed-race characters whose lives intersect at a powwow, features "a literary authority rare in a debut."
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In his new book Planet Funny: How Comedy Took Over Our Culture, Ken Jennings takes humor seriously, tracing how comedy infiltrated every aspect of our lives — and what it's doing to us.
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C. Robert Cargill's new story collection covers the globe and genres of horror from classic to modern, with ghost stories, thrillers, gore and puzzles that would be right at home on premium cable.
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Farmer Rosamund Young's book will charm people who want to lap up more evidence that animals have personalities, but may not warm hearts of animal lovers who don't eat meat.
Summer's getting hotter, so here are three romances guaranteed to raise your temperature and take you on an adventure, from London's West End to Barcelona to a Harvard University classroom.
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Lydia Millet's latest is a novel about death, disguised as a short story collection about real estate, alternately wrenching and hilarious, and full of joys on every scale.
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Adam Frank's valuable new book looks at the history of our search for other planets — and uses lessons drawn from outer space to shed light on the effect humans are having on our own planet.
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Fatima Farheen Mirza's first novel follows an Indian-American Muslim family — at its best, a happy family, but torn by tensions between a father and son who keep missing opportunities to connect.
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This graphic novel from creators Julie Rocheleau and Vero Cazot is a light, often zany story of a woman dealing with breast cancer that never loses its grounding in the real pain she's going through.
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The personal is most definitely political in Rosalie Knecht's crisp, lively and subversive novel about a queer woman who discovers her early life in the closet makes her well-suited for espionage.
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In the relaxed days of summer, critic Maureen Corrigan reflexively reaches for a mystery. This year, she's settling in with The Dime, by Kathleen Kent, and The Death of Mrs. Westaway, by Ruth Ware.
Author Helen Hoang used her own experience on the autism spectrum to build the character of Stella, a straight-laced numbers whiz who falls for the escort she hires to help her work on relationships.
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Zhou Haohui's high-octane cop drama Death Notice aims for Dragon Tattoo-type thrills, but gets dragged down by flat characterizations and odd romantic flourishes.
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Summer is the season for road-trips, and Mariam Sharma Hits the Road makes for a saucy, yet emotional ride, following three Pakistani-American teens on a journey through the Deep South.
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Critic and novelist James Wood has often dinged other writers for what he calls "hysterical realism," but his new novel Upstate — while beautifully written — goes too far in the other direction.
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In Lauren Groff's gorgeous, precise new story collection, Florida is a haunted place, full of eyes in the darkness — and angry, restless women, always on the move, always searching for something.
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Rachel Cusk's trilogy about a peripatetic writer and her many conversational partners winds up with Kudos. The books are essentially plotless — but there's plenty of joy to be found just in talk.
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In a new book, historian Marc Dollinger argues that the conventional wisdom of Jewish and African-American harmony during the civil rights era is flawed. And that the real story has lessons for today.
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The companion piece to this year's Met Gala, Heavenly Bodies functions beautifully as an art object — but it has some odd blank spots, particularly around the contributions of women to Catholicism.
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