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.
(Image credit: Claire Harbage/NPR)
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.
(Image credit: Arsenal Pulp Press )
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.
(Image credit: Christina Ascani/NPR)