Édouard Louis' autobiographical novel is the story of a young man coming of age in a downtrodden French village. Critic John Powers calls it a "bulletin from the enraged heart of Le Pen country."
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The great American dancer Isadora Duncan led a tragic life, and her worst year — just after the deaths of her first two children in an accident, forms the core of Amelia Gray's powerful new novel.
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Journeys, near and far, into the past and even into near space, are the subject of the novels, memoirs and narrative histories that make up book critic Maureen Corrigan's early summer reading list.
Detroit garage-rocker Josh Malerman's second novel follows a fictional 1950s rock bad recruited by the government to find the source of a mysterious, ominous sound emanating from the Namib Desert.
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Katherine Heiny's first novel for adults is a warmhearted and funny — if overly long — portrait of a man who begins to doubt his chaotic, talkative second wife after 12 years of marriage.
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Alison Weir takes a fresh look at familiar territory in this retelling of the story of Anne Boleyn. Weir's version of Anne is fiercely smart and guilty only of craving power that was hers by right.
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Mary Mann's new book digs into a phenomenon as old as humanity: boredom. Why do we get bored? Is there a cure? Yawn is a thoughtful read, but its mix of autobiography and scholarship doesn't jell.
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Jessie Chaffee's novel about a troubled young American woman in Florence is beautiful and exhausting; stick with it, and you'll find a thoughtful reexamination of a classic trope, the American abroad.
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The title piece in Mexican master Juan Rulfo's The Golden Cockerel is a good story with a simple point: Life is short and then you die. It's the sketches and fragments that come after that amaze.
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There are plenty of story collections out now to start your summer with, but Tessa Hadley tops the pile with Bad Dreams, ten richly complex tales of characters pushing the boundaries of their lives.
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