“I was desperately, desperately trying not to write a memoir,” Brennan-Jobs says. “But these stories kept on coming up for me, and they were more vivid and they were more pressing than other stories.”
While researching “The Library Book,” about the 1986 fire that decimated the Los Angeles Central Library, the author took a paperback and some matches into the yard.
Marilyn Stasio discovers books that document the history of serial killing and the poisons of past and present, as well as some scandalous murder cases.
Markus Zusak’s long-awaited “Bridge of Clay,” along with a French best seller, a story based on the ordeal of the Nigerian girls kidnapped by Boko Haram, and more.
Set in 17th-century France, Chris Womersley’s novel “City of Crows” features a mother who succumbs to witchcraft and a grifter with a gift for the tarot.
In these novels, a phantom walks the earth, families at a campground descend into a terrifying alternative universe and the Devil roams a bleak English landscape.
In "Fake Blood,” a sixth grader morphs into a vampire. “Scarlett Hart: Monster Hunter” has a retro-modern teenage heroine who slays all kinds of evil creatures.
“The Sky Is Falling,” by the pop culture historian Peter Biskind, traces the roots of our polarized political climates to Hollywood, television and Marvel Comics.
The author, most recently, of the novel “Unsheltered” loves “fiction that educates me on the sly, especially about something I didn’t realize I wanted to know. I’m open to any kind of arcana.”
Transgender writers are embracing a more elastic literary form — the novel — and a number of recent works, often genre-bending as well as gender-bending, have won critical acclaim.
Sixty years ago today, the Swedish Academy awarded the Russian author Boris Pasternak the Nobel Prize for Literature, but less than a week later, under pressure from the Soviet government, Pasternak rejected the award. The story, which had more twists and turns than a Cold War-era spy novel, played out in The New York Times with one front-page story after another.
