Tom Perrotta's new novel about a divorced mom and her college-aged son addresses some serious issues with dark humor. The result is uncompromisingly obscene, but still somehow good-natured.
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As an adult, the Colombian painter Emma Reyes lived in Paris and befriended Frida Kahlo. But in a series of autobiographical letters, she describes a childhood of grinding misery and poverty.
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The GOP has "given into the politics of anger—the belief that riling up the base can make up for failed attempts to broaden the electorate," the senator says. "These are the spasms of a dying party."
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NPR's Ron Elving reviews a massive new tome on the life of Edwin Stanton, certainly one of the most contentious and controversial figures in Abraham Lincoln's cabinet of rivals.
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Kathleen Barber's debut novel is an on-trend mashup of murder, social media and Serial-style true-crime podcasting, but though well paced, it suffers from thin characters and a lack of context.
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After the success of shows like The Handmaid's Tale, more and more books are leaping from page to small screen.
Heather Harpham's memoir centers on her baby daughter's struggle with a dangerous illness — but broadens out to include her family and her own fraught relationship with the baby's reluctant father.
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Silicon valley entrepreneur and novelist Rob Reid takes on artificial intelligence — and how it might end the world — in his weird, funny new techno-philosophical thriller After On.
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Coulton recruited writer Matt Fraction and artist Albert Monteys to tell a time-fractured tale of corporate greed and internet trolls.
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Vyvyan Evans' new book about the rise of emojis casts the little icons as part of human language's long-running struggle to evolve — but too often it reads like a textbook, didactic and dry.
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Laurent Binet's new novel starts with the death of French literary critic Roland Barthes and spins out a postmodern mystery packed with philosophical heavy hitters — and one bemused detective.
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Why don't crooked corporate CEO's go to jail anymore? Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jesse Eisinger uncovers culture of cowardice, incompetence, and corruption in both government and finance.
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The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers, thoughtfully edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Hollis Robbins, is a rewarding read that reminds us the past isn't a single story.
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Charles Soule and Ryan Browne's neon-drenched comic is giddily over-the-top, featuring a buffed-up wizard named Wizord, his talking koala sidekick and many, many glowing blasts of mystical fire.
(Image credit: Image Comics)
Gin Phillips' new novel — which follows a young mother trying to keep her child safe during a mass shooting at a zoo — explores the way violence can be a safe abstraction for kids, or cruelly real.
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Some great noir fiction has been written about Los Angeles, but what happens when a different genre bleeds through? We've got three tales of murder, magic and robot detectives to cool your summer.
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Lawrence P. Jackson's biography tracks the writer's course from prison to published novelist. Critic Maureen Corrigan says Himes' life story is well worth reading.
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In Strange Practice, Vivian Shaw kicks off a new series about Dr. Greta Helsing, descendant of the famous Professor Abraham Van Helsing and general practitioner to the ghouls and ghasts of London.
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Using excerpts from letters and diaries, historian and critic Bill Goldstein follows writers Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot through the tumultuous literary year of 1922.
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Sam Kean's funny, conversational new book reminds us not to take the air we breathe for granted — our atmosphere can tell stories about everything from dinosaurs and Julius Caesar to space flight.
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