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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Lauren Groff sets her new story collection in what she calls the "sunniest and strangest of states." Critic Maureen Corrigan says the tales are "brooding, inventive — and often moving."
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In his new book, Richard Rhodes lays out an accessible and surprisingly optimistic history of energy by exploring the lives of scientists and inventors — and a few unlikely people, like Bard of Avon.
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A divorced couple reconnects after nearly 30 years apart in Stephen McCauley's new novel. Critic Maureen Corrigan says My Ex-Life is a social satire that's "suffused with generosity."
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Helen DeWitt's new story collection seems less like a book, and more like a series of notes from some vast, alien intelligence, capable of picking apart human habits with startling precision.
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A love story between a black Army nurse and a German POW during World War II? You couldn't make that story up — and Alexis Clark, author of the upcoming book, Enemies in Love, didn't.
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Claire North's new gut-punch of a novel takes place in a dystopian world where one monster corporation controls England, every service is privatized, and every life has been assigned a monetary value.
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James Pogue — a journalist with his own rebellious streak — gets at the deep-seated anger that led Ammon Bundy to mastermind the ill-fated armed occupation of the Malheur wildlife refuge in Oregon.
(Image credit: Eslah Attar/NPR)
Graphic novelist Nick Drnaso's new book chronicles the aftermath of a murder in tightly-controlled, almost miserly panels that still manage to convey the horror of a senseless killing.
(Image credit: Eslah Attar/NPR)
Former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper recalls a lifetime of service in the spy business as he perceives Washington, D.C., crumbling around him.
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Sandhya Menon's new young adult novel follows aspiring filmmaker Twinkle Mehta, who addresses her diary entries to female directors like Mira Nair and Ava DuVernay and longs to change lives with film.
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Following up on her instant-classic Marbles — about her experiences with bipolar disorder — cartoonist Forney lays out her coping strategies in warm, deftly-rendered and densely informative style.
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Kevin Powers' bleak, stunning new book is set in both the 1950s and the Civil War era. It's an intricately plotted look at the ways violence can shape a nation in ways that may not be recoverable.
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Some of the sex scenes in Fuminori Nakamura's new novel Cult X will disturb you — but that's beside the point, because the book has much more disturbing things to say about groupthink and free will.
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Caryl Phillips' new novel, set in the waning years of the British Empire, follows the perpetually alienated Rhys from her birthplace in the West Indies to England and then the Continent.
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Elizabeth Tan's novel jumps between different characters and timelines, beginning with the death of the main character and only getting weirder — but there's a true heart underneath the cleverness.
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Rachel Kushner's heartbreaking, nearly flawless third novel centers on Romy Hall, a young woman who's just been sentenced to two life sentences for beating her stalker to death.
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Lara Feigel's new book is a combination memoir and celebration of the writer Doris Lessing — whose famous distaste for convention led her to exclaim "Oh, Christ," upon winning the Nobel Prize.
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In Lily Anderson's debut novel, a string of suspicious deaths prompts teen witch Mila to try to solve the mystery by raising the dead girls to ask who killed them — but of course, it's not that easy.
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In 1927, author Zora Neale Huston interviewed Cudjo Lewis, the last known living person who could recount the experience of being taken captive in Africa and transported on a slave ship to America.
(Image credit: Courtesy of McGill Studio Collection/The Doy Leale McCall Rare Book and Manuscript Library/University of South Alabama/Harper Collins)
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