R.L. Maizes' new story collection is a quirky mix of humor, gravity and warmth. She's drawn to outsiders who yearn for connection and who display behaviors and feelings they're not proud of.
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While the prolific Hollywood writer's career is well-documented, his personal history has been a mystery. His memoir is painful and inspiring, infuriating and full of hope, humorous and depressing.
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Silvia Moreno-Garcia's novel is set in an alternate Jazz Age Mexico, where gods and monsters from Mayan mythology walk the Earth and war with each other for dominion over Xibalba, the land of death.
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Laura Dockrill's young adult novel stars a refreshingly direct, unapologetic — and occasionally crass — plus-sized girl who uses her doctor-imposed food diary to record her life and feelings.
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Hwang Sok-yong's novel is a perfect slice of Koreana; a touching, somewhat depressive narrative full of nostalgia exposing the underbelly of a nation via the people inhabiting society's bottom rung.
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CJ Hauser's new novel centers on two estranged siblings trying to unravel their late father's work with a group of fringe biologists who believe evolution is running backward, away from millenials.
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If you want to see what that future might look like, David Ewing Duncan's book is a fun place to start; he envisions various bots based on interviews with scientists and engineers, among others.
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Chuck Klosterman's new collection of "fictional nonfiction" is full of people who subvert expectations and find ways around the systems that rule our lives. Also, there's a puma in an airplane toilet.
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Rather than the time travel or war, the thrill of Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's book becomes the connection between two lonely professional killers with the ability to inscribe letters on lava.
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Colson Whitehead's harrowing new novel is based on a true story about a brutally abusive reform school in Florida where the grounds were pocked with the unmarked graves of the boys who died there.
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After a cancer diagnosis, author and noted mountaineer David Roberts sets out on the trail of Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, remaining dutiful to the route some 240 years later.
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Through his graphic memoir, the Star Trek actor-turned-author shows that while it may be too late to undo the WWII incarceration of Japanese-Americans, it's not too late to learn from it.
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Mark Stryker covered jazz and its people for the Detroit Free Press for decades. He uses his reporter's eye and critic's ear to chronicle the musicians from the city who made their mark on the world.
Colson Whitehead's deeply affecting new novel is based on the true story of a segregated reform school in Florida where African American boys were brutalized and possibly murdered.
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Elizabeth Lim's new young adult novel follows a girl who disguises herself as a boy and sets off for the emperor's court in place of her ailing father, who's been summoned as an imperial tailor.
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Beatriz Williams' new novel follows a woman searching for her missing husband in London during World War II, jumping back and forth in time to show all the people and events that led her there.
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New York Times columnist Margaret Renkl astonishes with her essays, a woven tapestry that makes one of all the world's beings that strive to live — and, in one way or another, face mortality.
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Amanda Lee Koe's new novel was inspired by a famous photograph — Anna May Wong, Marlene Dietrich and the notorious actress and director Leni Riefenstahl, posing together at a Berlin party in 1928.
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Margarita Liberaki's novel, first published in 1946, follows three young women growing up in the Athens countryside alongside a colorful cast of family members, secret-keeping servants and local boys.
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Pablo Medina's The Cuban Comedy walks a fine line between poetry and political satire. It follows a woman in rural 1960s Cuba who longs to be a poet, and the troubles she faces when she succeeds.
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