Books

Pity the poor stage mother, living out her dreams through her put-upon offspring. In his first work of fiction, poet and memoirist Alan Shapiro brings us an archetypal doozy: Growing up, Miriam Bluestein imagined her glamorous future on the stage. Thos...

Reading recommendations from a writer of infinite curiosity.

Readings that explore China in an era of change.

Who doesn't love a novel in which a doppelganger plays a central role? Filmmaker and novelist Neil Jordan (The Crying Game) here introduces two boys growing up on the opposite side of the proverbial tracks in 1960s Dublin. One of them, not insignifican...

Great works of fiction and memoir from the singer's bookshelf.

In this extraordinary debut, Carter Sickels mines the beautiful, damaged landscape of West Virginia for fictional treasure. Sickels' characters are often trapped by greed and addiction, but for Cole Freeman, a drug-dealing nursing-home aide whose famil...

Human beings are biologically wired to be fascinated by novelty. But how do we keep the constant flow of new products, ideas, and data from overwhelming us? Winifred Gallagher (the author of Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life) digs into our natural i...

The author of Elizabeth the Queen on three books that turn deep research into dazzling stories.

John Mortimer's death three years ago, and the subsequent cessation of new Rumpole adventures, can be ameliorated slightly by the appearance of this volume, an expansion of The Best of Rumpole that adds seven stories to the seven which Mortimer himself...

The pieces of Bosnia-Herzegovinia-born author's dazzling, dynamic debut combine to create a multilayered picture of the Bosnian War, as seen through the eyes of two Muslim teens with dramatically different fates. The novel's truths are slippery and shi...

Casting a contrarian eye on the first major conflict of the twentieth century, Sean McMeekin finds the roots of WWI inside Russia, whose leaders deliberately sought -- for their own ends -- to expand a brawl that the Germans wanted to keep local. The a...

On the run from history and the modern world, Solomon Kugel flees with his family to rural New York -- but history follows, in the form of an unlikely figure in the attic. Shalom Auslander follows his blazingly funny and bracingly honest memoir, The Fo...