Books

This sensuous Italian historical novel, set in the early and mid-1800s, follows headstrong Agata Padellani, whose family falls on hard times after the death of her father. Agata is compelled to join a convent, dashing her hopes for marriage. There, she...

This aptly named teensy tome, edited by actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt, with help from his online creative collective, hitRECord, is packed with illustrated stories so short they can often be read in a single breath. Some of the stories and pictures in thi...

Hawaii is the state where our president was born --  but how did the United States come to claim it as its own? In this deeply researched narrative history, author Julia Flynn Siler (The House of Mondavi) recounts the dramatic, disturbingly dark s...

A cynical take on the bridal business would be easy to write, but that wouldn't be Jeffrey Zaslow's style. In The Girls From Ames, he  captured the complex beauty of female relationships with insight and sensitivity. Here the Wall Street Journal c...

How's this for a chilling premise: A nurse who agrees to pick up a package at a train station locker for an estranged pal finds that the "package" is a suitcase containing a drugged, but alive, 3-year-old boy. But who is he? When the estranged friend t...

In this sensitive, subtle and unsettling trio of novellas, the acclaimed Anita Desai tells stories of people striving to move beyond the stagnant circumstances of their lives.  These are heartbreakingly honest explorations of how dreams can be thw...

You can find out a lot about a year by surveying the real-time, 140-characters-or-less responses to breaking news on Twitter. In this orderly, fun-to-peruse almanac, journalist Kate Bussmann compiles telling tweets about many of 2011's key events: from...

Dreamers of the world to come, and their (not always accurate) visions of tomorrow.

Arresting classics selected by a master of crime fiction.

Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Michael Dirda has subtitled this book "The Whole Art of Storytelling," with good reason. Starting from Arthur Conan Doyle's life and work -- which included, in addition to the Sherlock Holmes stories, wonderful works of hi...

The enthusiasm Piotr Naskrecki, an entomologist at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology, feels for visible, tangible signs of Earth's prehistoric past is irresistibly infectious. Combining lively first-person narrative with his own breath...

What do you do when your kite gets stuck in a tree? If you're Floyd, the hilarious protagonist of Oliver Jeffers' absurd picture book for young readers, you chuck your shoe at it to get it down. And when the shoe gets stuck as well? You throw other stu...