5 Reasons We Can’t Wait To Read Jon Krakauer’s Missoula
Jon Krakauer is one of contemporary America’s most artful writers of narrative nonfiction. Like Laura Hillenbrand and Mary Roach, he…
Ester Bloom
All the Light We Cannot See: A WWII Novel About the Strength of Ordinary People
All The Light We Cannot See is a war novel. Bombs explode, innocent people suffer, neighbors rat out neighbors for extra…
Big Books to Get Snowed in With
Sure, you could take Anna Karenina to the beach, but with all those titillating distractions right in front of you, it…
Jane Smiley’s Some Luck, the First in a Trilogy, Stands on Its Own
A famous American post–World War I song struck a nerve by asking parents, “How Ya Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the…
10 Lessons Learned from Anne Lamott’s Small Victories
Anne Lamott is one of America’s wisest, most humane, and most quotable writers. In previous books, such as the classic…
This Season’s Best Fiction
The best novels of 2014 delve into the recent past, the near future, and faraway worlds. Encompassing late-career epics and…
Not That Kind of Girl: Honesty and Comedy from Lena Dunham
Lena Dunham writes and stars in her own HBO show. She publishes essays in The New Yorker. She’s been the…
15 Amazing Revelations from The Secret History of Wonder Woman
What does Wonder Woman, the superhero who first appeared in 1941, have to do with polyamory, pessaries, and the polygraph?…
Marilynne Robinson’s Lila is 2014’s Great American Novel
Author Marilynne Robinson has written either two or three Great American Novels, depending on who’s counting, most prominently the 2005…
In The Frangipani Hotel, the Story Doesn’t End at the Grave
When it comes to magical realism, especially magical realism set in East Asia, Japanese superstar Haruki Murakami gets all the…
Lay It On My Heart Is a Rare and Lovely Novel
Lay It On My Heart is a rare, lovely novel. It is about, and from the point of view of, a…
On Reading Bad Feminist at the Spa
I took Roxane Gay’s collection of essays, Bad Feminist, to a nail salon and read it while getting a pedicure. Though she…
Our Favorite Fictional Feminists
From Jane Eyre to Janie Crawford, strong female characters make literature go round. All of the best authors seem to…
Robin Black’s Life Drawing Resonates
At a time when novels’ female characters are routinely declawed in order to make them “sympathetic,” Gus, the narrator of…
We Are Called to Rise: What Happens in Iraq Stays in Vegas
Unlike most war novels, We Are Called To Rise is not about war. It’s neither a dark satire like Fobbit,…
The Quick: The Best Horror Novel Since Dracula
Lauren Owen’s The Quick, about aristocratic monsters stalking London’s streets during Victorian England, is pitch-perfect and unputdownable. Like the best…
Telling it Slant: 10 Authors Who Experimented With Autobiography
Some people can sit down and write the story of their lives in a clear and straightforward fashion and be…
Frog Music: Singing the San Francisco Blues
Juliet’s father in “Romeo and Juliet” tends to get off easy. Audiences feel bad for both sets of parents, Capulet…
Step Aside, Boys: The Heroine Has Taken Over
At a time when Americans still profess to be very divided on the subject of feminism, some of the most…
14 Books That Should Become the Next Friends
Enjoying the changing dynamics of a group of friends while they navigate jobs, relationships, and city life is what draws…