Search results for

Emiliano Monge's prose is brilliant, but that often obscures the moral questions around his protagonists, both human traffickers who transport their cargo while worrying about their relationship.

In his experimental new memoir, Matt Young conveys the chaos of his three deployments in Iraq. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls Young "a frank, funny and mercilessly self-lacerating narrator."

Ben Loory's new story collection is dreamlike in the best way: both cheerfully surreal and cosmically unsettling, full of lovelorn cephalopods, discontented sloths and the occasional darker touch.

Han Kang's new novel isn't quite a novel — it's a gorgeous, hard-to-categorize series of reflections, themed around the color white, on grief, mourning and what it means to remember those we've lost.

Deb Olin Unferth's story collection delights in going in unexpected directions, and her sensitively-drawn characters feel the full, real, often contradictory and uneasy layering of human emotion.

The proposed barrier would cut off 70 percent of the National Butterfly Center's property, putting it in a no man's land along the Rio Grande. More than 200 species have been documented at the center.

Quindlen's novel Still Life with Bread Crumbs is predictably comforting and readable, even as it details the challenges of a modern middle-aged woman: the fallout of divorce, a career on the wane, and the endless financial and emotional support demanded by her family.

In her newest novel, Lauren Groff uses a split narrative to tell the story of a long marriage. Critic Jason Sheehan says the device works thanks to Groff's stunning language.

The famous 1978 Lufthansa robbery is a great crime story — it was even a plot point in GoodFellas. But a new book about the heist falls flat, hampered by purple prose and pointless details.

Ursula Vernon (writing as T. Kingfisher) delivers a fleet, stripped-down fairy tale with echoes of Bluebeard and Peter Beagle. Critic Tasha Robinson praises Vernon's tough-minded, distinctive women

Aimee Bender's new story collection, The Color Master, is full of fractured fairy tales that flavor everyday lives and neuroses with a liberal dash of magic. Reviewer Alan Cheuse says Bender's work is "akin to the best of Italo Calvino in its matter-of-fact treatment of the fantastic."

While Dr. Seuss, David Rakoff was not, the author, it's clear, cared a whole awful lot. This book — his last — is a rhymed, pensive story: A triumph, says Heller McAlpin, in all its sly glory.

Alan Cheuse reviews a new collection of novellas by Jim Harrison, whom he calls "the reigning master of the form." Harrison, author of Legends of the Fall, is back with his sixth book of novellas, focusing on men in different stages of life.

Hayao Miyazaki's beguiling new fantasy combines the excitement of a boy's grand adventure and the weight of an older man's reflection. The hypnotic story is a partial self-portrait by an anime master.

Rivka Galchen's new story collection mashes up Heidegger and Will Ferrell in an off-kilter marriage that critic Alan Cheuse says practically defines the notion of eccentricity — but delightfully so.

While still at university, J.R.R. Tolkien became fascinated by Finnish mythology, abandoning his Classics degree to adapt the epic Story of Kullervo — work that led to the creation of Middle Earth.

Gloria Norris' wrenching, darkly funny memoir of her abusive father has strong parallels to accounts of life in the Soviet Union. How do you respond to tyranny? What would it cost you to rebel?

Marisa Silver's new novel imagines the meeting of a Depression-era photographer and her now-iconic subject. Giving the characters different names but similar stories to their real-life counterparts, Silver tackles big questions about the morality of art.

In her new story collection, This Close, Jessica Francis Kane depicts a group of women who are worn down, overwhelmed by love and loss, yet familiar as old friends. Reviewer Jane Ciabattari says they are "our family, our friends and neighbors. They are us, at our most vulnerable."

Iain Sinclair, the foremost modern practitioner of "psychogeographic" nonfiction, explores the modifications to the London landscape in preparation for the 2012 Summer Olympics. This "scam of scams," as he calls it, is an expression of British state egotism.