Books & Literature

James Lapine worked with Stephen Sondheim on Sunday in the Park with George, Into the Woods and Passion. In Putting it Together, he draws on interviews with Sondheim and members of the cast and crew.

Anthony Veasna So's posthumously published short story collection offers a smart, compassionate take on the push-pull of growing up first-generation Cambodian American.

William Gardner Smith wrote the story of a Black writer who, like Smith himself, moved to Paris to pursue a freedom he couldn't find in America. New York Review Books is releasing a new edition.

Dana Spiotta's new novel, Wayward, is about a 53-year-old woman named Samantha — Sam — Raymond, who's going through menopause and becomes a little unhinged.

Dr. Leana Wen is in favor of COVID-19 vaccine mandates. "I don't think that people should have the choice to infect others with a potentially fatal and extremely contagious virus," she says.

Akash Kapur was raised in an intentional community in India, then moved to the U.S. at age 16. He writes about the reality of utopian communities in Better to Have Gone.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan considers the reissue of 'The Women of Brewster Place' by Gloria Naylor which in 1983 won the National Book Award for first fiction.

What happens when a woman conceives of and creates an app — and then her husband becomes the face of the startup that monetizes it? That's the question Tahmima Anam set out to answer in the satirical novel, The Startup Wife.

The new novel Falling is a thriller and the debut of writer T.J. Newman who is a former flight attendant. It's about an airline pilot who faces a terrible choice.

Joshua Cohen offers a fictionalized version of a real-life campus visit by the father of the former Israeli prime minister. The novel offers a funny take on serious things.

In resurrecting lives that never were, Light Perpetual is a miracle, not only of art, but of encompassing empathy. The novel becomes not only about the terribly brief lives of these five fictional children, but of the finitude that bounds all the living and the dead.

In their new book, Forget the Alamo, Bryan Burrough and co-writers Chris Tomlinson and Jason Stanford challenge common misconceptions surrounding the conflict — including the notion that Davy Crockett was a martyr who fought to the death rather than surrender.

As Scott Borchert reveals in his new book, Republic of Detours, the amazing thing about the Federal Writers' Project was just how much went right.

Ford's new memoir, Somebody's Daughter, details her childhood growing up poor in Indiana and her complicated relationships with her mother, her grandmother and her own body.

When Daisy Hernández was 5, her aunt in Colombia came down with a mysterious illness that caused her large intestine to swell. Hernández details her aunt's story — and her own — in a new memoir.

Chris Power's brooding literary novel A Lonely Man and Jean Hanff Korelitz's nightmare of a thriller The Plot explore the dangerous consequences of sticky fingers in the literary world.

In 1989, 15-year-old Yusef Salaam was one of five Black and Latino teenagers who were wrongly accused of assault and rape in the so-called Central Park jogger case. Long after he’d served a seven-year prison sentence, DNA evidence confirmed that a serial rapist and murderer had committed the crime, and acted alone. Salaam's new memoir is 'Better Not Bitter.'

Dawnie Walton's debut novel centers on a fictional interracial rock duo from the 1970s: Opal is a Black proto Afro-punk singer from Detroit, and Nev is a goofy white British singer-songwriter. Walton's book 'The Final Revival of Opal & Nev' has gotten lots of critical acclaim.

A writer offers up her guest house to a famous painter in hope that something transcendent will happen. But he's selfish, amoral and flagrantly misogynistic — and monstrously at ease with all this.

Rogen's film credits include Knocked Up, Superbad, Pineapple Express, Steve Jobs and Long Shot. In his new memoir, Yearbook, Rogen shares funny stories of his early years and his more recent life.