Herman Melville, whose 195th birthday passed this August, is one of the few white American writers of the pre-civil rights era whose writing... More >>

"This book is really an extension of my youthful attempts to contact those in the business whom I admired most," Mike Sacks admits in the... More >>

Sally Ride: America's First Woman in Space by Lynn Sherr June 3 Small in stature yet large in courage, so private that she didn't come out... More >>

“My plan was to never get married. I was going to be an art monster instead,” says the nameless female writer who narrates Jenny... More >>

Voice scribes offer their recommendations from the year At the Bottom of Everything, by Ben Dolnick (Pantheon, 256 pp., $24.95) Two... More >>

Furious Cool: Richard Pryor and the World That Made Him By David Henry and Joe Henry November 5, Algonquin, 400 pp., $25.95 "We didn't set out... More >>

In this week's film section, Calum Marsh interviews author Martin Amis, who has moved from his native Great Britain to New York. On November 4,... More >>

The game Lotería can best be described as a Mexican version of bingo, but instead of numbers, each card bears a striking image, such as... More >>

Although it's double-stuffed with counts and balls, with duels and scandal and exquisitely described hunting parties, with idealists debating... More >>

Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks Keith Houston • September 24, W. W. Norton &... More >>

Bushra Rehman's first novel, Corona, is a fragmented, poetic, on-the-road adventure told from the perspective of the charismatic Razia Mirza.... More >>

In an essay from his 2009 collection, Eating the Dinosaur, Chuck Klosterman reasons that because most television laugh tracks are stock... More >>

Superheroes are bigger than comic books, so now they're in movies—all movies, it seems, forever, no matter what. But in another sense... More >>

Susan Choi’s fourth novel, My Education, is an erotic, sharply written tale of a young graduate student, Regina Gottlieb, who finds herself... More >>

Behind the Shock Machine: The Untold Story of the Notorious Milgram Psychology Experiments By Gina Perry | New Press | September 3 We all think... More >>

"How angry am I? You don't want to know," begins the gripping first chapter of Claire Messud’s new novel, The Woman Upstairs (Knopf). The... More >>

Rachel Kushner was the girl who spent her teens sneaking onto the backs of motorcycles in California. Today, a couple of decades later, she's the... More >>

It's March, but a zigzag of skiers still winds its way down Corkscrew, Aspen Mountain's double-black-diamond run. This is the view from Justice... More >>

King of Cuba By Cristina García, May 21 Set partially in modern Havana, García's sixth novel offers a profane, rollicking sendup... More >>