Up Close
Her True Colors
By ALEX WILLIAMS
The novelist Lisa Grunwald has a new book that may flush her out of the shadows.
The New York Public Library now sends books branch to branch with the aid of a $2.3 million sorting machine housed in a renovated warehouse in Long Island City, Queens.
In his new book, the historian Hampton Sides pieces together a dramatic account of the last days of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., intercut with the manoeuvrings James Earl Ray, his assassin.
The novelist Lisa Grunwald has a new book that may flush her out of the shadows.
Paul Davies’s new book suggests that humans are looking for alien life in all the wrong places, and in all the wrong ways.
Alan Brinkley chronicles Henry Luce’s career creating Time, Life, Fortune and other magazines.
George Prochnik’s “In Pursuit of Silence” sets out to understand noise and silence, and how they mold our surroundings.
E. O. Wilson’s novel, “Anthill,” has a philosophical premise, that there are grand cycles in nature, whether of ants, or people or the biosphere.
Paul Harding’s “Tinkers” received a raft of rejections from publishers. Now this book championed by independent bookstores is a Pulitzer Prize winner.
A new book examines the letters of Sylvia Beach, who founded Shakespeare & Company on the Left Bank of Paris and published Joyce’s “Ulysses.”
Overall book sales in the United States dropped 1.8 percent in 2009.
In a small library in Redding, Conn., Mark Twain’s annotated personal books have sat in obscurity for 100 years.
Howard Dodson plans to retire as the director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.
“The Big Short,” by Michael Lewis, and “The End of Wall Street,” by Roger Lowenstein, offer a backstage view of the financial crisis.
Ander Monson’s collection, in a tradition that has been described as the “lyric essay,” pointillistically confronts puzzles of truth and identity.
In Olga Grushin’s novel, Soviet Russians line up for a year in hopes of securing tickets to a famous exile’s concert that may never happen.
Disturbing ripples appear just beneath the surface in this novel of illusive domestic tranquility.
Rachel Cusk’s novel explores the family circle of a husband who leaves work to care for a daughter, and a wife who returns to a full-time job.
A powerful and painfully honest novel about the corrosive deceptions of a girl’s drug addiction.
Sheena Iyengar’s research indicates that we can handle more than a few choices, but an overabundance can paralyze us.
A boxers’ doctor writes about the Miami Beach gym that nurtured Muhammad Ali and other world champions.
In his 11th novel, Peter Carey models a character on Alexis de Tocqueville, gives him a feisty sidekick and parades him through the country.
A Harvard professor reveals the man behind “Democracy in America.”
A memoir of growing up American in the postwar Middle East, free to cross the checkpoints that defined others’ lives.
This novel follows a licentious 78-year-old widower’s conquests in the Alps.
The characters in Sue Miller’s new novel are connected by a theatrical production.
An account of Jane Austen as a canny agent of her own image.
In this first novel, one soldier learns that in Iraq, “expendable” refers to him and his buddies.
I simply refuse to read any books whose authors or characters have any affiliation with the Yankees, the Dallas Cowboys or the Duke University men’s basketball team.
Featuring Anna Quindlen on her novel “Every Last One”; and Daniel Gross on two excellent new books about the Wall Street implosion.
Deborah Eisenberg conveys her acutely self-conscious characters’ interiority with a Woolf-like grain, though with startling humor.
The Tea Party is new. But this is not the first time we’ve seen an angry populist politics emerge from the American middle class.
The very forces of globalism that were expected to erode local cultures are helping to preserve them.
A new book by Terry O’Reilly and Mike Tennnant says advertising and marketing are increasingly dominant and defining forces in society.
Recent motorcycle books include a history of the English motorcycle industry and road tests of the hottest new bike designs.
The winners include the novel “Tinkers,” by Paul Harding; and the musical “Next to Normal.”
“The Bridge,” David Remnick’s biography of Barack Obama, enters the hardcover nonfiction list at No. 3.
Virginia Postrel is at work on a book about glamour, which can crop up in unexpected places.
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