The Scottish novelist Ali Smith’s slim new book, “Artful,” is equal parts ghost story and academic treatise: a set of lectures by a dead writer placed, like the filling of a dumpling, inside a love story.
Sonia Sotomayor’s searching and emotionally intimate memoir, “My Beloved World,” charts her life’s journey to become a Supreme Court justice.
France’s National Library is negotiating to buy the manuscript of “The 120 Days of Sodom,” the Marquis de Sade’s tale of rape, murder and torture, which Sade believed was lost in the storming of the Bastille.
Since its debut in September 2010 the radical journal Jacobin has become an improbable hit, attracting nearly 2,000 print and digital subscribers and some 250,000 Web hits a month.
“Love Is a Canoe,” a novel by Ben Schrank, revolves around a self-help author who must put his ideas into practice.
Angry fans bombarded Amazon with dozens of negative reviews of a new biography of Michael Jackson and got several favorable notices erased.
“Sex and the City,” the Connecticut years.
Ben McFall has managed the Strand Book Store’s fiction section for 35 years, and customers go to him not just for his prodigious knowledge of titles, but also for relationship advice.
In Will Self’s “Umbrella,” which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, a new drug helps to awaken an elderly woman in 1971 after nearly five decades in a stupor.
New art books look at Winslow Homer in Maine, Mati Klarwein’s album covers, Joel Sternfeld photographs, the gaudy romanticism of Gustav Klimt and the Abstract-Expressionist Alps of Robert Motherwell.
The novelist John Green and his brother, Hank, have built a fandom based on a YouTube channel and books aimed at teenagers.
New comic novels by Dave Barry and Tim Dorsey feature hapless tourists and overlapping humor.
“The River Swimmer,” Jim Harrison’s latest, consists of two novellas that treat youth and advancing age.
“Henry and the Cannons,” written and illustrated by Don Brown, tells the true story of a Boston bookstore owner who got involved in the American Revolutionary War.
In George Saunders’s latest collection, the stories tend to pivot around loneliness, disappointment, frustration and the difficulty of connecting with other human beings.
In “Going Clear,” Lawrence Wright uses vast research and reporting to make clear that Scientology is like no church on Earth.
The author of “The World Until Yesterday” says that if he had to recommend one book of geography to children, he would suggest his own “Guns, Germs, and Steel.”
Peter Ackroyd looks at England’s long, tumultuous formative period.
The men in two novellas by Jim Harrison experience the triumph and torment of being alive, at 17 and at 60.
Sonia Sotomayor recalls her early life and the road toward the court.
In these essays, Adam Phillips explores the alternative “lives we could be leading but for some reason are not.”
The relationship between poetry and mythology is central to Louise Glück’s “Poems 1962-2012.”
Amy Wilentz further explores Haiti, a country that continues to confound.
The title story in Joyce Carol Oates’s collection involves two aspiring starlets.
Joyce Johnson explores Jack Kerouac’s heritage and early career.
In “Standing in Another Man’s Grave,” Ian Rankin’s incorruptible but moody hero, John Rebus, investigates a series of missing persons cases.
New books by Yan Lianke, Henning Mankell, Peter Hoeg, Laird Hunt and Susan Isaacs.
A 29-year-old director with only one movie under his belt got David Sedaris to agree an adaptation of his work, to be shown at Sundance.
Self-help memoirs take on not the exceptional challenge, but the everyday one.
The daily book critics of The New York Times choose their favorite books of the year.
This week, Lawrence Wright discusses Scientology; Leslie Kaufman has notes from the field; Emily Bazelon talks about Sonia Sotomayor’s new memoir; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Sam Tanenhaus is the host.
David Baldacci, whose latest novel is at No. 12 on the hardcover fiction list, says he envies the time when he was writing “in my little cubbyhole with nobody knocking on my door.”
The year’s best books, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.
Some of the year’s best book covers, chosen by people in and around the world of graphic design.
January 22, 2013
January 22, 2013
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