PEN International has condemned the slaying of Thai poet Mainueng K. Kunthee, the pen name of activist Kamol Duangphasuk. The 45-year-old writer was in a car in a parking lot when he was shot by an assailant who fled on a motorcycle; the poet and activist died at a hospital.
Lisa See's ambitious novel, "China Dolls," spotlights the under-told story of Asian American entertainers during the 1930s and 1940s. A popular Los Angeles writer whose eight previous books explore Chinese American experiences, See offers the perfect summer read in this flamboyant,...
After three fine works of fiction focused on contemporary families, Lily King broadens her horizons, geographically as well as emotionally, in a novel inspired by a real-life trio of anthropologists in New Guinea during a few fraught months in 1933.
In his deeply reported and compellingly told "hybrid history" of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, one of the many voices that combat novelist Steven Pressfield presents is that of Boaz Amitai, a reconnaissance platoon commander in the Israelis' perilous push through the Sinai to the Suez Canal.
"We Were Liars" is a Gothic tale of failed romance in an entrenched East Coast family still enslaved to the rigid WASP codes.
Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard's "My Struggle" is the buzz book of the moment — or more accurately a certain kind of buzz book, for a certain kind of audience. It is also a provocation, sharing its title with one of the most notorious works of the 20th century (Adolf Hitler's "Mein Kampf"...
Tom Rob Smith's fourth novel, "The Farm," opens with a vivid conflict: A Londoner named Daniel receives a phone call from his father with troubling news. "Your mum's in hospital," the older man says. "She's been committed." Then the phone rings again and it's his mother, who offers a...
With her latest "Have You Seen Marie?," Sandra Cisneros has written a picture book for adults (and kids too).
Gene Luen Yang has been getting a lot of attention from prize juries for his two-part graphic novel for young adults, "Boxers and Saints."
Gina Frangello's "A Life in Men" (Algonquin) is a novel about a woman with cystic fibrosis who decides to explore the word, making reckless choices with the knowledge that her time is limited. Frangello keeps very busy: She is fiction editor of the Nervous Breakdown, Sunday editor of the...
In "The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature," Ben Tarnoff explores Twain's formative years as a young writer in San Francisco in the 1860s and the surprisingly rich cultural community he found there.