Dogear whatever novel you've been trudging through, because you need to read Keija Parssinen's The Unraveling of Mercy Louis (Harper Collins).This is the witchhunt novel you never knew you needed, but now's the time. Mercy is a teenaged basketball…

>Words like “again” and “another” abound in reviews of Anne Tyler novels, largely because she returns to familiar subjects and themes in her work. In her 20th novel, A Spool of Blue Thread (Knopf), Tyler proves that it is possible to breathe new…

In the opening paragraph of Miranda July's debut novel The First Bad Man (Scribner) our protagonist Cheryl drives to a doctor's office and feels terrific. "I drove to the doctor's office as if I was starring in a movie Philip was watching," July…

It was a banner year for essay collections — names like Roxane Gay, Lena Dunham, and Leslie Jamison come to mind without hesitation — and Meghan Daum's The Unspeakable (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) rounds out the string of excellence. It's Daum's second…

Adolescent girlhood: it's fodder for good fiction. Jesse, the protagonist of Darcey Steinke's Sister Golden Hair (Tin House), is just beginning her foray into adolescence when we meet her; she's 12 in the book's opening pages, an age that Steinke…

Over iced coffee in Brooklyn, Emily St. John Mandel tells me that her fourth novel, Station Eleven (Knopf), is her favorite of her titles so far. This highly touted work is a departure from the type of book those who know Mandel have come to…

In late June, Stephen Colbert commanded viewers to refuse to "lick [Amazon's] Monopoly boot." Colbert, a Hachette author, had personal stake in the ongoing battle between bookselling giant Amazon and the publisher, but he also sought to encourage…

I spoke with Emily Gould just when the World Cup was beginning, and she professed how much she hated the soccer tournament already. "But I like watching people watch the World Cup," she said, and therein described herself better than I could attempt…

Lisa See is an author as prominent as she is talented. The Paris-born, L.A.-bred writer just published her 9th novel, China Dolls (Random House), and it's as captivating and well-crafted as her acclaimed earlier works, including 2005's Snow Flower…

“Some people dreamed of going someplace else; I dreamed of being someone else." So laments klutzy Charlie Wong, the teenaged daughter of a ballroom-dancing mom, who passed away years ago, and a noodle-making dad. Charlie washes dishes in her dad's…

When you finish Cristina Henríquez's latest novel, The Book of Unknown Americans (Knopf), you may want to lie very still. That's normal. This is a book for which you will allow very few, if any, interruptions. You'll want to silence your phone,…

Who's the best author to rewrite a play about death, family, and revenge? Gillian Flynn, whose bestselling novel Gone Girl is all about... well, death, family, and revenge. Flynn is set to reimagine Hamlet , the Shakespearean classic, as part of…

As anyone who grew up on a hearty diet of books and TV can attest to, life is filled with moments that remind one of fiction. (Sometimes the overlap is so intense that my life seems strangely like what would come of a collaboration between Judy…

"It's important to avoid mirrors if one is unprepared to accept the daily news," the narrator muses in the titular story from Rivka Galchen's new collection American Innovations (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). The narrator is one of many female voices…

In one of the most memorable scenes of Johanna Lane's sparkling debut novel Black Lake (Little, Brown), 8-year-old Philip Campbell is just trying to have a Coke in his kitchen — but he's told he has to pay for it. Philip's father, John, has sold the…

It's been a whopping 89 years since the publication of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and, true to form, it has aged so elegantly. Clarissa, you're on our minds when we throw parties, run into ladies we have kissed, and get the flowers ourselves.…

It's Labor Day weekend and the world may end — that is, if you ask Nicole, a mother who lives in Brooklyn with a young son and her husband. So begins Cutting Teeth (St. Martin's), Julia Fierro's debut novel. Nicole's anxiety prompts her to plan a…

A severed ear in a laundry hamper, a mother reincarnated as a horse, a boyfriend who has turned into a camel — these are the weird and surprisingly poignant images that make Kodi Scheer's stories unforgettable. Incendiary Girls (Little A/New…

Happy birthday, Harper Lee! The oft-celebrated, rarely public author turns 88 on Monday, and we'll be toasting her all day long. Lee, the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning, 7th grader-humanizing novel To Kill a Mockingbird , worked on a few…