Claire Luchette

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…