Annalisa Quinn

Novelist Ben Lerner takes on poetry in his new book, an academic dissection of the ways we love and hate that ancient art. But sometimes he seems like he's talking about his own thinly-veiled hatred.

Stephanie Danler's new novel follows a young woman finding herself in the New York City restaurant world. It's voluptuous, ripeness on the verge of rot — but anything more tasteful wouldn't do.

Dan Vyleta's new novel imagines a world where inner faults and sins are made visible by black smoke curling from bodies. He says his big, sprawling narratives were inspired by the works of Dickens.

Rivka Galchen's meditation on motherhood is wry, low-key and non-linear, inspired by the 11th-century Japanese classic The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon — and the sleep-deprived brains of new parents.

Author Maggie Nelson's aunt was murdered decades ago. Her new book chronicles the trial that ensues when the old, cold case is reopened. It's an uneasy masterpiece that avoids quick catharsis.

Edna O'Brien's new book is set in a little Irish village disrupted by the arrival of a mysterious stranger, a war criminal in hiding whose murderous hands can heal as well as kill.

Madness and genius make a familiar literary couple whose success with readers, I suspect, depends on a certain amount of gratified vanity: who wouldn't like to imagine that their moods and eccentricities are down to brilliance? Ethan Canin's new novel is about the "the unremitting quarantine" of this type of ...

Waldy Tolliver wakes to find himself "excused from time" (excused, as if time were PE class or jury duty). It's 8:47 – it stays 8:47. "Time moves freely around me," he writes from the cramped apartment of his eccentric, dead twin aunts, "gurgling like a whirlpool, fluxing like a quantum ...

Editor's note: This review contains a word some readers may find offensive

"I'm sorry," was the first thing Gloria Norris' mother said to her father when he came into the hospital room after the baby was born. "I'm sorry it wasn't a boy."

Girls, Gloria soon learns from her father, ...

Shira is a frustrated temp and Ph.D. dropout, living in Manhattan with her daughter, Andi, and best friend and co-parent, Ahmad. She quits one menial job to another, tired of stuffing envelopes and being told to smile. Her past is scarred with abandonments: most bruisingly, a mother who left her ...

You arrive in England confident. Why shouldn't you be? You speak the language, you've seen Downton Abbey, and as a teenager you nurtured an inexplicable but ardent crush on Tony Blair. It will be like America, but quainter.

It's only after a few months that the strangeness begins to sink ...

"Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress," goes the first line of Middlemarch. Simplicity is a brave choice in a novel as well as in a dress: it means there are no forgiving distractions and no flattering cuts. In My ...

Diana Athill is, by her own account, a very old woman. At 98, she lives in a home for the elderly in North London. This small and lovely book is a collection of favorite memories that return to Athill at the end of her life: heartbreak, yes, a miscarriage, but ...

Shame and Wonder is a series of wandering essays on cartoons, comic books, model rockets and other passions of a midcentury boyhood, as well as meditations on travel and friends and whatever else drifts into its slow and dreamy orbit. And everywhere, David Searcy finds the strange and marvelous in ...

The third and grisliest mystery from Robert Galbraith, J.K. Rowling's alter ego, opens with a woman's severed leg. "It's not even my size," complains one-legged detective Cormoran Strike when the grim package is delivered to his assistant.

Under the limb are lyrics to Blue Oyster Cult's "Mistress of the Salmon ...

Terrible jealousy, an oracle, a lost child, a living statue, miraculous redemption: The Winter's Tale is one of Shakespeare's most mythic and magic plays. It is a story, as the characters like to say as strange occurrence follows strange occurrence, "like an old tale."

Even then it was an old ...

Editor's note: A Dietland quote in this review contains language some may find offensive.

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In fiction, there are the Good Fats (Clara Peggotty, Mrs. Weasley and various other pillowy matrons) and the Bad Fats (Ursula, Augustus Gloop, assorted despicable characters whose fatness is shorthand for moral decay). Oh, ...

Anna Lyndsey lives in the dark. She was living a pleasantly ordinary life, working for the British government, when she began to feel a sensitivity to light: At first, computer screens seemed to burn her face, and then artificial lights, and then, finally, sunlight.

She describes the moment when she ...

Cheryl Glickman has an unflattering wardrobe and a permanent lump in her throat. She is in love with Philip, who offers her only a reference to his color therapist and text message updates about his affair with a teenager ("What would be the emoticon for Carry me to your penthouse ...

Amanda Palmer's well-intentioned, slightly clueless new book, The Art of Asking, is a little bit diary, a little bit TED talk, and a little bit how-to guide. Palmer, Neil Gaiman's wife and one-half of the band the Dresden Dolls, had a well-publicized break from her record label and asked her ...