Jason Heller

Through travelogues, story-songs and a literary quality that's been honed to a cutting edge, Taylor Goldsmith and his band have crafted their most ambitious record to date.

Poignant and bittersweet, the Scottish pop band's 10th album captures the way things slip away — and are clutched tighter as a result.

Award-winning comic book writer Paul Jenkins tries his hand at the novel with Curioddity, but this quirky tale of imagination and innocence regained is smothered in smirking self-consciousness.

Beth Cato's new book is set in an alternate version of San Francisco where geopolitical intrigue and homegrown unrest complicate a young earth magician's attempt to head off the great quake of 1906.

On its sixth album (and first since 2010), Jimmy LaValle's hushed ambient project has a way with whispers, minimalism and intimacy.

In his latest solo project, the frontman of Pittsburgh psychedelic band Black Moth Super Rainbow revels in all things synthetic.

After 14 albums, Kevin Barnes' music still bursts like an overripe peach. He retains his knack for supple, indelible melody, as well as pomp, melodrama and lavish flourishes of texture and verse.

Nick Mamatas takes on the legacy of H.P. Lovecraft — both Lovecraft's notorious racism and sexism, and the zealous fandom that's sprung up around him — with scathing humor in his latest novel.

Jenni Fagan's latest follows a transgender girl and her mother in a near-future world that's slowly freezing to death. Fagan makes potent but subtle links between climate change and personal change.

Undimmed by the decades, singer Milo Aukerman and his band thrash, crash and blaze gloriously on the seventh album in their 39-year history together.

Jeffrey Ford's new story collection is packed with fairies, demons, historical figures and death personified: not always the freshest concepts, but when the stories work, they're enthrallingly eerie.

Dana I. Wolff's new novel digs up the story of infamous disease vector "Typhoid Mary" Mallon — it's a fun, fast read, but misses a rich opportunity to draw parallels to modern pandemic scares.

It's not hard to parse the two main influences on Robert Kroese's new novel, The Big Sheep: Philip K. Dick and Raymond Chandler. But Kroese's knack for humor helps elevate their gonzo grimness.

Things are not what they seem in Paul Tremblay's new novel; a simple search for a missing child becomes a dizzying emotional vortex as ominous new details and old tragedies surface.

This week, the NPR Books Time Machine travels back to the era of the Napoleonic Wars for a look at Naomi Novik's Temeraire series, which wraps up this week with the release of League of Dragons.

Thirty years after his breakthrough hit "The Way It Is," the singer-keyboardist once again hits the sweet spot between joyful improv and immaculate songcraft.

More than 20 years into its career, the mostly instrumental Scottish rock band returns with an album that can be poignant, blood-curdling and beautiful.

Malka Older's new book takes place at the end of the 21st century, in a future where the game of politics has become more streamlined — but infinitely more complex and terrifying.

Neil Gaiman is best-known for his fictional creations, but he is also a prolific producer of essays, album liner notes, speeches and introductions — now collected in The View From the Cheap Seats.

Angry, righteous and redemptive, The Last Days Of Oakland celebrates survival, as Xavier Dphrepaulezz infuses his songs with hard-bitten perspectives on life, love, art, commerce, class and society.