Annalisa Quinn

Nadja Spiegelman is insightful about the power and malleability of memory in her new memoir, but the book is weighed down by an aggressively artificial poignancy, all ashtrays and meaningful silences.

Megan Abbott's novel about a talented young gymnast and her mother starts with a mysterious death, but the real mysteries are the characters themselves: You never really know the people close to you.

Gay Talese conflates the journalist and the voyeur in his new book about a motel owner who spied on his guests. And he makes the readers voyeurs as well: We watch him watching the unwary motel guests.

Catherine Banner's new novel takes familiar tropes — it's a multigenerational family saga set in Sicily, and yes, there's limoncello and dancing in the piazza — and makes them fresh and inviting.

In Patrick Flanery's new novel, the border between mental illness and justified paranoia grows porous as average guy Jeremy begins to fear he's under surveillance. But is he? It's never quite clear.

Talese had told The Washington Post he wouldn't promote his new nonfiction book, The Voyeur's Motel, after the paper found flaws in its story. But now he says the book will go ahead as planned.

The Toast — the funny, literary feminist website, gleeful kneecapper of high culture, center of cheerful misandry, and habitat of the courteous commenter — is closing. We have an appreciation.

Annie Proulx's epic new novel is a multigenerational, multi-century epic about the fall of forests before human depredation — just don't think about how many trees went into its 700-plus pages.

Jessica Valenti's powerful new memoir examines the toll sexism takes on women's lives. Sex Object doesn't offer solutions; instead, it bears witness to the daily grind of harassment and hatred.

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 ...