Annalisa Quinn

The narrator of Zadie Smith's new novel is never named — fitting, for a book about the illusions of identity and the ways people try and fail to know and define themselves.

Anne Carson's unconventional collection of 22 chapbooks can be read in any order, and covers everything from Helen of Troy to H.G. Wells — but mostly, it's about women taking back their own stories.

Renowned chef Jeremiah Tower focuses on the consumption rather than the preparation of food in Table Manners. The book leans fussy and prim, turning a blind eye to hosts and hostesses short on cash.

Brit Bennett's new novel focuses on two best friends, both motherless, growing up in a black community in Southern California — and their shifting, lifelong negotiation with the idea of motherhood.

Fran Wilde built a glorious world of living bone towers and wing-gliding people in last year's Updraft. Her new Cloudbound has stunning skyscapes but lacks some of the first book's emotional heft.

Eimear McBride's latest follows a young drama student who goes to London and falls for an older man. Her live, wriggling language makes a beautiful account of the ways the self is built and rebuilt.

Ordinary family life provides all the tension and attraction in Ann Patchett's new book. The story of two families and a fateful party that upends both, it draws on Patchett's own life experiences.

Ian McEwan's fetal Hamlet is an extravagant spirit confined to the womb while his mother and uncle plot. But he is no sweet prince; the book stumbles over the unborn Dane's grumpy cultural commentary.

Amor Towles' new novel stars a Russian aristocrat, sentenced by the Soviets to permanent house arrest in a luxury hotel. It's a frothy romp that tends to overlook the reality of life under Stalin.

Luke Dittrich's new book is part pop science book, part medical ethics essay and part family history: His grandfather was the surgeon who originally cut into the brain of the celebrated Patient H.M.

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.