Michael Schaub

Imbolo Mbue's debut novel is one of the best books to deal with the financial crisis of 2007-2008. It's the story of a Cameroonian immigrant couple and the rich, troubled Americans they work for.

The Underground Railroad is a literal train running underground in Colson Whitehead's new novel, which follows escaped slave Cora. It's both brilliant fiction and searing historical document.

Nicole Dennis-Benn's assured, gorgeous debut novel follows Margot, a worker at a rich Jamaican resort, whose home life is a series of sacrifices as she struggles with family and forbidden love.

Bob Proehl's sprawling novel follows actor Valerie and her son Alex on an epic road trip, punctuated by stops at comic conventions. It's a charming but messy debut that crams in too many ideas.

Larry Watson sticks to what he knows and loves in his latest novel: The cinematic badlands of Montana, and a tough, taciturn Western hero. But none of his characters truly rise above ciphers.

Young adult author Robin Wasserman's new novel is definitely just for grown-ups — it's a tangled, thrilling story of two friends gone very wrong; hard to put down, with a twist you won't see coming.

Martin Seay's debut novel tells three separate but connected stories, all revolving around an alchemist in 16th-century Venice who conspires to smuggle two legendary mirror-makers out of the city.

Dana Cann's novel is packed with ghosts, literal and figurative. It centers on a married couple grieving the loss of their infant daughter — and the way that grief can make strange things happen.

The characters who populate John Jodzio's new story collection are a long way from respectable — they're junkies, liars, and in one case, a tiger thief. But Jodzio treats them all with compassion.

Most writers would give everything they own to have just one masterpiece to their name. British author Helen Oyeyemi is barely 31, and she already has at least three of them. That includes her last two novels, Mr. Fox and Boy, Snow, Bird, both of which received extensive critical acclaim ...

"Furo Wariboko awoke this morning to find that dreams can lose their way and turn up on the wrong side of sleep." That's the first sentence of Blackass, the debut novel from Nigerian author A. Igoni Barrett, and if it sounds familiar, there's a good reason for that. The book ...

The total cost of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is expected to approach $6 trillion, but it will be decades before we know what we've truly lost. We have a generation that's never really known peacetime, and thousands upon thousands of service members who have returned to the country ...

There's no shortage of contemporary writing about New York. While that's not surprising — it's the largest city in the country, and has always had a special hold on the American imagination — it sometimes seems like it's hard to find new fiction not set in the five (but usually ...

It's the dead of winter in a small town in northern Michigan, and Carletta James is missing. Again. Her 16-year old daughter, Percy, isn't exactly surprised — it's not unusual for Carletta, a meth addict, to disappear for stretches of time, strung out and unconscious somewhere. But Percy's more worried ...

On the edge of a town called St. Nils sits the Burrow. It's a low mound of earth, just like any other burrow, but with a front door and six windowless apartments inside. It's not clear when it was constructed; some speculate it was built as a secret bunker, others ...

"Twenty-seven may be too young to die," muses Tim Sunblade, the narrator of Elliott Chaze's Black Wings Has My Angel. "But it isn't too young to die like a man." Tim has death on his mind frequently — he's an escaped prisoner determined to do whatever it takes to stay ...

On Nov. 30, 1999, tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered in downtown Seattle to protest the World Trade Organization conference being held at the city's convention center. It didn't take long for the situation to deteriorate; after some protesters started smashing windows and occupying intersections, police officers began to use ...

Herman Wouk's new memoir opens with two stanzas from "The Wreck of the Old 97," the famous ballad about a 1903 train crash in Virginia that killed 11 people. Initially, it seems an odd choice — while Wouk's most famous novels have dealt with tragedy, they've been mostly focused on ...

The American writer Edgar Allan Poe might have invented detective fiction, but it's been a long time since the United States has had a monopoly on the genre. In the past few decades, Americans have fallen in love with mystery writers from as far away as Iceland and Japan.

It ...

"My whole life / Was like a picture of a sunny day," Carrie Brownstein sings in Sleater-Kinney's "Modern Girl." It's one of the band's happier-sounding songs, with a catchy, almost sweet melody belied by the deeply ironic, cutting lyrics. She follows up those lines with the ones that inspire the ...