'Impatient with Desire' by Gabrielle Burton

The writer's long fascination with the Donner Party tragedy takes shape in a novel told by family matriarch Tamsen Donner.

'The Changeling' by Kenzaburo Oe

A Japanese novelist tries to understand why his longtime filmmaker friend committed suicide, raising issues of art, postwar identity and...

'Courage and Consequence' by Karl Rove

A curiously empty memoir of what went on in George W. Bush's White House by the former president's political strategist.

Young adult lit comes of age

Authors may gear their novels toward the junior and senior high crowd, but adults are snapping up the books, often about misfit teens or...

'Unincorporated Persons in the Late Honda Dynasty' by Tony Hoagland

Must everything be turned into pop cultural slogans? the poet asks in his new collection.

'Lonely Hearts' by Marion Meade

Nathanael West and Eileen McKenney were fun-loving souls who married only to die soon after.

Dark Passages: Boarding school gothic

Carol Goodman's "Arcadia Falls" finds something sinister behind a school's idyllic setting.

'Reality Hunger' by David Shields

In his media manifesto, a fed-up author makes a case for reality.

Greg Critser considers our mortality in 'Eternity Soup: Inside the Quest to End Aging'

"My American pathology trilogy," Greg Critser calls it: "Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World" (2003), "Generation...

'Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter' and 'Queen Victoria: Demon Hunter'

It's hard enough leading a nation: In two new novels, Lincoln and Queen Victoria get enmeshed in ghoulish, supernatural intrigue.

'Jerry West: The Life and Legend of a Basketball Icon' by Roland Lazenby

When I was a boy, my father took me to see my first live professional basketball game downtown at the Sports Arena.

'In the Land of Believers' by Gina Welch

In May 2007, deep into her time as a stealth member of Jerry Falwell's Lynchburg, Va., congregation, Gina Welch had become unsettled about...