David Ignatius' gripping novels are quickly emerging as the spy industry's narcotic for smart, complex intelligence yarns to read on long flights. His made-for-movies stories seem to be a hybridized LeCarre with a twist of Michael Crichton as he reveals tectonic fault lines between an overly self-confident, reckless America and a fragmented, in spots radicalized, almost always misunderstood Islamic world.

In this sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes hilarious novel, protagonist Eric Cho contemplates the life of Joshua Yoon, the Korean novelist with whom he, along with provocative visual artist Jessica Tsai, once formed the 3AC or Asian American Artists Collective. What may have led Joshua to commit suicide (or was it?) by running into the path of an oncoming car? Lee explores themes of identity he's contemplated in the past — the allure of the cultural bond, the bristle of the stereotype — but this time through the lens of the college novel. With the pump already primed by recent successes from Jeffrey Eugenides and Chad Harbach, I'm hoping that folks will be ready for this addition to the collegiate canon.

I loved it right away. My editor showed it to me in a dark bar—Barbès on 9th Street in Park Slope—and I fell in love with it. I don’t recall seeing a series of attempts, just two alternatives in the bar, and this was my clear choice. I like the fact that it’s both concrete, divided into sky and sea, and abstract.

With echoes of the voice of Huck Finn, Biscuit Bonham tells his own story in an ambitious and often brilliant debut novel of a young man growing up in Dallas in the 1950s.

A reportage-style novel that captures the economic and racial diversity of waning-boom London through the residents of a single road.

In her new book, Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, Williams offers her take on — among other things — why breasts are getting bigger and developing earlier, why tumors seem to gravitate toward the breast, and how toxins from the environment may be affecting hormones and breast development.

In virtually every language in every corner of the world, the first sound a baby makes that can be called a word is MAMMA. In ancient Latin MAMMA became the word for breast - our first source of nurture, comfort and love - and for all humankind a source imagery and medical challenge across the centuries. Our Cover Story is reported now by Tracy Smith

In the fifty years since the publication of A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess’s dystopian fable remains by far the best-known of his more than 60 books. It also remains controversial and widely misunderstood: assailed for inciting adolescent violence (especially following Stanley Kubrick’s explicit 1971 film adaptation) or viewed as an anti-psychiatry treatise for presenting behavioural conditioning as an instrument of social control. But this aspect of the book needs to be seen within a broader context.

One of the bummers about having children, Anne Enright declares in “Making Babies,” her excellent memoir, is that it “can interfere with your drinking for up to 15 years; first because you don’t want to drop them, and subsequently because you don’t want to make them cry.”

Apostol offers an intriguing and significant view of Marcos-era Philippines in this complex and feverish novel.

In restoring the words of Jesus to their rightful poetry, and making an excellent case for this necessity, Barnstone brings their music, passion, ethics and intellectual rigor into a more complete view.

Chairman Bernanke Should Listen to Professor Bernanke

In her book Memoir of a Debulked Woman, she details — with graphic honesty — the physical and emotional pain, the surgery, chemotherapy, "intestinal disasters" and psychological changes that followed.

The book, aptly titled Will Oldham on Bonnie ‘Prince’ Bill, will collect a series of conversations between Oldham and avant garde musician and writer Alan Licht. W.W. Norton will publish the book in the U.S. in September. In addition, Domino Records will release a limited-edition box set containing the book and the EP

Two polar economic opposites, Ron Paul and Paul Krugman, just faced off on Bloomberg TV.

You can read our live blow by blow below.

While the U.S. prepares a strategic shift toward the Far East, evidence mounts that the terrorist organization is resurgent in the Muslim world.

To imagine what that future might be, a new book goes backward in time, exploring the terrorist group's history. It's called Hunting in the Shadows: The Pursuit of al-Qaida Since 9/11. Author Seth Jones is an expert on international terrorism who has advised the U.S. Special Operations Command.

Kinsella describes; he does not prescribe. He rests less comfortably in his retreat than Thoreau and without the surety that he lives an exemplary life.

Wright, a practicing psychologist, expertly weaves together a literary tapestry of self-discovery, brutal sadistic violence, custodial battles, and tender, burgeoning sexuality, leaving readers spellbound by a story that delivers on several levels. The author’s impressive, multitiered storytelling talents are on brilliant display in this entrancing, impressive debut.

This is a novel about crowds—Don DeLillo would tip his hat in recognition—and the economic and social conditions that can be used to manipulate them. If the characters in Kingdom Come seem indistinct by comparison; if David Cruise doesn’t quite seem worthy of “the pale aura of suburban fame” that surrounds him—well, perhaps it’s because from this remove, it’s difficult to understand why people would launch into a melee over a waffle iron or camp out for a cell phone. But these things do happen, every year, and Ballard’s novel is at its best when it takes this behavior to its most frightening, but strangely possible, extremes.

In his final, elegiac vision of suburban apocalypse, Ballard once again allows us to imagine the unthinkable.

If you like cringing at gratuitous violence and perversity, but balk at good quality prose, this will be perfect for you. There are some moments of power, but they are few and far between, and neither the stories nor the characters are very compelling.

It lacks the originality, sharp twists and stinging imagination of Trainspotting, but Skagboys engages on a more personal level, invoking feelings of almost parental concern, a passive observer, powerless to prevent the unavoidable end.

The author of Liar's Poker talks to himself about how to make the Occupy Wall Street movement better. His strategy: boycott the banks!

Capital portrays an authentic slice of contemporary life on the eve of change in a way that recalls Franzen.

“It really was such a shame, the way you could be so careful, and for so long, and then go ahead and undo it all in the end, as though nothing had ever been held together by anything at all.”
—Johanna Skibsrud, This Will Be Difficult to Explain: And Other Stories

There’s much more in the little 217-page book, but I’ll leave that for you to discover. “Titanic Tragedy” is a don’t-miss for both the Titanic historian and those with just a passing curiosity about a night to remember in April 1912.

Sweet Heaven When I Die, a book of journalistic essays by reporter Jeff Sharlet, is a Cubist portrait of American faith, an ecumenical David Hockney photocollage.

There are basically two types of Irvine Welsh novel. There are the deeply felt and vividly evoked stories about young men going to the bad on the mean streets of Leith (Trainspotting, Glue). Then there are his silly, sick ones, whether the genre is tapeworm-infested police procedural (Filth), evil-double gothic (The Bedroom Secrets of The Master Chefs) or psychedelic thalidomide revenge fantasy (Ecstasy).

Patricia Highsmith, author of The Talented Mr. Ripley, Strangers on a Train, This Sweet Sickness, and several others, speaks with Don Swaim in this 1987 interview about the differences in the English vocabulary between European and American written language. She has had great success throughout her career, and several of her books have been turned into movies. Her most famous character, Tom Ripley, has been a continuous character throughout her career, and has been inspiration for several other books and movies. One thing she comments on is creating a certain pace, or speed of the novel in order to create suspense.

The Sorrows/Suffering of Young Werther has not lacked for translators. Among first-rate modern versions are those by Burton Pike, Michael Hulse, and Victor Lange. Corngold’s new translation is of the very highest quality, punctiliously faithful to Goethe’s German and sensitive to gradations of style in this extraordinary, trail-blazing first novel.

An epistolary memoir filled with Diana Athill's wit and humor, celebrating a 30-year friendship.

Irish author and Booker prize winner Anne Enright talks to John Mullan at the Guardian Review book club about her tale of adultery in the time of boom and crash, The Forgotten Waltz

E.O. Wilson of Harvard University on his book “The Social Conquest of Earth”

within the book’s 382 pages Oldham answers nearly every question one might wish to ask about his prolific output, which he has recorded and performed variously as Will Oldham, Palace Brothers, Palace Music, Palace Songs, Palace, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Bonnie Billy, and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy and the Cairo Gang.

In “Prairie Fever” (W. W. Norton, $28) Peter Pagnamenta documents the frequently humorous love affair that British aristos had with the American West, where they flocked in the 19th century to hunt elk, build polo stables and play tennis in the prairie. They made frontier faux pas, of course, like misidentifying cowboys as “cow-servants.”

Not long ago, writer Mary Roach got a real hands-on lesson on the gut: she got to stick her hand inside a real live cow stomach, and experience digestion from the inside. When we heard about her adventure, we had to try it ourselves—so producer Tim Howard headed to Rutgers University to see, feel...and smell...a fistulated cow firsthand.

Reading this study is like running your palms along the walls of the Toledo Cathedral on a dark night, slowly acquiring painful impressions until a sense of dark structure emerges.

Listen to Slate's show about the works of Adrienne Rich, killer grizzly bears, and the mysterious disappearance of the neurotic.

Religion. Sports. War. Biologist E.O. Wilson says our drive to join a group—and to fight for it—is what makes us human.

Rich’s body of work is massive and varied, and there are several nearly all-inclusive collections floating around (our guess is that there are about to be a few more), but here we’ve collected what we feel to be the essential books from this incredible poet, who will long be remembered as one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.

A visit to the set of FILTH in Stirling Scotland

Ali H. Soufan's The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against al-Qaeda (W.W. Norton) has won the ninth annual Ridenhour Book Prize, which "honors acts of truth-telling and outstanding works of social significance in publishing."

Poet Adrienne Rich, whose socially conscious verse influenced a generation of feminist, gay rights and anti-war activists, has died. She was 82.

The author of 18 novels including “Empire of the Sun,” Ballard, who died in 2009, is more funny than preachy; there’s a certain glee in his spite, as when he writes about the slain leader of these devoted shoppers, the talk-show host of the mall’s cable channel: “Only his hair survived, a blond mane lying across the phlegm-soaked pillow.”

Adrienne Rich, a pioneering feminist poet and essayist who challenged what she considered to be the myths of the American dream, has died. She was 82.

Jim Fingal and John D'Agata read from Lifespan of a Fact at Prairie Lights Bookstore in Iowa City.

Reading from Skagboys in Fall of 2010 in Chicago.

At BookCourt in Cobble Hill Sunday night, Aleksandar Hemon and Nicole Krauss went to bat for translated literature, eviscerating American publishers for their neglect of work from abroad. (The commonly cited statistic has it that only 3 percent of books published in the United States are translated from another language.)

Dale Carpenter speaks about FLAGRANT CONDUCT at the Cato Institute, March 2012.

Hard to recall now how I first came upon The Price of Salt, the fabulously swoony lesbian love story Patricia Highsmith published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan in 1952. (Highsmith, deep in her own alcoholic closet, would not acknowledge the book publicly until 1984.) I'm guessing it was when I was a graduate student—shy, unfledged, and morbidly conscious of my unnatural leanings—at the University of Minnesota in the late '70s. Lesbian separatism was then in its zany heyday and in the vain hope of fitting in with my radical sisters, I had cut most of my hair off with pinking shears and adopted the standard in-your-face dyke uniform: men's flannel shirt, oversized waffle-stompers, and grubby Army fatigues from Minneapolis Ragstock. Not exactly what you'd call an oil painting.

Joshua Topolsky asks Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson about life as an animated gif during a taping of On The Verge in New York City. Subscribe to our channel for more clips from On The Verge and our interview with Dr. Tyson!

Snip from an essay in the New York Times today about the neuroscience of romantic love, by author Diane Ackerman:

Having an off-the-page conversation with Flynn meant Skyping his cell phone from where I sat in a back bedroom of a house in Kansas while he was in a café in Wilmington, North Carolina, “trying to find places to write in a town I’ve never been in before.” His wife is on location, filming her first big role since the birth of their daughter, who is now four. We spoke about the process of seeing (and collaborating with) his memoir become a film, the moving ASCNYC benefit, and why his memoir trilogy is like Star Wars.

Celebrated authors Andre Dubus III (Townie) and Richard Russo (Empire Falls) sit down to talk about the future of publishing, the slow demise of brick-and-mortar book stores, and Amazon's ploy to control the entire e-book market.

“The Spanish Holocaust” is a compelling chronicle of a grim time in history. It would be a pity if the book’s dubious title discouraged a wider readership.

Described as his best piece of writing since Trainspotting itself ‘Skag Boys’ is Irvine Welsh’s new book prequel-ling the 90′s classic, bringing the big picture to the front by getting into the main influences from Trainspotting and why it did happen to many of Britain’s youth during the dark side of the 80′s ,the political, social and personal factors that determined the lives of characters Renton, Sick Boy’s and others takes centre stage in this deeper and wider perspective on the epic Irvine Welsh story, in turn producing another in ‘Skag Boys’,..prior to its release (April 19th) Irvine Welsh talked to LTW

Announcing The Brandy Alexander Witness Reincarnation Project Tour, a series of reading and signing events to support the release of the new Invisible Monsters Remix book (due out June 11th). This is a West coast only tour. Here are the dates and cities Chuck will be visiting:

For those who care so deeply about accuracy, that impression is absurdly and irresponsibly wrong. The book is a two-sided argument. It’s an invitation inside the way artists and researchers, and culture as a whole, contemplate and justify what truth means in nonfiction. I’m not saying you should agree with John D’Agata. That’s not the point. But why not be open? Experience it. Don’t write off an uncomfortable conversation. Engage in it.

The name Psmith is a comic invention of genius, perfect for the character. The absurdly contrived plot was one of PGW's best (and he was a master of such things); in moments of gloom I think back to Psmith, masquerading as a sensitive poet, inspecting the line 'across the pale parabola of joy' and hoping he will not be asked to explain it. How many times have I read it? 10? 15? 20? Surely not more than 20? But if not only because I devoured as many other PGWs as I could get my hand on, because otherwise even Psmith might grow stale.

The historian John Maxtone-Graham begins his new book, “Titanic Tragedy: A New Look at the Lost Liner,” with a tip of his cap to Walter Lord, whose 1955 classic “A Night to Remember” is still considered one of the best places to start on a Titanic syllabus. Mr. Lord’s book also inspired a 1958 movie of the same name.

Live Video Chat With Andre Dubus III

A writer colleague, referring to a document she had written, confessed: “I totally D’Agata’d this.” I couldn’t help laughing. But her comment was unsettling because she meant that she had fudged her story, made some of it up. And I suspected that the man behind the reference, John D’Agata, co-author of the book The Lifespan of a Fact, would be pleased.

Dale Carpenter’s excellent new book, Flagrant Conduct: The Story of Lawrence v. Texas is not only an in-depth study of the complicated background of the case, but also a highly informative, detailed, even thrilling account of how the Supreme Court arguments reshaped American law, possibly even inadvertently leading to the legalization of same-sex marriage.

How genuinely close were Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher? In the popular imagination, of course, they were as close as were Churchill and Roosevelt, or Kennedy and Macmillan, or George W. Bush and Tony Blair—possibly even closer since their political ideologies coincided as well. Yet as Richard Aldous shows in "Reagan and Thatcher," a well-researched, well-written and revisionist double portrait, very often the day-to-day policies they pursued diverged significantly. The result was "a more complex, testier relationship" than we might hitherto have thought.

The British prime minister had a more critical view of the American president than is generally reported, and through the Iron Lady’s eyes we might get a more accurate picture of the Great Communicator.

Often, in contemporary literature, grief becomes clichéd; O’Rourke, however, avoids sappiness or melodrama. Instead, her poetry probes at the actualization of grief, revealing a startling emotional depth.

Before winning the 1973 Pulitzer Prize, before bolstering the representation of women in contemporary poetry during her tenure as U.S. Poet Laureate, from 1981-82, Maxine Kumin began a fruitful relationship with The New Yorker, in 1957, when her poem “The Rites” appeared in our pages. Over the ensuing fifty-five years, Kumin has published thirty-one poems in the magazine. Her latest piece, “Truth,” was featured in last week’s issue. I spoke with Kumin about the poem and her work at large.

Dale Carpenter’s “Flagrant Conduct” is a stirring and richly detailed account of Lawrence v. Texas, the momentous 2003 decision that overturned Bowers. Carpenter, who teaches at the University of Minnesota Law School, tells the story through the eyes of the major players — the plaintiffs, arresting officers, attorneys, judges and prosecutors — most of whom were interviewed at length. The result is a book that turns conventional wisdom about Lawrence on its head. Indeed, the readers most likely to be surprised by “Flagrant Conduct” are those who think they already know the basic outlines of the case.

A prequel to the world-renowned Trainspotting, this is Irvine Welsh's greatest work and where it all went wrong for the boys...

When (if ever) is violence necessary? What (if anything) does it have to do with “manhood”? And what toll does a life of violence take on the human spirit?

These questions writhe at the heart of Andre Dubus III’s profound new memoir, Townie. Forced at the age of 11 into the role of “man of the family,” Dubus became a fighter to defend his mother and siblings from predatory thugs in their poverty-stricken town of Lowell, Massachusetts. Now an accomplished novelist (House of Sand and Fog, The Garden of Last Days), Dubus reflects on the complicated nature of violence, and what exactly it does to the lives of those it touches.

A darkly funny story of two young girls whose hopes and dreams come to a disastrously tragic end.

Used well, the collective perspective affords the poet a wider voice, a surer sense. The reader feels present in these moments of ruin, trusting even the more fantastical occurrences.

A remarkably vibrant and engrossing novel about what we truly value.

Williams puts hard data and personal history together with humor, creating an evenhanded cautionary tale that will both amuse and appall.

Capital interweaves the lives and stories of the residents of Pepys Road, looking at the recent financial crash and its effect on our everyday lives. To support the book, Storythings have been commissioned by Faber and Faber to produce PepysRd.com – a unique interactive story based on Capital that asks you to think about how your own life will be affected by events of the coming ʻlost decadeʼ.

Screenwriter Amanda Coe’s fiction debut, What They Do in the Dark, is distressing. It is also technically impressive, and while its subject matter—the wreckage resulting when adults fail children—is somber, its character portrayals are soaked in the warmth of honesty. Set in a working-class northern town in 1975 England, the book chronicles a gloomily pivotal spring/summer in the lives of 10-year-old schoolmates Gemma Barlow and Pauline Bright. The girls are not exactly friends, but are drawn together by their fractured souls. Their fates become hauntingly entwined.

Corngold’s translation is earthy and precise, with language belonging to a young man who is capable of both elation and despair. If the prose sometimes sounds hyperbolic, so does Werther, who is by turns silly, melancholy, and somber.

Irish poet Eavan Boland reads "Quarantine."