In his first collection in five years, a master fabulist in the tradition of Poe and Nabo-kov invents spookily plausible parallel universes in which the deepest human emotions and yearnings are transformed into their monstrous opposites... read more
The fate of a slave child abandoned by her mother animates this allusive novel -- part Faulknerian puzzle, part dream-song -- about orphaned women who form an eccentric household in late-17th-century America... read more
O'Neill's seductive ode to New York -- a city that even in bad times stubbornly clings to its belief "in its salvific worth" -- is narrated by a Dutch financier whose privileged Manhattan existence is upended by the events of Sept. 11, 2001. ... read more
Bolano, the prodigious Chilean writer who died at age 50 in 2003, has posthumously risen, like a figure in one of his own splendid creations, to the summit of modern fiction... read more
There is much cultural news in these precisely observed studies of modern-day Bengali-Americans -- many of them Ivy-league strivers ensconced in prosperous suburbs who can't quite overcome the tug of traditions nurtured in Calcutta... read more
Mayer's meticulously reported descent into the depths of President Bush's anti-terrorist policies peels away the layers of legal and bureaucratic maneuvering that gave us Guantanamo Bay, .... read more
The New York Times correspondent, whose tours of duty have taken him from Afghanistan in 1998 to Iraq during the American intervention, captures a decade of armed struggle in harrowingly detailed vignettes... read more
This absorbing memoir traces Barnes's progress from atheism (at age 20) to agnosticism (at 60) and examines the problem of religion not by rehashing the familiar quarrel between science and mystery, but rather by weighing the timeless questions of mortality and aging... read more
In this powerful book,Faust,the president of Harvard, explores the legacy, or legacies, of the "harvest of death" sown and reaped by the Civil War. In the space of four years, 620,000 Americans died in uniform, roughly the same number as those lost in all the nation's combined wars from the Revolution through Korea... read more
The most surprising word in this biography is "authorized." Naipaul, the greatest of all postcolonial authors, cooperated fully with French, opening up a huge cache of private letters and diaries and supplementing the revelations they disclosed with remarkably candid interviews... read more
