Books & Literature

After writing biographies of Charles Dickens and Mary Wollstonecraft, Tomalin turned to memoir. Her new work tells of her conflicting desires to have children and to lead a meaningful working life.

There's life in the old road trip saga yet. That's just one of the many things that Gary Shteyngart's spectacular, sprawling new novel, Lake Success, affirms.

After years as a reporter, Avi Issacharoff co-created an action series about an elite unit of the Israeli military whose members work undercover in the West Bank. Fauda is now streaming on Netflix.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new apocalyptic novel 'Severance' by debut novelist Ling Ma.

Olga Tokarczuk's book won the 2018 Man Booker International Prize. Critic John Powers says the hard-to-classify work is positively exploding with maps, remembrances, riffs, history and more.

What I love most about Wilson's writing is that he'll start off with these goofy, almost sitcom-type contrived premises and from there create stories that knock you out with the force of their emotional truth. That distinctive sweet-tart flavor of Wilson's writing is triple-concentrated in his new short story collection, Baby, You're Gonna Be Mine.

R. O. Kwon's pensive debut novel, The Incendiaries, arrives just in time to stoke up "back-to-school" anxieties, especially those of entering college students and their nervous parents.

Bad things happen in Castle Rock, a new Hulu series based on King's fictional town. King spoke to Fresh Air in 1992, 2000 and 2013 about his career writing horror and his fear of losing his mind.

Megan Abbott's new novel centers on a two young women whose high school friendship has morphed into professional rivalry. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls Give Me Your Hand a "spectacular thriller."

It's a rusty old bucket of a plot contrivance: throw a bunch of strangers together on a boat and roil the waters with a big storm or a white whale. But, in her latest novel, The Last Cruise, Kate Christensen demonstrates there's life yet to be found in what may appear to be the creakiest of fictional premises.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new novel 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation,' about a grieving woman trying to sleep long enough to relieve existential pain.

Deborah Levy opens her new memoir, The Cost of Living, by telling us one of those small stories whose size, like an ant or a virus, stands in inverse proportion to its power.

Hall, who died on Saturday, wrote about farm work and his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, in the 1993 memoir Life Work. He and Kenyon spoke to Fresh Air in 1996, and Hall was interviewed again in '02 and '12.

Richard Ratay book, Don't Make Me Pull Over!, is a very breezy history of the family road trip, which had its heyday, at least for some Americans, from the 1950s into the '70s. Main-Travelled Roads, by Hamlin Garland, a writer barely anybody knows anymore. Garland's short stories are vivid and tough in their take on the realities of Midwestern farm life, especially for women.

Authors Dorthe Nors and Sayaka Murata use bracing good humor to subvert readers' expectations about single women in their new novels, Mirror, Shoulder, Signal and Convenience Store Woman.

McCauley's novel, My Ex-Life, is a comedy about a couple whose marriage ended years ago when the husband came out as gay. "All relationships evolve — even for people who stay together," he says.

Here's the thing about There There, the debut novel by Native American author Tommy Orange: Even if the rest of its story were just so-so — and it's much more than that — the novel's prologue would make this book worth reading.

The women's history scholar, who died June 1, grew up on a remote Australian sheep farm and later went on to write three memoirs, including True North. Conway spoke to Fresh Air in 1989, '94 and '98.

In the relaxed days of summer, critic Maureen Corrigan reflexively reaches for a mystery. This year, she's settling in with The Dime, by Kathleen Kent, and The Death of Mrs. Westaway, by Ruth Ware.