The Middle Passage has been a touchstone of storytelling for generations — the television series “Roots” and Charles Johnson’s award-winning “Middle Passage” spring to mind — but no artistic work can truly translate its atrocities.

Hence the necessity of nonfiction: Siddharth Kara’s wrenching, superb “The Zorg” depicts a ...Read more

I love a Western.

Maybe it’s because my dad had old movies playing on the TV throughout my childhood, or maybe it’s because I grew up in rural California, where it was easy to imagine cowboys and campfires.

Nowadays, I gravitate toward what I would call “modern literary Westerns,” with their strong sense of place and complex look at ...Read more

The singular, disconcerting uneasiness that is so characteristic of Joy Williams’ fiction, yet so hard to pin down, is once again dazzlingly on display in her latest collection, “The Pelican Child.”

The critically beloved author’s first book of full-length stories since 2015’s “ The Visiting Privilege” contains a dozen works, all ...Read more

The phrase “Time is a flat circle” often refers to how the manic post-pandemic news cycle makes comprehension of the recent past impossible. A similarly dazed bafflement is explored in W. David Marx’s lucid and entertaining —yet despairing — book about the new millennium’s flattening of culture, “Blank Space.”

One of the primary...Read more

Emily Maxwell is back.

The star of Stewart O’Nan’s novel “Emily, Alone” and a co-star of O’Nan’s “ Henry, Himself,” she plays a supporting role in the author’s latest, “Evensong.” She’s one of several elderly female characters, mostly widows, mostly living in an independent-living complex where they have settled into ...Read more

Kate Baer tries her best not to give people advice.

But the bestselling poet and author of the new collection “How About Now” does want to share some of what she’s been reminding herself lately.

“I think most of us, when we get into our 40s, we’ve lived enough life to know that we’re so lucky to age and that there’s a lot of ...Read more

A lifetime of reading has convinced me that books are more likely to get worse — not better — as they go. “The Breath of the Gods” bucks that trend.

You could say Simon Winchester’s book, subtitled “The History and Future of the Wind,” is running against the wind. There’s too much hot air in its first half, which has an awful ...Read more

Next July marks 250 years since a handful of upstart American colonies declared independence from Britain. A war was fought, as we all know, and almost immediately after it was over, Richard Bell asserts in “The American Revolution and the Fate of the World,” a “collective amnesia” took hold.

The preference for historians and Americans ...Read more

The #MeToo movement may have faded from the news, but its influence still reverberates in the literary world.

Recent years have seen a handful of authors reassessing relationships between young women and older men. Some of these scenarios derived from an author’s past fiction, as with Mary Gaitskill’s “Minority Report,” which retells ...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Nov. 15, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana.

(Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.)

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "The Strength ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — It's a rare gray Saturday in Los Angeles; raindrops collect along a window overlooking a row of trees at Le Parc at Melrose.

Light trickles its way into the hotel room, illuminating a brown coffee table. An unreleased novel from Swiss author Nelio Biedermann sits next to a cup of tea, and a wood cross string necklace lies on the...Read more

Brandon Taylor’s fourth book, “Minor Black Figures,” begins in New York City in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

As political and societal tides shift, as the city rises up in agitation, we meet Wyeth, a Black, millennial artist who hasn’t made art in a while and is struggling with what to paint next....Read more

Novelist John Irving says he knew he was on track when he figured out how “Queen Esther” would end. Now he faced a new challenge: How the story began.

“Like all my novels, that’s the thing I see most clearly or I don’t begin,” Irving says on a recent video call from his home in Toronto. “A timeline begins that is instigated by the...Read more

In October 1995, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson hadn’t yet become the pop culture science star he is today.

Tyson was newly appointed as the interim director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, where as a 9-year-old from the Bronx, he’d first seen the stars and glimpsed his future career.

Then the first exoplanet was discovered...Read more

Like many an epic Russian tale, “Tigers Between Empires” fittingly opens with a cast of characters, some with two legs, but most with four.

Minneapolis writer Jonathan C. Slaght’s book is a deep look at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Siberian Tiger Project, which begins in the early 1990s and covers three decades of exhausting ...Read more

Call him a master wordsmith, formal innovator, Booker prize winner, Nobel laureate-in-waiting, a sorcerer. Call him Sir Salman Rushdie.

He slips into a story as gracefully as Laurence Olivier vanished into a Shakespearean role. Rushdie’s towering talent is evident throughout “The Eleventh Hour,” a quintet of tales that are his follow-up ...Read more

Bianna Golodryga, a news anchor for CNN International, immigrated to the U.S. from the former Soviet Union in 1980 with her family to escape antisemitism.

Now a parent of two children, the onetime political refugee finds herself having to explain the hatred expressed toward Jewish people in the country she loves — much of it expressed in the ...Read more

“Some Bright Nowhere” is infuriating, and it’s supposed to be.

Ann Packer’s novel is about Claire, who is dying of cancer and who wants to be in charge of that as much as possible. How her in-chargeness manifests itself, in the latest novel from the author of “The Dive from Clausen’s Pier” and “ The Children’s Crusade,” is ...Read more