Search results for

Explorer and activist Bell is best remembered today for helping create the modern state of Iraq. A smartly edited new collection of her writings presents a fascinating (if not always smooth) portrait.

Readers everywhere are rediscovering the work of Brazil's Clarice Lispector. Critic Juan Vidal calls Lispector a singular artist, whose newly collected stories linger in the mind like poetry.

Author Tracy Daugherty's new biography of Joan Didion is an honest attempt to construct a coherent narrative about her — but critic Michael Schaub says it doesn't completely work.

Ottessa Moshfegh's new novel follows a defiantly, triumphantly off-putting young woman who dreams of escaping her grim New England existence. Critic Jean Zimmerman calls it "pleasingly perverse."

Historian Alex Kershaw's latest book focuses on an American doctor and his family who worked with the French Resistance from their apartment just down Avenue Foch from the Paris SS headquarters.

Alaa Al Aswany's new book sets the dynamics of a fallen family and an elitist car club against the tensions of post-World War II Egypt, but a clunky translation and too many plots keep the brakes on.

Louisa Hall's novel fits several wildly disparate storylines — a young Puritan girl, a disgraced inventor, a computer programmer — into an unforgettable meditation on what it means to be human.

There are a few confessional speeches in Vu Tran's noirish debut novel, but what people write is more important than what they say: Anguished notes, letters and secret diary all drive the action.

Stephanie Clifford's debut novel, about the desperate social strivings of a young woman in Manhattan, has its roots in the tragic, old-money fascinations of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth.

Reggie Love went from playing sports at Duke to working as Barack Obama's personal assistant. His new memoir, Power Forward, describes what he learned on the campaign trail and in the White House.