Search results for

Also: Isabel Allende's love of Zorro; Lemony Snicket makes a Twitter appearance; Cat Marnell's book proposal was leaked.

James Salter is a master prose stylist whose deceptively simple sentences reveal the sensations and truth of experience. In All That Is, he conjures the life and times of Philip Bowman, who, returning to New York after World War II, pursues love and a publishing career, with unequal success.

The young heroine of Rachel Kushner's new book The Flamethrowers negotiates art and revolution from the back of a motorcycle — both the late-1970s art scene in Manhattan and the Italian radical left of the same era. Reviewer Maud Newton says The Flamethrowers has "timeless urgency."

Sara Suleri Goodyear's heartbreaking memoir, Meatless Days, describes growing up in post-colonial Pakistan with an elegiac immediacy. Author Rajesh Parameswaran says the book does justice to the way memory actually lives in the mind.

An incredible diversity of grains, herbs and fruits goes into the world's alcoholic drinks, as writer Amy Stewart explains. Her new book describes the plants behind cocktails and other boozy beverages and features drink recipes and growing instructions.

Emily Rapp lived every parent's nightmare when her infant son was diagnosed with a fatal disease. The Still Point of the Turning World is not only a powerful memoir of a mother's endurance but also a meditation on how our mortality should inspire us all to live life ferociously in the present.

Joy Williams' The Quick and the Dead, about three motherless girls traveling through the desert, left author Domenica Ruta with more questions than answers. Do you have a favorite book that left you confused — in a good way? Tell us in the comments.

In Joyce Carol Oates' latest novel, apparitions haunt the streets of sleepy 1905 Princeton, N.J. Oates says she wanted to explore the hypocrisy of wealthy white America in that era with her portrayal of a town where the denial of social and racial injustice produces monsters.

Comics veteran Ben Katchor's new book, Hand-Drying in America, examines the spaces we live and work in, and the ways we build and navigate through them. Critic Glen Weldon says Katchor's panels "celebrate the mundane world around us by revealing it to be anything but."

On the 10-year anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, journalist Aaron Glantz talks about the challenges American service members face in accessing disability and other benefits. Glantz says there is a backlog of 900,000 claims and that the average waiting period is 273 days.