Search results for

For centuries, the memory of Jane Franklin has languished in brother Benjamin's shadow. While Ben is on currency and splashed across textbooks, Jane's life of curiosity and hardship has been forgotten. In Book of Ages, historian Jill Lepore draws a portrait of one of the American Revolution's "little women."

California parolee Charles Manson arrived in San Francisco in 1967, when the city was full of young waifs looking for a guru. In Manson, Jeff Guinn argues that if the cult leader had instead been paroled in a place like Nebraska, he likely would not have been so successful.

Jesmyn Ward's new memoir Men We Reaped follows the lives and tragically early deaths of several young black men — Ward's brother among them. Reviewer Richard Torres says Ward is "talented enough to turn ... prose into poetry," but that she doesn't sugarcoat her terrible experiences.

Doctor Sleep is Stephen King's sequel to his 1977 smash hit The Shining, about a haunted hotel. Sleep follows Danny Torrance, the troubled son of Shining protagonist Jack, as he gets drawn into a new battle against evil. Reviewer Alan Cheuse says King "is still scaring the hell out of me."

Shirley Hazzard's 1980 novel Transit of Venus tells a sweeping, decades-long tale of two Australian sisters and three men, with a dash of astronomy thrown in. Author Roxana Robinson says the novel entranced her with tragedy, complexity and elegant, arresting prose.

His new book, Dissident Gardens, follows three generations of an activist family, from Rose, a secular Jew and communist, to Sergius, her commune-raised grandson. The book is fiction, but its characters were inspired by Lethem's own family story.

India's politics and history play a central role in Jhumpa Lahiri's The Lowland. In the Booker Prize-nominated novel, an Indian radical is killed, and his wife and brother start over in America. Lahiri tells NPR's Lynn Neary that the story was inspired by true events, but very unlike her own life.

Was King's 1977 The Shining your first fictional scare? Now, after nearly 40 years, King has followed up his horror tale of a little boy and a haunted hotel with a sequel called Doctor Sleep. "I wanted to revisit Danny and see what he was like as a grown-up," King says.

RASL collects all 15 issues of Jeff Smith's comic of the same name, about a time-jumping physicist-turned-art-thief who knows more than is good for him about interdimensional travel. Reviewer Etelka Lehoczky says RASL's female characters can be a little one-dimensional, but overall the book is full of surprises.

Bob Odenkirk and David Cross created and starred in the short-lived sketch comedy program Mr. Show. Fifteen years after their show went off the air, they have a new book of old scripts that were rejected by Hollywood.