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Book critic Maureen Corrigan says that if there's one word that characterizes her list this year, it's "serious." These books certainly aren't grim or dull, but they take on big, difficult subjects.

We're previewing this year's summer reader poll on comics and graphic novels by highlighting comics that stand as historic milestones.

This year's cookbooks point to big dreams, and a kind of comfort with concepts once considered the province of professional cooks.

Has the end of Game of Thrones and the long wait for the next Song of Ice and Fire book got you, uh ... dragon? We've rounded up some of this year's best scales-and-wings reads to help fill the void.

This year's treasures include a heart-racing memoir, a fun first novel, a fascinating study of fraternal bonds, plus Toni Morrison's Home and Christopher Hitchens' last work. Critic Heller McAlpin has sifted through piles of new publications and panned for literary gold.

Hang on tight. These five new works of fiction will take you on an exhilarating ride. Brace yourself for a noir he-said-she-said, an R-rated version of Marie Antoinette's life and death, a haunting tale from a back-to-nature commune and Toni Morrison's lush Home.

It's a rich week for fiction, with new novels from Ann Patchett and Jennifer Weiner, and a debut by Chad Harbach that marries a literary sensibility with a love of baseball — plus Jorie Graham's new poetry collection. In nonfiction, Erik Larson is back with the story of an American ambassador in Germany in 1933.

Novelist Tayari Jones explores a father's deception of his family, while historian David McCullough looks at 19th-century Americans in Paris, Roy Blount Jr. revels in verbal curiosities, writer Bill James reflects on true-crime stories, and journalist Diana Henriques probes the Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff.

Novelist Mary Gordon looks at love and maturity, while Henning Mankell delivers his last Kurt Wallander mystery. In nonfiction, Jim Rasenberger revisits the Bay of Pigs, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon tells of Afghani women's ingenuity, Charles Ogletree probes the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Meagan O'Rourke meditates on her mother's death.

Poet Tracy K. Smith's three favorite poems of 2011 blur the private and public, the personal and political, and will refresh how you look at language and the world.