Bob Odenkirk: By the Book
The actor and author of “A Load of Hooey” keeps a volume of “hippie philosophizing” on his shelves as a counterbalance to his “angry, skeptical, scowling mind.”
In ‘The Stranger,” Chuck Todd, moderator of “Meet the Press,” dissects President Obama’s record.
The actor and author of “A Load of Hooey” keeps a volume of “hippie philosophizing” on his shelves as a counterbalance to his “angry, skeptical, scowling mind.”
Amy Poehler’s new book, “Yes Please,” includes backstage “Saturday Night Live” stories, lists, old photos and guest essays from both her parents.
Twenty-five years after the Berlin Wall came down, a picture book finds hope in one family’s escape from the East.
“All the Truth Is Out,” by Matt Bai, makes the case that the Gary Hart scandal of 1987 left a lasting scar on America’s political life.
In Richard Ford’s fourth Frank Bascombe book, “Let Me Be Frank With You,” his Everyman hero is 68, retired and living in Default Mode.
The writer David Ritz reflects on his career of helping celebrities, often recording artists, put their lives on the page.
The latest Norton anthology takes on major world religions, in 4,000-plus pages.
Clive James, 75, who has leukemia, continues to publish poetry and work on other projects in a career that has defied definition.
Product placement in a novel might strike some as unseemly, but “Find Me I’m Yours” — an e-book that also makes room for sponsored content from companies — is not like most novels.
Emily St. John Mandel’s novel “Station Eleven” envisions a world in which a strain of flu wipes out most of civilization.
On Halloween, a look at three small publishers of horror novels and comics.
In the third offering in the Red Knit Cap Girl picture-book series, the heroine and her animal friends create a library in an inviting tree.
A former Navy SEAL who wrote a best seller about the raid that killed Osama bin Laden is under criminal investigation for disclosing classified material.
“Respect” is David Ritz’s latest biography, this one about the life of Aretha Franklin.
Mr. Kinnell’s works could encompass celebrations of Manhattan street life and meditations on mortality. In 1983, he won a Pulitzer and a National Book Award.
Recent releases include fiction by David Nicholls, Edward St. Aubyn, Yannick Grannec and Ludmilla Petrushevskaya.
In Michel Faber’s novel “The Book of Strange New Things,” a missionary dispatched to a faraway planet gets desperate missives from his wife.
Emmanuel Carrère’s new book profiles Edward Limonov, the bad boy of Soviet dissident writers.
“Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh” is John Lahr’s thick volume on the playwright.
Martha Weinman Lear returns to the territory she covered in “Heartsounds,” but this is not a sequel so much as a rueful epilogue, a brief account of her own recent skirmish with heart disease.
Ahead of the American publication of his latest work, “The Book of Strange New Things,” Michel Faber discusses it and why it will be his last novel.
In a country that has long been ill at ease with its hard-living son, Thomas’s granddaughter is trying to refocus public attention on the poet’s work.
In “At Home in Exile,” Alan Wolfe argues that the Diaspora has fostered in Jews a commitment to defend the rights of other groups and to live by universal values wherever they may be.
Squeezed out by new construction, Posman Books, which has been at Grand Central Terminal for 15 years, will close its store there on Dec. 31.
In Michel Faber’s novel, a pastor heads off to take up a new ministry on another planet.
The musician and author of the new picture book “Outlaw Pete” likes reading about cosmology: “I find men and women struggling to answer the deepest questions we can ask freeing.”
Deserted by their enigmatic father, three brothers struggle to find themselves in Daniel Kehlmann’s tragicomedy.
Matt Bai sees the implosion of Gary Hart’s second presidential campaign as a watershed in American politics.
Leslie H. Gelb reviews Leon Panetta’s memoir, which recounts a career in public service, including stints as White House chief of staff, director of the C.I.A. and defense secretary.
The stories in “Wallflowers,” Eliza Robertson’s debut collection, portray people surviving loss and heartbreak in a world full of uncanny moments.
Brian Morton’s heroine is a feisty aging feminist.
Recovering Aristotle as a scientist who explored and cataloged the Mediterranean’s natural world.
Two books about Berlin, past and present, explore its dualities of sex and violence, freedom and fascism.
From the mid-19th century through the 1930s, gay people were at home in Berlin.
Lincoln dealt shrewdly with the publishers and editors of politically powerful 19th-century newspapers.
A recounting of Martin Luther King Jr.’s difficult final year.
In 1787, George Washington again rode to the nation’s rescue.
How did America become a postwar haven for Nazis?
Resistance in a provincial French town helped save thousands.
In Michael Connelly’s “The Burning Room,” Harry Bosch tries to impart wisdom to his new partner.
Thomas Mallon and James Parker discuss what influences their work — aside from other books.
“Sweetbitter,” by the 30-year-old waitress Stephanie Danler, is but one in a crop of debut novels acquired by publishers in lucrative deals.
The New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2014, with sample artwork from each.
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Bruce Springsteen has increasingly become the subject of popular and scholarly literature.
New books by Julie Schumacher, Cathie Pelletier, Stuart Rojstaczer and Jonathan Coe.
Zoë Heller and Anna Holmes discuss the havoc books can wreak on relationships.
This week, Marcel Theroux discusses Michel Faber’s novel “The Book of Strange New Things”; Alexandra Alter has news from the literary world; Harold Holzer talks about “Lincoln and the Power of the Press”; and Gregory Cowles has best-seller news. Pamela Paul is the host.
Bryan Stevenson, whose “Just Mercy” is No. 10 on the hardcover nonfiction list, says that “if we’re really committed to justice, we’ve got to do better for the poor than we’re doing.”
Three new books celebrate New York City history, culture and its subway and bus systems.
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