Books

Laird Hunt's slim sixth novel wields outsized power. Like the fairy tales the narrator's mother told her as a girl, the deceptively plain language of "Neverhome" vibrates across the spectrum of human experience. "My mother liked to start one story and finish off with another," she recalls....

If Rose Howard's family was well off, she'd be a "special" girl who was considered smart and quirky by the teachers at her private school for children who have Asperger's syndrome.

In Japan, history is still divided according to the reign of the emperors. This year, for instance, is Heisei 26 — the 26th year of the reign of Emperor Akihito, who will be posthumously renamed Heisei.

Herbie Hancock has had the kind of career that's unlikely to ever be duplicated. Appearing on landmark recordings with Miles Davis as well as his own band in the 1960s, Hancock memorably scaled to even greater fame while fusing jazz and funk with the Headhunters in the '70s and becoming the...

With a National Book Award, two PEN/Faulkners and a Pulitzer nomination under his belt, Ha Jin is one of America's most decorated living novelists. He's made a name for himself writing beautiful stories centered in China, where he was born and raised. Jin didn't start writing in English until...

Lydia Millet's new novel, "Mermaids in Paradise" (W.W. Norton: 290 pp., $25.95), operates on a variety of levels, from parody to romance to (in its own way) oddball thriller, tracing a couple on their honeymoon who get embroiled in high-stakes drama after they discover actual mermaids...

With her latest "Have You Seen Marie?," Sandra Cisneros has written a picture book for adults (and kids too).

Gene Luen Yang has been getting a lot of attention from prize juries for his two-part graphic novel for young adults, "Boxers and Saints."

Gina Frangello's "A Life in Men" (Algonquin) is a novel about a woman with cystic fibrosis who decides to explore the word, making reckless choices with the knowledge that her time is limited. Frangello keeps very busy: She is fiction editor of the Nervous Breakdown, Sunday editor of the...

In "The Bohemians: Mark Twain and the San Francisco Writers Who Reinvented American Literature," Ben Tarnoff explores Twain's formative years as a young writer in San Francisco in the 1860s and the surprisingly rich cultural community he found there.