Arts

Emily Suvada's debut novel — a high-tech young adult dystopia — is bursting with ideas (and exploding viruses). And while it might seem like a conventional thriller, it's got a twist to reckon with.

When museum conservators examined Vincent Van Gogh's Olive Trees, they found something curious stuck in its paint: a grasshopper. Could it be just some weird leftover — or a crucial clue?

"It wasn't like I had to go looking for the drugs and the sex," Anthony DeCurtis says. "Lou wrote about it ... so I felt it was fair game." DeCurtis' new book is Lou Reed: A Life.

Author John Banville makes a valiant imaginative leap with Mrs. Osmond, his attempt to craft a new ending for the heroine of Henry James' The Portrait of a Lady, but he doesn't quite land it.

Activist Bill McKibben answers his own call for topical fiction with Radio Free Vermont, a gently surreal tale about a septuagenarian troublemaker who inadvertently sparks a secession movement.

In the 1600s, after decades of war, the Netherlands was thriving. Artists like Johannes Vermeer celebrated the nation's wealth with images of fine clothing, glimmering pearls and imported parrots.