Arts & Life

This month, our kids' books columnist Juanita Giles is thinking about how hard it is to race through a series — as her son did with The Last Kids on Earth — and have to wait for the next book.

As usual, the more than two dozen winners in 2019 span a range of fields, from fiction and cartoons to neuroscience and theoretical geophysics. Now they've got one important accolade in common.

Maaza Mengiste's new novel is set just before the second Italo-Ethiopian War, and follows a woman who becomes a guard to a "shadow king," a man impersonating exiled Ethiopian ruler Haile Selassie.

The new book Letters from Hollywood offers a peek inside the inner workings of the film industry through 137 communiques from luminaries like Audrey Hepburn, Bette Davis and a very young Jane Fonda.

Smith's musical career sometimes threatens to overshadow her accomplishments in other creative fields, but every page in this book reminds us that she is an accomplished novelist, essayist and poet.

"Magic is often very much a part" of the story of enslavement and escape, Coates says. His new novel, The Water Dancer, imagines a world in which teleportation helps power the Underground Railroad.

With her new essay collection, Jamison reverses the arc of The Empathy Exams by moving from the external to the internal, from others' longings and hauntings to her own.

A new book explores how overhunting and habitat destruction have left us with only a fraction of the foods that existed a century ago, and the changes that are needed to preserve our culinary variety.

The holidays at work can mean boozy parties, end-of-year bonus disasters and a whole lot of sugary baked goods. If you have questions about getting through the season, we want to hear from you.