Book Reviews

Escape from the holiday whirl with three tasty romances, featuring a duke with an epic library, a young girl finding herself in the big city and a proper lady finding love where she least expects it.

Fresh Air's book critic says her 2017 list is chaotic in a good way. "These books zing off in all directions: They're fresh, unruly and dismissive of the canned and contrived."

This season's secret weapon in literary banter will be Mrs. Caliban, a peculiar, wonderful, overlooked 1983 novella by Rachel Ingalls, about a housewife whose life is upended by a suave frog monster.

Wilson — the first woman to translate The Odyssey — has created a fresh, authoritative and slyly humorous version of Homer's epic that scours away archaisms while preserving nuance and complexity.

Virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier's book is part memoir, part history of the development of VR, and an unexpected but welcome comparison of the promises of VR with those of artificial intelligence.

Sydney, the teenage protagonist of Charles Forsman's new graphic novel, has all the usual problems of her age, plus one: She's telekinetic. And it quickly becomes clear that her story is a grim one.

Arthur Herman's new book zooms in on Vladimir Lenin, Woodrow Wilson, and the vast, conflicting historical forces they embodied — and which came to a head in the fateful year of 1917.

Susan Sontag once called author László Krasznahorkai the "contemporary Hungarian master of apocalypse," but his new book — while disturbing — isn't as hopeless as that might lead you to think.

Previously, American comics fans would've been lucky to discover French artist Nicole Claveloux in old issues of Heavy Metal magazine. Now, her delightfully weird work has been compiled in a new book.