Book Reviews

Once a year, for 51 years, residents of the Tuscan hamlet Monticchielo have staged a play about their lives. A new documentary finds the town's younger generation is losing interest in the practice.

Sorry, Wrong Nombre: Directors Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, known for stripped-down social realist dramas, bring their spare aesthetic to a surprisingly pulpy murder mystery.

Sigrid Rausing is heir to a packaging fortune and a global philanthropist, but her new memoir describes a painfully ordinary family tragedy: her sister-in-law's drug addiction, struggle and death.

Ben Loory's new story collection is dreamlike in the best way: both cheerfully surreal and cosmically unsettling, full of lovelorn cephalopods, discontented sloths and the occasional darker touch.

This collection of essays, poems, and short stories — edited by John Freeman — makes for a gripping and intensely personal examination of inequality, transience and displacement in America.

Brendan Mathew's The World of Tomorrow follows three Irish brothers having the best (or the worst) week of their lives, in 1939 New York. It's a serious literary novel, but full of madcap flourishes.

Jesmyn Ward's lush and lonely new novel is set amid the mud, blood and heat of Mississippi. It's a road-trip odyssey complicated by hunger, sickness and the murderous racism that infects the town.

Journalist Jason Schreier walks readers through the development of 10 recent games, finding marked similarities in the essential infrastructure of their design and production.

As the weather turns cooler and we start to emerge from summer's torpor, it's time for some faster-paced romances with plenty of exciting twists and turns on the way to the happily-ever-after.

Robin Sloan's latest is a beautiful, small, sweet, quiet book that takes a deep dive into the world of food, underground restaurants and markets, and the magic power of a good sourdough starter.