Book Reviews

The New Yorker journalist says Putin and Trump were elected president without really wanting the job. They ran "not for president but for autocrat" and did not expect to settle for anything less.

In Meryl Wilsner's debut novel, a Hollywood showrunner and her assistant are thrust into the spotlight after an innocuous red-carpet moment prompts gossip about a relationship between the two women.

Musician Mikel Jollett writes of his young years spent in the Synanon cult and how music helped him overcome these dark days, but misses a chance to discuss music as art and the ideas guiding him now.

During a boyhood in the Philippines, Meredith Talusan received positive reactions to the white skin and blonde hair accompanying albinism. She found a different response as a trans woman in the U.S.

Nancy McKinley mixes screwball humor with social criticism in a collection of interlocking stories about two women who work at a mall in Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Porochista Khakpour's work is strongest when she turns the lens on herself to examine how she, too, is complicit; many essays here are just too tantalizingly brief to allow space for deep analysis.

Ivy Pochoda keeps up her focus on the overlooked and forgotten in her new novel. Here, it's a group of sex workers and club dancers whose lives are connected — and imperiled — by a serial killer.

Edward Snowden handpicked Barton Gellman as one of three journalists he would work with to reveal government secrets. Gellman's book is an in-depth look at where he agreed and disagreed with Snowden.

While Suzanne Collins leaves readers uncertain of the answer to the question she poses in The Hunger Games — how much of character is innate, how much formed — it becomes painfully obvious here.