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Marion Meade chronicles the life and times of little-known author Nathanael West and his wife, Eileen McKenney. West was the author of the novels Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust.

The first two books in Stieg Larsson's Millennium trilogy are megahits, and the third, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, comes out in May. But some American readers don't want to wait that long — they're importing the book from England, where it was released last year.

James Sturm's graphic novel, set just before the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, is about a young expectant father on his way to market to sell the rugs he carefully makes by hand.

Superbug, a new book by journalist Maryn McKenna, tracks the spread of MRSA, the drug-resistant staph infection that seems to outwit every antibiotic thrown at it. McKenna explains how the bacteria has changed over the past 30 years — and how a vaccine may be the only way to stop it.

When author Simon Van Booy looks to puncture the solitude of writing life, he reaches for George, Being George, the oral biography of George Plimpton. Based on hundreds of interviews with his intimates and colleagues, the portrait of Plimpton reveals the richness and flavor of life that the actor and writer knew how to capture so well in his own work.

How much do we really know about the day-to-day in Jesus' time? What people ate, how they flirted, how they stayed clean? Scott Korb takes on that question in Life In Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine a historical travelogue that manages to reference Michael Pollan, Anthony Bourdain and H1N1, all while recreating the time and place of Jesus.

In 2008, historian Tony Judt was diagnosed with ALS, a progressive motor-neuron disease. For the past several months, Judt has been writing a series of essays for The New York Review of Books, charting life in what he calls a "progressive imprisonment without parole."

Jeff Shesol's Supreme Power is the story of President Franklin Roosevelt, his struggle to institute the New Deal, and the Supreme Court's subsequent backlash. Critic Michael Schaub says the book breathes new life into a historic conflict.

Brian McLaren, an influential evangelical leader, suggests in a new book that Jesus is not the only way to salvation. Traditional evangelicals fiercely object to his ideas. But McLaren is tapping into a generational divide between young evangelicals and their parents.

Daily Beast Editor-in-Chief Tina Brown shares with Steve Inskeep the best things she's been reading lately: on making too much money, almost selling sex, and murder in a city known for sin.