Search results for

In The Pregnant Widow by Martin Amis, a man in his 50s looks back on the sexual high point of his life, a summer in Italy when he was 20 and torn between three women. Reviewer Heller McAlpin says The Pregnant Widow is both a romp and an exercise in extended nostalgia.

Jonathan Eig's Get Capone follows the 1931 effort to take down the quintessential American criminal — and obvious killer — on nothing more than a tax charge.

The novel Bronze Drum explores the legend of the sisters' rebellion against Chinese rule and the idea of collective memory as resistance.

Tell Me More Producer Rob Sachs and his wife are eagerly expecting their second child. Besides diaper duty and a soon-to-be little one to love, the Sachses are facing a dilemma — what should they name the baby, whose gender they've chosen not to know before birth? Sachs talks about his search for the perfect baby name.

Lyndall Gordon's Lives Like Loaded Guns explores the family secrets of the reclusive 19th-century poet. Gordon theorizes that Dickinson may have been epileptic, and describes the multi-generational family feud over the posthumous publication of the poet's work.

Private Life, the new novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley, follows the life of a midwestern woman who moves with her new husband, an astronomer, to California at the start of the 20th century. Reviewer Maureen Corrigan says the story, which spans a half-century, is beautifully observed.

English rose from humble beginnings to become a language that's spoken by people from every corner of the Earth. In Globish, Robert McCrum tells the story of how a mongrel language slowly took the world by storm.

Alasdair Gray's latest novel is a hodgepodge of older material — reworked from newspaper articles, discarded stories and plays. It swings widely through time and space to portray the vulnerabilities of men in power, yet it ultimately holds together as funny, profane, cohesive fiction.

The characters in Aimee Bender's latest novel could be modern-day descendants of J.D. Salinger's Glass family. The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake tells the story of Rose, a precocious young girl with a blessing — and a curse: She can taste the emotions of those who cook her food.

Garden writer Bonnie Blodgett didn't know what her sense of smell meant to her — until she lost it. Her new book, Remembering Smell, describes what it's like to live in the world without being able to smell it — from the sweet aromas of springtime to the stench of sour milk.