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A new biography by Lorna Gibb glosses over West's writing to focus on her remarkable, tumultuous 20th-century life. Reviewer Michael Schaub says the book is well-researched, yet reads like a novel.

The action in Paula Fox's harrowing 1970 novel is set in motion by an unfriendly alley cat — but it spirals out into a multilayered and pointedly accurate portrayal of the dissolution of a marriage.

In her early teens, author Megan Abbott felt trapped in her quiet community. She yearned for a life of glamour and art — like the one she found in a biography of Edie Sedgwick. When she grew up, Abbott realized just how much she'd misunderstood about the woman she'd idolized.

Not much happens in An Unnecessary Woman, Lebanese-American author Rabih Alameddine's novel about an elderly recluse who spends her time reading and translating. But what does happen shows a life in all its mundane, unconventional brilliance.

The knish is a classic Jewish comfort food — a pillow of dough filled with savory fillings like mashed potatoes. Author Laura Silver says the New York knish is also filled with stories.

Adam Begley says Updike created an everyman in his Rabbit book series, and inhabited him fully, "allowing that everyman's senses to be totally open to the American experience."

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist says the myth of the cowboy feels "hollow." The Last Kind Words Saloon is a spare and unsentimental story about two Western icons, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday.

Sue Monk Kidd's new novel, The Invention of Wings, is a fictionalized account of the abolitionist sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké, and the slave Hetty, given to Sarah on her 11th birthday. Reviewer Bobbi Dumas says Wings is a "textured masterpiece, quietly yet powerfully poking our consciences and our consciousness."

Chang-Rae Lee is an award-winning author best known for his novels Native Speaker and The Surrendered. NPR's Rachel Martin speaks with Lee about his latest book On Such a Full Sea, a futuristic dystopian novel set in a declining America that's been repopulated by Chinese immigrant workers.

In 1979, Gary Shteyngart's family moved from Leningrad to Queens. Three decades later, he wrote a memoir about growing up in a Russian immigrant family in New York. Reviewer Meg Wolitzer says the book is full of rich, gratifying writing as well as pride, exuberance and sophisticated humor.