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In his novel Dream Boy, Jim Grimsley explores the beauty and violence of growing up gay in the rural South. Author Justin Torres offers this devastatingly beautiful novel to anyone who has ever been the target of a bully.

Comic book writer Grant Morrison offers up a treat of a treatise on what superheroes represent: A trippy, hyperarticulate and occasionally pointed cultural history of the spandex set.

Award-winning novelist Robert Stone hung out for many years with Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. He recounts the group's cross-country road trips and experiences taking hallucinogenic drugs in his memoir, Prime Green.

Kathy Reichs, a forensic anthropologist, is the author of the books that inspired the Fox TV series Bones. Her latest novel kicks off with a gruesome discovery: a body stashed in a drum full of asphalt and tossed in a landfill at a North Carolina speedway.

The A&P changed the way Americans do their grocery shopping, but it did so at a cost — thousands of mom-and-pop corner stores closed as the chain grew. Economic historian Marc Levinson chronicles the rise and fall of the grocery giant in The Great A&P and the Struggle for Small Business in America.

Justin Torres' debut novel is a welterweight champ of a book. It tells the story of three brothers growing up in a family that is both fiercely loyal and violently chaotic. Together, they endure their parents, their poverty and, of course, each other.

Being a teenager is hard. You're misunderstood, your hormones are surging, and you just know that the girl down the street is the one. Author Ben Dolnick recommends revisiting this time with Scott Spencer's romance, Endless Love — a novel that brings you back to that amorous teenage angst.

What makes a memorable character? It is the one who changes the most throughout the book? The one who makes a personal discovery? Or is it simply the most eccentric who we love? Actor Simon Pegg says that for his favorite literary protagonist, all three apply.

Two years after opening his award-winning Chicago restaurant Alinea, chef Grant Achatz was diagnosed with tongue cancer. He describes losing and regaining his taste in Life, on the Line. "My palate developed just as a newborn," Achatz says. "I don't recommend it, but I think it made me a better chef."

While many hoped Barack Obama's presidency would usher in a post-racial period in America, Randall Kennedy says the reality hasn't lived up to that expectation. In The Persistence of the Color Line, Kennedy explores the racial issues still at play in the presidency and throughout the country.