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Most people are familiar with Leonardo da Vinci's Vitruvian Man: A nude man, with his arms and legs outstretched, inside a square within a circle. In his book Da Vinci's Ghost, author Toby Lester tells the story of da Vinci's quest to create an image of the perfectly proportioned human.

Historian Adam Goodheart explains how national leaders and ordinary citizens across the country responded to the chaos and uncertainty in 1861: The Civil War Awakening.

D.A. Powell's poems in Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys subvert Boy Scout imagery with cheekiness, and take on desire, salvation and HIV with courage. This is a book that looks death in the eye — and winks.

Lauren Groff's new novel, Arcadia, follows the story of Bit, the first baby born to a Utopian commune, as he grows to adulthood and the commune gradually falls apart. Groff says she was skeptical about communes at first, but her views changed as she wrote.

Kathryn Harrison's novel about Rasputin's daughter and the blood-soaked last days of the Russian imperial family should be full of wicked intrigue — but critic Heller McAlpin says it falls curiously flat.

The correspondence between John D'Agata and his former fact-checker Jim Fingal is antagonistic, hilarious and even profound.

In R.J. Palacio's new novel, a middle-schooler with a facial deformity struggles to fit in. Raquel Jaramillo, the author behind the pen name, says she found it more interesting to write about teens being kind than about teens being mean.

Liza Mundy, author of The Richer Sex, discusses the trend — and implications — of women becoming the primary breadwinners in their families, a phenomenon that cuts across race, class and geographic location.

From the comedian and digital director of The Onion, a satirical self-help book for anyone who has a black friend, wants to be the next black president or speak for the black community.

Lysley Tenorio's humorous and heart-rending short stories take us into the lives of B-movie actresses, superhero obsessives and the residents of leper colonies.