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Welcome to awards season. Between the Golden Globes, the SAG awards, and the upcoming Oscars, it's enough to make anyone question America's fixation on movies. But author Kevin Roose says that Jess Walter's Beautiful Ruins, a novel with a funny take on the movie industry, shows that there's something important going on behind the glitz.

Director David Cronenberg's debut work of fiction is not for the faint of heart. Consumed follows two journalists as they chase stories of cannibalism, backroom surgeries, self-mutilation and murder.

Sarah Waters' latest novel, set in 1920s London, examines the moral consequences of passion. Though slightly too long, this book brings the past to life with exquisite clarity.

Colin Meloy, best known as the Decemberists' front man, is also a novelist. His newest book is the second in a series for young readers, called Wildwood Chronicles. The book catches up with its precocious protagonist, Prue, who leaves the seventh grade to return to the magical world of Wildwood.

Molly Antopol's short stories are set in many different times and places. But reviewer Meg Wolitzer says each one will make you nostalgic for another era in short fiction, a time when writer like Bernard Malamud, and Issac Bashevis Singer and Grace Paley roamed the earth.

The Counterfeit Agent, released this week, is the 8th book in Berenson's series starring tormented ex-CIA agent John Wells, who never stops battling dangers that might be on the front page of the New York Times — and who converted to Islam years before the TV series Homeland used the same plot device.

In Marcel Theroux's Strange Bodies, dead people inhabit new bodies and immortality isn't all it's cracked up to be. Theroux tells NPR's Scott Simon, "I think that everyone who loves books has experienced the feeling of being taken over by another mind."

Biographer Amanda Vaill's new book delves deeply into the lives of journalists like Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, whose documenting of the war helped shape public perception.

Former Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner received mixed reviews of his performance during the financial crisis. In his new book, he says he did what was required to "keep the lights on."

Performer Philippe Petit, who walked between the World Trade Center towers in 1974, says the difference between the average criminal and an artistic one is that the former takes and the latter gives.