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"Lives don't divide up into chapters," says novelist Will Self, whose latest, Umbrella, is a challenging read that layers narratives, places and characters for an intensely nonlinear experience. The book centers on a psychiatrist and one of his patients, a woman who's been comatose for 50 years.

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.

Tales about travel don't always end well: Planes crash into jungles and ships run aground. For NPR's "Book Your Trip" series, Lynn Neary considers the rich genre of travel disaster literature.

A new collection reprints the first six issues of EC Comics' classic 1950s pulp horror series. Packed with gore and goofiness, these may, in fact, be the comics your mother warned you about.

Reviewer Maureen Corrigan says Ian McGuire's The North Water and Dominic Smith's The Last Painting of Sara de Vos are suspenseful historical novels that may just give readers nightmares.

Where did Lear get the confidence to spend three years fighting to get All In The Family on air? His answer: "Can you say 'beats the **** out of me' on NPR?"

Reviewer Jason Heller says Laura Van Den Berg's first novel has a stellar setup — mysterious young woman, post-disease-apocalypse — but drifts listlessly, never quite living up to its premise.

Other people just going about their lives in public are not fodder for your social media. Let's think a little harder about the etiquette of putting pictures and videos of strangers up online.

James Salter is a master prose stylist whose deceptively simple sentences reveal the sensations and truth of experience. In All That Is, he conjures the life and times of Philip Bowman, who, returning to New York after World War II, pursues love and a publishing career, with unequal success.

A fierce playwright, a fiery socialist and a pioneering feminist, Lillian Hellman lived unapologetically. But today she's remembered as a fabulist and a rabble-rouser — if she's remembered at all. A new Hellman biography, A Difficult Woman, hopes to set the record straight.