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At the beginning of January, the cover story of The New York Times Magazine declared: "George Saunders Has Written The Best Book You'll Read This Year." The stories in the author's latest collection, The Tenth of December, prove that The Times may well be right.

Blues, jazz and gospel; a civil rights movement that began with the Emmett Till case; modern glass and steel buildings that dared the sky. In Third Coast, Thomas Dyja writes that "the most profound aspects of American Modernity grew up out of the flat, prairie land next to Lake Michigan."

"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.