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Claire Messud's new novel, The Woman Upstairs, delves into the inner life of the quiet, friendly — and secretly furious — woman upstairs, a frustrated artist named Nora who becomes obsessed with a glamorous immigrant family.

Professional Scrabble fan John D. Williams' new memoir is chock full of interesting tidbits (like lists of important words with Q, X and J) but gets bogged down in tedious biographical detail.

In her new book, social researcher Wednesday Martin examines the sometimes puzzling culture of motherhood in that most exotic of locales — Manhattan's Upper East Side.

Hugh Howey is the author of the dystopian WOOL series, about a future in which the remains of humanity are living underground in giant self-sustaining silos. The first volume of WOOL was a self-publishing sensation; the latest volume, Dust, has just been released.

Intelligent, gregarious and at times disarmingly personal, Justice Sonia Sotomayor's memoir, My Beloved World, recounts her trailblazing journey from a Bronx housing project to a bench on the Supreme Court.

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.