Bookworm

Ann Patchett's latest novel, Commonwealth, follows fifty-two years in the life of a large family. The idea of the book came to her because as a bookstore owner, she saw that what was missing from the shelves was the story of a big, modern family.

The hero of Here I Am is a pun-loving television writer who is pummeled by the loss of everything he values.  This novel expands a family crisis into a global crisis which threatens the state of Israel.

Nicholson Baker's Substitute: Going to School with a Thousand Kids was born of a desire to write a book articulating his theories about education – theories based on having had kids in school. Realizing his premise was weak, as he'd never been a teacher, he embarked on the adventure of a lifetime by becoming a substitute teacher. 

Since memory is not only malleable but unreliable, which version of the truth will prevail?

Another Brooklyn, award-winning Young Adult novelist Jacqueline Woodson's first novel for adults in twenty years, tells the story of childhood friends as they grow into women. 

An ugly young dwarf girl transforms first into a beauty, then into a tall woman, then into a wolf. 

In Auschwitz, the infamous Dr. Mengele conducted horrifying physical and psychological experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Affinity Konar's Mischling (meaning mixed blood) is the story of twin sisters who find themselves imprisoned in Dr. Mengele's "zoo."

Adam Fitzgerald's poetry in George Washington: Poems comes across as playful while exploring the concept of Americana and what that means. 

Krys Lee's first novel dramatizes boundaries and borders – not just political ones but those that complicate human relationships.  

A married couple wind up in a wasteland of foreclosed houses and abandoned homes.

Tom McCarthy's Satin Island features a protagonist who, as his company's corporate anthropologist, has been given the enormous task of compiling a report summing up the modern era.

In his travels to more than 100 countries – some dangerous, some surprisingly not – Tom Lutz finds that the more places he goes, the more the world leaves him a little bit lost.

Neither a novel nor a collection of stories, the "fictions" in She  weave together a composite view of Los Angeles.  

A tale of the ordinary, everyday quest for contentedness -- written entirely in heroic couplets.

Vivian Gornick's memoir The Odd Woman and the City takes us on a tour of a life that is lived by walking, observing and talking. Gornick keeps her eyes open, and does she ever have a mouth on her!