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January 16, 2013 Harlem Renaissance writer Eric Walrond's 1926 story collection, Tropic Death, is being reissued after decades out of print. Reviewer Oscar Villalon says the stories are "disturbing reminders of how utterly vulnerable we are to the injustices of the heart and of community."

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October 20, 2010 In Our Kind of Traitor, former British intelligence officer John le Carre uses his unmatched knowledge of crime and psychology to spin a smooth and satisfying spy thriller about multinational money laundering and greed.

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October 7, 2010 In her debut novel, Vida, Patricia Engel explores one woman's struggle to define her own life in a hard-boiled world of loss and disappointment. With searing and unsentimental prose, Engel demonstrates just how easy it is to stiffen into a person you never wanted to be.

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September 11, 2010 On March 3, 1943, 173 people were crushed to death in a stairwell leading to a London air-raid shelter. The crowd was mostly made up of women and children. In her tender and sorrowful novel, Jessica Francis Kane meditates on the disaster, and how humans try to make sense of inexplicable events.

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July 19, 2010 Former foreign correspondent Dan Fesperman returns with his latest exotic thriller, this time set among the indoor ski slopes and desert strip malls of Dubai. Critic Oscar Villalon says the novel is terrific entertainment, but the book really shines in its dissection of the strange conflicts and contradictions of Dubai's culture.

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July 13, 2010 Suzanne Rivecca's seven short stories feature angrily confused, acerbically witty and romantically incompetent female protagonists. In her first work of fiction, Rivecca brilliantly expresses the pain and the humor of becoming a woman.

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June 23, 2010 Nicholas Carr asks us to look up from our laptops long enough to appreciate the way multitasking and technology are changing the way we think. In his book The Shallows, he laments all that we are losing in exchange for our dynamic, interconnected, Internet-fueled world.

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June 21, 2010 Author and video game aficionado Tom Bissell is just one of millions of kids who grew up with console games and never abandoned the hobby. In his new book, Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, he describes the creative choices that go into creating the virtual worlds of mayhem and fantasy.

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May 7, 2010 In his poetic noir novel, Martin Solares uses the sinister connection between the murder of a journalist and the serial slayings of young girls to explore the grim side of Mexican politics, history and human nature.

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April 14, 2010 Finnish-Estonian novelist Sofi Oksanen uses a newly formed bond between an escaped Russian sex slave and a solitary Estonian woman to explore the ways decades of Soviet rule ravaged life in the former USSR.

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June 26, 2009 A delicious comedy of miscommunication, Percival Everett's I Am Not Sidney Poitier takes on racism and its absurdities. It's a freewheeling coming-of-age, and one of the funniest, most original stories to be published in years.

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May 20, 2009 Part Russian mafia thriller, part postmodern reflecting pool of sentence fragments and literary allusions, Jose Manuel Prieto's confounding, glimmering Rex celebrates the aesthetic and spiritual power of writing.

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April 1, 2009 A scientist and adventurer of legendary endurance, will and bravery, Percy Fawcett set out in 1925 to find the Amazonian city of El Dorado. The Lost City of Z, David Grann's novel-like reconstruction of Percy's quest, thrills both the heart and mind.

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March 19, 2009 In his slyly comic Sum: Forty Tales From the Afterlives, David Eagleman speculates about the great beyond. His whimsical thought experiments set in the hereafter expose truths of the here and now.

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January 29, 2009 Interviews from the influential journal tease out the triumphs and struggles of literary giants, including Norman Mailer, Ralph Ellison and Joyce Carol Oates.

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