Esch Batiste is the only female in the Pit, a hardscrabble patch of bayou country she has shared with her father and three brothers since their mother died in childbirth.

In this brilliantly inventive novel, memory and imagination blur as a young Bosnian man living in Southern California recalls life in his disintegrating homeland.

A 25-year-old debut novelist ponders the wisdom of the ages.

Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad is a wildly ambitious novel about the music business, media technology and culture.

Half a Life, a beyond-brave memoir by Darin Strauss, offers an intensely personal look at the most agonizing events in the author's life after a tragic accident.

Learn more about the book and the author.

In The Warmth of Other Suns, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson illustrates how the early-20th-century migration of blacks to northern cities precipitated the civil rights movement and created our cities and art forms.

The singer-icon's memoir about coming of age with soul mate Robert Mapplethorpe. Funny, fascinating, oddly tender.

Pam Houston reviews Olive Kitteridge by Elizabeth Strout for O, The Oprah Magazine

Vince Passaro reviews Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey, a biography of a great American novelist.

Chilean novelist and poet Roberto Bolaño died in 2003, at only 50, cutting short a career that swept over the literary world like a tidal wave. His final novel, 2666 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), published posthumously, takes on the real-life subject of hundreds of women who have been found killed over the last 15 years in the desert outside Ciudad Juárez on the Mexican-American border, one of the most disturbing series of crimes in Latin American history.