Book Reviews

Jo Walton says her new collection isn't actually a book of short stories — rather, these pieces are jokes, exercises or odd poems. Either way, Starlings proves endlessly fascinating and inventive.

Lyndon Baines Johnson was an outsize character who gets a lot of credit for his adminstration's successes — but he didn't do it alone, and Joshua Zeitz' new book looks at his most influential aides.

Novelists Nella Larsen, Wallace Thurman and George S. Schuyler forged their art in what W.E.B. Du Bois famously called the "double-consciousness" of African-Americans.

In Melissa Albert's dark take on fairy tales, 17-year-old Alice has spent her entire life on the run from her family legacy: a terrifying mythical world created by her grandmother, a famous author.

Many of the books of poems coming out this year are sad, but also powerful; full of poets processing their lives, looking into pains both personal and political through the cracked glass of poetry.

Nnedi Okorafor winds up her saga of a spacefaring Himba girl from Earth in Binti: The Night Masquerade — but she's warned readers not to expect a neat conclusion, and the book bears out her warning.

Chandler Klang Smith's novel, set in a crumbling far-future metropolis menaced by dragons, is a dizzying, delirious crash of wonders and grotesqueries, spiked with crackling dialogue and detail.

Tommi Parrish's new graphic novel is about a seemingly inconsequential encounter — old, estranged friends spend a few hours talking and drinking — but it's bursting with style and emotion.

Sigrid Nunez's new novel follows a woman mourning the suicide of a close friend, mentor and fellow writer — and the upheaval after she reluctantly takes in his huge, bereft (and smelly) Great Dane.