Book Reviews

Like a hidden NINA, there are great moments in Ellen Stern's hefty new biography of cartoonist Al Hirschfeld — but they're obscured by her off-puttingly glib tone and perpetual present tense.

Alice Hoffman returns to the world of her best-selling Practical Magic in this new book, a prequel dedicated to the early lives and loves of the first volume's elderly aunts Francis and Jet.

Carmen Maria Machado's new collection takes young female online culture — LiveJournal and Tumblr, ghost stories and urban legends — and reinforce the uncanny power and reach of those stories.

Lizzie Collingham's new book takes 20 exemplary British meals, from plain stewed beef to an elaborate Christmas pudding, and uses them to illustrate the way food and empire are inextricably linked.

Matthew McIntosh's fractured and fracturing 1,600-page tale of a writer with amnesia and a missing manuscript isn't fun, and it probably isn't supposed to be. But it is magnificently weird.

Jonathan Eig's exhaustively researched new book paints a complex picture of Muhammad Ali, from his Kentucky childhood to his brilliant fighting style, his kindnesses, cruelties and eventual decline.

Rivers Solomon's novel is set on a giant generation ship, on an interstellar voyage of centuries, divided between the wealthy, light-skinned upper-deckers and the oppressed, laboring lower-deckers.

Jennifer Egan's new novel, set in New York in the 1930s and 1940s, is full of deeply researched period detail and rich, memorable characters — though their motivations don't always add up.

For centuries, Shakespeare's tragedy was too painful for audiences; it was performed with an altered happy ending. But Edward St. Aubyn has never flinched at inflicting pain on his readers.