Book Reviews

Carrie Vaughn — known for her Kitty Norville urban fantasies — ventures offworld with Martians Abroad, a high-school adventure that pays fun, thoughtful homage to Robert Heinlein's "juveniles."

The characters in Ottessa Moshfegh's new collection are cold, unfiltered, frequently pathetic — all suffering from unease and nameless longing, made understandable by each perfectly-built story.

Rachel Cusk's latest — the second in a trilogy that began with Outline — follows a writer unmoored by the breakup of her marriage, and the people she meets as she goes about her strange new life.

In a new collection, 16 essayists describe how Michelle Obama helped change the perception of black women and the White House.

The second installment of Laura Anne Gilman's gritty, mythmaking Devil's West series follows Isobel, the Devil's Left Hand, as she learns the extent of her powers and battles an ancient, angry spirit.

Samanta Schweblin's debut novel starts as a warped child's game, and evolves into a terrifyingly toxic eco-horror tale in the vein of short-but-creepy Latin American classics like Pedro Páramo.

Lijia Zhang's debut novel — about a young woman in China who fights her way out of the sex trade to become a teacher — is sensitively drawn, full of folk wisdom and concise, touching imagery.

Noy Holland's new collection brings together several decades worth of difficult-to-describe stories — some only a few paragraphs long, and all of them hallucinatory and maddening in the best way.