Books

William T. Vollmann's 2005 novel Europe Central was a masterpiece. His latest work, a collection of ghost stories entitled "Last Stories and Other Stories" is flabby and cliched.

Modeled after the groundbreaking feminist health manual Our Bodies, Ourselves, the book details the social, political and medical issues faced by transgender people.

In her new book, Angela Ricketts writes about raising three kids while her husband deployed eight times over 22 years. Each separation "kind of blackens your soul," she says.

After Harper Lee wrote To Kill A Mockingbird, she became a recluse and lived with her sister, Alice, in Alabama. Reporter Marja Mills uses rich detail to provides glimpses into their twilight years.

The South African Nobel laureate was an associate of Nelson Mandela's, and while she was never imprisoned, several of her books were banned by the government. She died Sunday at the age of 90.

Virginia furniture owner John Bassett III was determined to beat out foreign competitors. Author Beth Macy documents him, and the collapse of the U.S. furniture industry, in her new book, Factory Man.

Germany thrashed Brazil 7-1 this week. Author Kevin Roose says Ernest Thayer's classic poem on failure, "Casey at the Bat," might cheer the Brazilian soccer team up.

Jacqueline Winspear's debut mystery, Maisie Dobbs, set in England around World War I, came out in paperback a decade ago. A new edition testifies to the enduring allure of the traditional mystery.

Was "I think I can" the grandmother of "lean in?" Some readers see the plucky locomotive as a parable about working women, but in some versions of the story the protagonist was male.

California tells the story of a couple who, when they learn they are having a baby, leave their solitary refuge in a forest for a Utopian community in post-apocalyptic America.

The story, which is about a man who comes back to life, was meant to be the final piece in Samuel Beckett's first collection of stories. But his original editor refused to publish it.

Jean Kwok, the award-winning writer of Girl in Translation, has written a new book called Mambo in Chinatown, a Cinderella story about a 22-year-old Chinese-American torn between two cultures.