Every year I play this game: a Chinese portrait built entirely from the titles of books I read. 2024 edition. Describe yourself: Child of All Nations. How do you feel? Wild. Where do you live? The House in the Trees. Your favorite food? Feast. What...

Another year done, time for tallies. Read more this year than last. Lots of doorstoppers, mostly digital. Makes sense—I was on the move constantly, and my e-reader guarantees I always have something to dig into. Some stats: I demolished more books than...

"Evil couldn't come from one isolated person. It always came from numbers, accumulation, the proximity of too many destinies orchestrating their accomplishment ferociously." Been wanting to discover Andrée Michaud's work for ages. This novel hits hard—a meditation...

"If you want my humble opinion, life without Shakespeare is no life at all." Fifty years of American history crammed into one debut novel. Three generations, multiple families. The twist? Porter structures this thing like a play—scenes, acts, dialogue-heavy...

"Being a Jew on horseback instead of the Jew running in front of the horses—that was nothing less than America's miraculous promise." Jay Gladstone is obscenely rich. Inherited a real estate business, turned it into an empire. Built an NBA team from scratch...

"If we can't believe a story just because it's beautiful, what's the point of doing this job?" Four men climb into the Alps, hunting a dragon trapped in ice. Three are paleontologists, one's a guide. This expedition becomes something else entirely—an obsession...

"An artist's role—a writer's role—is to introduce doubt where there was certainty. Kind of the opposite of a politician, if you will." Take one Parisian writer, career winding down. Loves literature, sure, but also loves getting paid. Gets commissioned to write...

"She fears what she calls a general blandness of life settling over her. Her sensations lose their power, their light, their brilliance." Three years ago Vincent Message completely floored me with Defaite des maîtres et possesseurs. Now he's back with this...

"I made a commitment to serve not an agency or even a government, but the public interest—to defend our Constitution, which protects our civil liberties and which is being trampled without shame." Been curious about Snowden's story for years. This memoir...

"His heart could barely support everything he felt. Either it swelled to the sky or shrank to the size of a pin, hard to say." After her phenomenal novel Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff returns with a story collection. All set in Florida—hurricanes, sinkholes...