Book Review: 'the Favorites' By Mary Yukari Waters

Colonel Pogue, the pilot for Skylab’s last manned mission in 1973, went on “strike” while in orbit to demand more free time to enjoy the view and to think.

Storms at sea play a key role in the tale of John Jacob Astor's attempt to establish a pivotal trading center on the unsettled, little-known northern Pacific Coast in the early 19th century. Yet few modern readers have ever been in a fragile wooden sailing ship during a storm on the ocean, especially with its sails unfurled.

25 years after Tiananmen Square, Li publishes an allegorical novel about the dangers of passivitySilence poisons. The past ensnares. Lives linked by tragedy — time and distance be damned — cannot be untangled.

Skokie resident has different take on classic 'Sleeping Beauty' taleLike the heroine in her new novel, Elizabeth Blackwell is not the sort of person about whom stories are told. A veteran freelance writer, she is usually the one telling the stories. But this may be about to change with the publication of her third and most ambitious novel, "While Beauty Slept," a new take on "Sleeping Beauty."

With 'Blood Will Out,' Kirn questions the motives of his subject. And his own. In 1998, Walter Kirn agreed to drive a crippled dog from Montana to New York as a favor to a man he had never met: Clark Rockefeller.

Moore dishes on the intersection of bleakness and humor in her writingLorrie Moore is simultaneously one of the funniest and saddest fiction writers in America. Her collections of short stories are masterpieces of the laughter-through-tears variety, full of high and low comedy that somehow redeems, or maybe just makes temporarily bearable, their deep wells of sorrow.