Books News

In his memoir, Saunders recounts his troubled childhood and efforts to maintain balance.

Kinsey Millhone makes one of her last crime column appearances. Elsewhere, we meet rough limo drivers, inept Laotian athletes and a wry L. A. coroner.

Danzy Senna’s new novel follows a woman’s love triangle (of sorts) with two men.

New works by Frank Bidart, Mary Jo Salter and Mary Jo Bang.

Akhil Sharma’s story collection, “A Life of Adventure and Delight,” is a cultural exposé and a lacerating critique of a certain type of male ego.

Bruce Handy's new book 'Wild Things' celebrates the classics of children's literature and reading them again. A 3-star review.        

Imagine you’re a young white prosecutor, engaged to be married, looking forward to the future. Next thing you know, the Rev. Al Sharpton has accused you falsely of raping and abusing a black teenager you’ve never seen or met as part of a racist hate crime. It takes years to clear your name, but by that time, you and your family have been dragged through the mud endlessly, and your faith in the system is broken.

“Seeming, seeming!” a Shakespeare heroine exclaimed as another character betrayed her. The novel “Golden Hill” is also about seeming, and its characters allude often to Shakespeare.

The most refreshing thing about Joshua Green’s new book on the president and his alleged archmanipulator is that it belies its own title. “Devil’s Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency” doesn’t really demonize the White House chief strategist at its center. Delicious from page one, a tad stale down its home stretch, it is a nearly balanced look at the intellectual underpinnings of last year’s electoral revolution, and at a right-wing rebel at the right hand of power — for the moment.

Spend your weekend reading 'See What I Have Done' by Sarah Schmidt. Plus more books USA TODAY's critics liked.        

Suggested reading from editors at The New York Times.

The author of “The Last Tudor” is no fan of “sloppy genre novels”: “The typing alone is so exhausting — surely if you’re going to undertake 150,000 words, you might as well have something interesting to say?”

It's not just your @#%& imagination: American books have gotten a lot more profane over the last six decades, according to a study led by a San Diego State University psychology professor. A team of scholars reports that there's been a “dramatic” increase in curse words in American literature since

'The Medical Examiner' debuts at No. 1 on USA TODAY Best-Selling Books list        

The creative impulse is driven not by personal or professional history, but uninhibited curiosity: the capacity to play around without judgment.