Books News

As sharp, sophisticated and refreshing as a flute of champagne, Genevieve Valentine’s “The Girls at the Kingfisher Club” will make you want to strap on dancing shoes and find an all-night speakeasy to call your own.

If America has a Victor Hugo, it is Amy Bloom, whose picaresque novels roam the world, plumb the human heart and send characters into wild roulettes of kismet and calamity. Her best known work, “Away,” was an epic adventure set in the early 20th century. In it, a Jewish mother survives a devastating Russian pogrom, comes to America, becomes a famous actor’s mistress, then traverses the country, joins the African American underworld, and crosses Alaska and Siberia in search of her daughter.

Ms. Shivers was startled by the critical success of her first novella, “Here to Get My Baby Out of Jail” (1983), published when she was in her 50s.

Peter Mendelsund has designed hundreds of striking book covers, but his imagination seized up when it came time to design one for his own book.

All of William T. Vollmann’s future books will have been written by a ghost. He assures readers of this much in his note at the beginning of his latest short story collection, “Last Stories and Other Stories.”

Brett Arends suggests some business classics that every serious investor should read.

FICTION: Two sisters reinvent themselves – and the notion of family – in 1940s America.

FICTION: Linked stories about white and Lakota families in North Dakota, and the spiritual connection to the land.

In a new book, two professors of family law chronicle the economic factors that are eroding old definitions of the family.

Reform-minded journalists over the years have ranged from Ida Tarbell to Woodward and Bernstein.

Now that Sony's Walkman is back, what's next? Joe Queenan has a wish list. Paging the the Nehru Jacket.

In Phnom Penh, Cambodia, there’s a small garden sheltered from the clatter of the street where young girls quietly play inside a treehouse. The purpose of this hideaway is almost unfathomable. The girls — many of whom have been sold into sexual slavery by their mothers — are brought to the garden by activists who rescue them.

By now, the story of British double-agent Harold “Kim” Philby may be the most familiar spy yarn ever, fodder for whole libraries of histories, personal memoirs and novels. But Ben Macintyre manages to retell it in a way that makes Philby’s destructive genius fresh and horridly fascinating — and, to me, at least, ultimately inexplicable.

Teen love story was No. 1on USA TODAY's list for 11 straight weeks.        

Midwestern natives among four of five Americans longlisted for literary awardLost in Wednesday's news about the first global Man Booker Prize longlist was that among the five Americans who made it on the longlist of finalists, four are Midwesterners.

Author Harper Lee says she did not cooperate with a book that is now on USA TODAY's list.