'Wisdom’s Kiss': A Hypertextual Fairy Tale

Playful, sophisticated and intensely witty, Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s latest fairy tale, Wisdom's Kiss, bears all the trappings of a high Victorian yarn: protracted chapter titles, characters named after virtues and a fast-paced, wildly convoluted plot. A veritable chorus of narrators greets readers as the florid cast of protagonists and antagonists alike reveal their schemes and desires for love and power in the Empire of Lax.

Murdock got so caught up in describing the sagas of Trudy and Tips, Wisdom, Ben, Escoffier the cat and the dastardly Wilhemina, that she not only employed a variety of genres—drama, letters ...

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Following Mother Teresa in ‘An Unquenchable Thirst’

“I want earth, not heaven,” concludes Mary Johnson in the epilogue to her spellbinding memoir, An Unquenchable Thirst. In the book, she describes her spiritual calling to work with Mother Teresa, along with the inner reckonings that compelled her to leave a nun’s life and her faith after 20 years in the convent.

Read more of our Best of 2011 Nonfiction.

After Johnson took one look at Mother Teresa on the cover of Time in 1975, the devout then-17-year-old Texan knew that she not only wanted to devote her life to God but work alongside the pious, world-renowned champion ...

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Harlan Coben's New Teen Hero

With double-digit trade bestsellers and an armful of major awards for writing mystery, Harlan Coben has become synonymous with the page-ripping thriller. Why then has this master of suspense who keeps millions of adults up past their bedtimes with his Myron Bolitar novels, including this year's Live Wire, set his sights on a slightly younger crowd?

Turns out Coben's young protagonist, 15-year-old Mickey Bolitar, not only happens to be Myron's nephew, but has a few hair-raising issues of his own to work out: a new school, a missing girlfriend, his mother in rehab and a chance encounter ...

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Wendy Wasserstein’s Uncommon Life

Part detective, part social commentator, Julie Salamon employs her copious investigative gifts in portraying the life of Broadway lion Wendy Wasserstein (1950-2006) in Wendy and the Lost Boys.

Wasserstein’s frank, wry dramas earned her a Pulitzer Prize, made her the first female playwright to win a Tony and, along with her essays, established her as a spokeswoman for baby boomer women. The playwright opened the stage by revealing her inner life in her work, yet Salamon convincingly shows that her personal life was riddled with secrecy and paradox.

While Wasserstein died prematurely from leukemia five years ago, Salamon was ...

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‘Addie on the Inside’ with James Howe

With its interesting experimentations in form and engaging plot line, you would never know this is veteran author James Howe’s first novel in poems. Addie on the Inside is a companion piece to The Misfits (2001) and Totally Joe (2005), which began Howe’s path-breaking saga following the travails of four middle-grade friends negotiating their ways through school and their own identities.

Here, Howe steps inside the lone female and most outspoken character of the group, Addison “Addie” Carle. Addie’s first-person voice gains strength as it emerges from the poems, revealing the vulnerability of her interior thoughts and ...

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Audrey Couloumbis on the 'Unsavory Topic' of Divorce

Just in time for summer, Lexie, Audrey Couloumbis’ latest novel (Jake, 2010, etc.) takes preteen readers to the beach as 10-year-old Lexie heads down the Jersey shore with her father for a week at their family’s beach house. Unbeknownst to Lexie, who’s traveling without her mother for the first time since her parents’ divorce, her father has invited his new “friend” Vicky and her sons, Harris, 3, and Ben, 14, to join them.

Read more books about kids dealing with divorce.

Lexie soon finds she must adapt to a vacation completely unlike what she’d imagined, negotiating the ...

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Jennifer Weiner: 10 years of ‘Good in Bed,’ now ‘Then Came You’

Hard to believe, but a decade has passed since Jennifer Weiner broke onto the literary scene with Good in Bed, employing her abundant wisdom and unflagging wit to tackle modern women’s issues head on. Nine bestselling novels later, Atria celebrates that momentous occasion with the 10th-anniversary release of that book featuring the beloved and beleaguered Cannie Shapiro.

Read more new and notable fiction for July. 

Weiner’s latest novel, Then Came You, features a quartet of female protagonists exploring the many sides of surrogacy with great insight and the author’s trademark humor. We caught up with Weiner in ...

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Things That Go Bump in the Night in 'Who's There?'

Much like Carole Lexa Schaefer and Pierr Morgan’s storied collaboration and friendship, this dynamic author-illustrator duo’s latest effort, Who's There?, was literally years in the making. The warm, lushly illustrated tale of bunny brothers BunBun and FonFon, who hear bumps in the night and imagine all kinds of monstrous horrors, only to find each other both the source of those mysterious noises and refuge against the dark, was well worth the wait.

Read more books about things that go bump in the night.

The genesis of this delightfully tender tale for preschoolers offers a revealing window into ...

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Exile and Extremism in 'The Convert'

In 1961, the day after her 27^th birthday, Margaret Marcus, a middle-class Jew from Larchmont, N.Y., converted to Islam. A year later, she left her parents’ home for Lahore, Pakistan, to join the household of the Mawlana Mawdudi, an Islamic political leader and ideologue seen by many as the unwitting father of militant Islam.

In Pakistan, Marcus became Maryam Jameelah and, adopting her mentor’s two-camp worldview consisting of observant Muslims and everyone else, went on to become a seminal Islamic critic of the West. Yet radical conversion is but half The Convert’s story. The other is ...

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Mother Goose's Evil Twin Sister: Lisa Wheeler

Author of more than 25 children’s books, with Spinster Goose, Lisa Wheeler satirically takes the eye-for-an-eye morality hinted at in classic Mother Goose rhymes and turns it up a notch, sending wayward children to Spinster Goose’s reform school for a little behavioral management.

With “hundreds of rules / all beginning with NO,” Wheeler’s Spinster Goose tailors punishments for all types of bratty children her kindlier sister, Mother Goose, couldn’t abide. Sophie Blackall’s eerily exacting muted watercolor-and-ink illustrations brilliantly underscore the unseemliness of Wheeler’s repulsive cast of thieving, gum-chewing, class-cutting disobedients. We spoke with Wheeler to ...

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Horror with a Sense of Humor: Thanhha Lai

Thanhha Lai’s lyric smash debut novel, Inside Out and Back Again, tells the story of a pivotal year in the life of 10-year-old Kim Hà. In her author’s note, she makes the bald admission that “Much of what happened to Hà…also happened to me.” In spare, movingly image-laden poems, Hà relates the life-altering events of 1975, when, having lost her military father in action nine years earlier, she, her mother and three brothers fled war-ravaged Vietnam.

Hà’s narrative details their harrowing boat trip from Saigon to Guam, then on to a Florida refugee camp before finally ...

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‘Roots and Blues’ with Arnold Adoff

Arnold Adoff is a poet’s poet. His latest volume, Roots and Blues: A Celebration, explores the African-American experience and how the blues evolved out of it, but it can also be viewed as an autobiographical portrait of the vital importance that music and African-American culture have played in Adoff’s genesis as a writer. As he writes in “Chained,” “Always: this melody of words is journey home.”

Find more great books about the arts among our 2011 Best Books for Children.

Combined with illustrator R. Gregory Christie’s arresting acrylics, Adoff’s sonorous, spatially oriented poems powerfully depict the ...

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To Eat or Croak? A Q&A with Katherine B. Hauth

Hungry to pique young readers’ interest in the world outside their doors, New Mexico poet Katherine Hauth teams up with illustrator David Clark to offer 29 delectably light, informative and slightly twisted poetic explorations of curious eating behaviors in the animal kingdom in What’s for Dinner? Quirky, Squirmy Poems from the Animal World.

With an unlikely menagerie ranging from baby wasps to polar bears and the spinning phalarope, Hauth boils down the quest for supper to a simple maxim any child can appreciate: “finding food / is not a joke. / Living things must eat / or croak,” and Clark’s hilarious ...

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Love for Realists

Just in time for Valentine’s Day comes the U.S. release of Why Do Fools Fall in Love, British psychoanalyst Anouchka Grose’s provocative study of that most maddeningly dynamic state of human relationships—romance.

Drawing from cultural icons high and low, from Freud to Carrie Bradshaw, Grose explores what compels us to love, leave and love again, offering practical advice for negotiating the ins and outs of intimate relationships alongside hilarious, insightful readings of Western classics on love.

FOR MORE TITLES ON LOVE AND LOSS, CLICK HERE.

You note that a very large percentage of the world’s ...

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A Survivor's Story

Powerful as this first-time author’s memoir, Crash Into Me, may be—a tale of bravery, rage and fortitude in the face of bald injustice—Liz Seccuro’s experience is likely one she would prefer never having experienced. Raped at age 17 at a frat party during her first semester at college, Seccuro had her adult life upended 22 years later when she received a letter from her assailant asking for forgiveness.

Seccuro’s subsequent e-mail correspondence with William Beebe, who’d quietly left the University of Virginia uncharged with the crime, led to his eventual prosecution and sentencing, which ...

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2010 Best Books: Jennifer Egan

Anyone tracking the monstrous critical success of Jennifer Egan’s latest opus, A Visit from the Goon Squad, probably knows it is the uncanny love child of conceptual insight gleaned from years of reading Proust and structural inspiration drawn from The Sopranos. Beset by time as the ultimate goon, Egan’s richly eclectic cast of music-industry have and have-nots confront one another across three decades, multiple points of view, even a chapter written in PowerPoint. Though Egan’s genius for narrative experimentation has brought this Brooklyn resident much international acclaim in the handful of months since the book’s publication ...

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Capturing Pablo Neruda

Printed in a warm shade of evergreen and illuminated by Peter Sís’ signature spare quasi-pointillist pen-and-ink drawings, Pam Muñoz Ryan’s achingly beautiful fictionalized account of the childhood of Neftalí Ricardo Reyes Basoalto—better known to the world as Pablo Neruda—employs a dazzling array of forms to capture the genesis of her subject’s poetic genius and budding political activism in The Dreamer.

Thin, sickly, stuttering and shy, Ryan’s young Neftalí is dogged by two opposing forces that wish to direct his life—the imaginative lure of poetic expression and his domineering father. Kirkus asked Ryan ...

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2010 Children's Best: Ubiquitous, by Joyce Sidman

From this Caldecott Honor–winning duo (Song of the Water Boatman, 2005) comes another breathtaking picture book eight years in the making in large part due to its 4.6 billion-year-old subject—Earth and its hardiest creatures. Asked how a discussion of beetle wings with her biologist sister led to this brilliant evolutionary timeline of Earth’s survivors, ranging from 3.8 billion-year-old bacteria to mere 100,000-year-old humans, Joyce Sidman says that “the Big Question that led to the book was: Why do some organisms thrive while others die out?” Beckie Prange’s arresting hand-watercolored linocuts shine throughout, especially ...

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