Books & Literature

Paul Steinbeck's new book chronicles the antics, both on and off stage, of the storied jazz ensemble. Critic Kevin Whitehead says Message to Our Folks celebrates the band's success on their own terms.

In 2010, writer Rakesh Satyal won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Debut Fiction, for his novel "Blue Boy." His new novel is called "No One Can Pronounce My Name" which book critic Maureen Corrigan says is a misleading title.

Before she turned to writing, the National Book Award nominee ran away from home and worked as a stripper. Her new collection of personal essays is Somebody with a Little Hammer.

Actress Gabourey Sidibe made her acting debut playing a sexually and physically abused teenager in the film Precious. Since then she's co-starred in the TV series Empire, American Horror Story and The Big C. She has a new memoir.

Maureen Corrigan reviews 'Anything Is Possible,' the new book by Elizabeth Strout. Strout also wrote 'Olive Kitteridge' which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist revisits the lives and deaths of his parents in his new memoir, Between Them. "As much as they loved me, an only child, they loved each other more," he says.

Comic W. Kamau Bell has spent much of his life feeling awkward. A self-described "tall, rangy black dude," Bell was often mistaken for a basketball player growing up — except that serious asthma and allergies meant he spent the bulk of his childhood indoors watching TV.

In her new memoir, "Sometimes Amazing Things Happen," psychiatrist Elizabeth Ford writes about the horror and the hope she found in treating Rikers inmates.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new memoir by Dani Shapiro; it's her third memoir and it's about marriage. Her first two were best sellers.

British filmmaker Terence Davies turns his attention to the gifted New England poet in his new movie. Critic Justin Chang calls the film a "sharp, sensitive portrait" of a woman ahead of her time.

Former Obama staffer Alyssa Mastromonaco is well acquainted with the privilege — and sleeplessness — of working in the White House: "I basically ran on adrenaline, almost, for six years," she says.

These days, the whole world, including our politics, is being shaped by migration. Few people explore the nuances of this reality more skillfully than Valeria Luiselli, a strikingly gifted 33-year-old Mexican writer who knows the migratory experience first-hand.

My Favorite Thing is Monsters is Emil Ferris' debut graphic novel, about a ten year old girl who sees herself as a werewolf. Ferris always loved monsters, and also wanted to be one as a child. Her love of monsters is what helped her get thru some of the darkest periods of her life.

Maureen Corrigan says 'One of the Boys', is a slim, deeply affecting and brutal story, about the fierce power of a father-son relationship.

Kate Hennessy drew from family letters, diaries and memories in writing Dorothy Day, a biography of her late grandmother. Day founded the Catholic Worker Movement and is now a candidate for sainthood.

Jean Hanff Korelitz's new novel is a smart, semi-satire about the reign of identity politics on college campuses today.

New Yorker staff writer Elif Batuman's new novel, The Idiot, follows a young woman's first year at Harvard University, and how she finds love through email.

You might say that Heretics, a sprawling novel by celebrated Cuban writer Leonardo Padura, has been in the works since the early 1990s. It was back then that Padura began writing a series of books featuring an ex-police detective in Havana named Mario Conde. Funny and philosophical, Conde, like the sharpest of detectives, devotes more time to investigating the mysteries of his own society than he does to investigating crime.

Author Mohsin Hamid's new novel, Exit West, is about knowing when it's time to flee your country, and what happens when you migrate to a nation that's hostile to immigrants. It's a topic the author himself is personally familiar with.

In 2009, Maj. Mary Jennings Hegar was shot down by the Taliban in Afghanistan while co-piloting an Air National Guard medevac helicopter. Though she was wounded in her rifle arm, Hegar managed to return fire while hanging onto a moving helicopter, which saved the lives of her crew and her patients.