Fiction

Straub's new novel is a time-travel fantasy about a 40-year-old woman who's tending to her ailing father — until, that is, the day she's transported to her childhood home on her 16th birthday.

David Bianculli reviews HBO's new miniseries, which imagines that Charles Lindbergh became president in 1940. And we listen back to a 2004 with Philip Roth, who wrote the novel the series is based on.

After years as a reporter, Avi Issacharoff co-created an action series about an elite unit of the Israeli military whose members work undercover in the West Bank. Fauda is now streaming on Netflix.

"I don't use my life as inspiration," says the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist. Her new book, Manhattan Beach, imagines the lives of the women who worked on the Brooklyn Navy Yard during World War II.

Utopian communities don't fare much better in fiction than they do in real life. As the plot usually unfolds, a brave new world loses its luster fast when the failings of its founder are exposed, or when the community itself begins to morph into a cult. Think of Lauren Groff's Arcadia or Carolyn Parkhurst's Harmony, two recent novels that have imagined alternative communities and their inevitable crack-up.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan gives us her picks for the best holiday books of 2004. Her choices range from literary thrillers to a new biography of Ben Franklin.

Journalist Neil MacFarquhar is a veteran Middle East foreign correspondent and was Cairo bureau chief for The New York Times. Next, he will cover Islam in North America for the Times. His new novel The Sand Cafe is set in Saudi Arabia and examines the day-to-day reporting life of foreign correspondents in the Middle East during the Gulf War.

Megan Abbott's new book takes readers deep into the intense, vacuum-sealed universe of young female gymnasts and their parents. Critic Maureen Corrigan says You Will Know Me is worthy of a gold medal.

In his new novel, The Underground Railroad, Whitehead returns to his childhood vision of the Underground Railroad as an actual locomotive that carries escaped slaves through tunnels.

In his first novel, The Meursault Investigation, Kamel Daoud retells The Stranger from an Arab perspective. John Powers says Daoud's retelling will forever change the way you read the Camus classic.