Books

Private Life, the new novel by Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Jane Smiley, follows the life of a midwestern woman who moves with her new husband, an astronomer, to California at the start of the 20th century. Reviewer Maureen Corrigan says the story, which spans a half-century, is beautifully observed.

Dominique Browning ran the magazine House & Garden until it folded in 2007. Her new memoir, Slow Love, reveals how Browning refocused her life by baking, playing the piano and wearing pajamas all day.

The Publisher, Alan Brinkley's biography of Henry Luce, digs into Luce's professional successes -- among them, Time and Life magazines -- the sway his politics held over his journalism empire, and his eccentric personal habits.

Author Yoko Ogawa's Hotel Iris, published in Japanese in 1996, is the latest of her books to be translated into English. Critic Maureen Corrigan says the story, about a 17-year-old girl who begins an intense, sometimes violent affair with a tenant of her mother's rundown hotel, is decadent and profoundly sad.

So Much For That, Lionel Shriver's new novel, is about a middle-aged man forced to give up his dream of retirement on a tropical island when his wife falls ill and he's forced to go back to work to keep his employee health insurance. Critic Maureen Corrigan says the novel "acknowledge[s] the dramatic depth that fiction can bring to the debate over current events."

Jane's Fame, Claire Harman's book about the author of Emma and Sense and Sensibility, reveals the gap between her legacy -- modest, indifferent to fame and devoted to her characters -- and her ambition.

The latest novel from John Banville throws a handful of Greek gods into the household of a glum human family to explore sex, love, faith and mortality. Reviewer Maureen Corrigan says The Infinities puts Banville's literary gifts on prominent display.

Maureen Corrigan reviews "36 Arguments' Poses Questions Of Faith."

The Routes of Man is the new book by Ted Conover, a Pulitzer Prize nominee for Newjack: Guarding Sing Sing. Reviewer Maureen Corrigan says Conover's newest effort, about how roads shape the world in which we live, has "vivid armchair travel" appeal.

Back when Theodore White did his groundbreaking book The Making of the President 1960, it was easy to write about elections. Most Americans didn't know very much about how campaigns actually worked. These days, we're all experts on push-polling, NASCAR dads, and those oddball Iowa caucuses. For an election book to register now, it must offer something new, something hot. It has to dish.