Books

Alua Arthur is the author of the book "Briefly Perfectly Human: Making an Authentic Life By Getting Real About the End". Arthur is also an attorney and founder of Going With Grace, an end-of-life planning organization that supports people as they ask the question - and answer for themselves - what should I do to be at peace with myself so that I live in the present and die peacefully?

Writer SALMAN RUSHDIE. Two years ago he was nearly killed at a festival about keeping writers safe from harm. He had just come on stage, when an assailant ran onto the stage, came at him with a knife and kept stabbing Rushdie, for 27 seconds. There was so much damage and blood loss, it’s remarkable he survived. RUSHDIE’S attacker is a muslim extremist, who wasn’t even born when the fatwa, a religious ruling, calling for Rushdie's death was issued by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini. SALMAN RUSHDIE’s new memoir is called Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder.

In her new book, The Age of Magical Overthinking, Montell says that our brains are overloaded with a constant stream of information that stokes our innate tendency to believe conspiracy theories and mysticism.

Shriver's new novel is one of her best. It takes place in an alternative America, where the last acceptable bias — discrimination against people considered not so smart — is being stamped out.

"A lot of things started going wrong from the very beginning," historian Hampton Sides says of Cook's last voyage, which ended in the British explorer's violent death on the island of Hawaii in 1779.

It's shaping up to be quite a moment for Percival Everett. His 2001 novel "Erasure" was made into the acclaimed film "American Fiction," and his latest novel, "James," has just come out. It's a reimagining of Mark Twain's 1885 classic "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.

In her 2013 debut novel "The Love Affairs Of Nathaniel P.," Adelle Waldman wrote about love and narcissism among literary hipsters in Brooklyn. Waldman's long-awaited second novel "Help Wanted" is set in another world entirely - a big-box store in a depressed town in the Catskill region of New York state. Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has a review.

Nordland writes about facing mortality from war and cancer in his new memoir, Waiting for the Monsoon.

The Freaks Came Out To Write captures the elements that made a great American newspaper and the forces that killed it: the internet, the loss of advertising revenue, corporate greed, a changed New York City.

The Kamogowa Food Detectives is an off-beat bestselling Japanese mystery series that began appearing in 2013. In every story, a client enters the restaurant, describes a significant-but-hazily-remembered meal. And, after hearing their stories, Nagare, the crack investigator, goes to work.