"As formulaic as this plot might sound, Mr. Perrotta uses it not to construct a conventional screwball romance but to create a sad-funny-touching story that looks at the frustrations and perils of life in suburbia through darkly tinted, not rose-colored glasses."—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"[Powers'] cerebral new novel offers a chilling examination of the life we're reengineering with our chromosomes and brain chemistry . . . Powers sticks so closely to the state of current medical science and popular culture that this isn't so much a warning as a diagnosis. And as with any frightening diagnosis, you'll be torn between denial and a desperate urge to talk about it . . . With Generosity, Powers has performed a dazzling cross-disciplinary feat, linking the slippery nature of 'creative nonfiction' to the moral conundrums of genetic engineering. Although you might expect a novel so weighted with medical and philosophical arguments to flatten its characters into brittle stereotypes, ultimately that's the most impressive aspect of this meditation on happiness and humanness. As Generosity drives toward its surprising conclusion, these characters grow more complex and poignant, increasingly baffled by the challenge and the opportunity of remaking ourselves to our heart's content."—Ron Charles, The Washington Post Book World

“[Price’s] new novel, Lush Life, which is filled with page after page of vital speech, shows him inventing a life for dialogue rather than just taking it from life; and this spoken magic is often indistinguishable from Price’s apparently more formal, descriptive prose. Of course, the author of such novels as Clockers and Samaritan (as well as episodes for The Wire, and several movies) has done his urban homework.”—James Wood, The New Yorker

"Poet's novels tend to be finely wrought, pretty failures—or worse. Ron Rash, a justly admired poet, is an exhilarating exception, and his third book-length work of fiction, The World Made Straight, marks him as a major Southern writer . . . Rash is too fine and knowing a writer to allow even a hint of folkloric sentimentality to intrude. His fiction inhabits a territory of great beauty and few material consolations . . . The World Made Straight is his most ambitious novel . . . Rash's skill as a storyteller, allows this novel to succeed as an intellectually satisfying work of suspense . . . The World Made Straight reminds us of the sort of compelling literature a brave artist can fashion from the shards of experience.  It is less the literature of post-apocalyptic landscape than it is one in which life, searching for reconciliation, continuously recapitulates the apocalypse in ways both social and personal."—Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times

"It is a book unsparing in its acknowledgement of sin and unstinting in its belief in the possibility of grave.  It is at once hard and forgiving, bitter and joyful, fanatical and serene.  It is a wild, eccentric radical work of literature that grows out of the broadest, most fertile, most familiar native literary tradition.  What a strange old book it is.”—The New York Times Book Review

"At the Same Time, a posthumous collection of [Sontag's] speeches and essays, shows how her feeling for a vanished Europe deepened even as she grew more distrustful of an America she saw in the grip of a 'dangerous, lobotomizing notion of endless war.' Mostly written during the Bush administration, [the essays] reveal a darkening vision of America as well as the rest of the contemporary world . . . The amplified note of despair and loss in At the Same Time makes Sontag resemble one of the European 'last' intellectuals she often wrote about."—Pankaj Mishra, The New York Times Book Review

“Ambitious . . . In a daring literary performance, Syjuco weaves the invented with the factual . . . Ilustrado is being presented as a tracing of 150 years of Philippine history, but it’s considerably more than that . . . Spiced with surprises and leavened with uproariously funny moments, it is punctuated with serious philosophical musings.” —Raymond Bonner, The New York Times Book Review

This National Book Award finalist and New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice is an enthralling, poetic adventure set in post-apocalyptic Siberia.

“[An] incredible talent . . . It sometimes feels as if there’s nothing Tower can’t render in arresting fashion . . . Tower’s prose is a welcome reminder that the first job of the fiction writer is to introduce the reader to worlds both new and familiar in ways they wouldn’t have arrived at on their own . . . One suspects we’ll be hearing his name—which invokes prose that is both soaring and deep—for a long time to come.”—Jim Ruland, Los Angeles Times

"The Street of a Thousand Blossoms has epic ambitions—considerable scope, encompassing the years 1939-66; a multitude of significant characters; and recurring moments of tragedy and redemption. But it's written in the reassuringly small-scale style of a folk tale, characterized by short anecdotes and a heavy dose of morals . . . Tsukiyama's prose is simple and slow, at times seeming to strive for the kind of eloquence found in a Noh play, whose centuries-old art depends on stylized action to create tension and drama."—Louisa Thomas, The New York Times