Now that the pre-release hype has subsided a bit, what remains is an assured and classic story of innocence lost—think Huck Finn with gators, casinos, and the occasional video game.

The Illumination is about just that: At 8:17 p.m. on a Friday evening, in the present era, light begins to radiate from anywhere there is pain on the human body. All of a sudden, all around the world, you can ...

You cannot read Lynda Barry’s Picture This. You just can’t. You can’t read a book this profoundly exquisite, this acutely emotional, this deeply weird. “Reading” is simply the wrong word for the experience of leafing through the 225 pages of ...

A best-books-of-the-year list is inevitably more subjective than a similar list of movies, or even music, because so, so many more books are released in a year. Even if you read all the time, you still end up with a ...

Diane Johnson has perfected the contemporary novel of manners. Or more particularly, she has mastered the expatriate version of such, a cross between Henry James’ American on European Tour and Jane Austen’s Social Commentary. In previous works, such as Le ...

With the film adaptation of his young adult novel Coraline now in theaters, it’s worthwhile to glance at Neil Gaiman’s newest book for a younger audience, The Graveyard Book, which just picked up the coveted Newberry Medal and has been ...

Osamu Tezuka is generally regarded as the father of manga, the Japanese comic form that has only recently burst into the mainstream American consciousness. His signature works are the kid-friendly Astro Boy and Kimba the Lion and the epic 12-volume ...

In conservative commentator Bruce Herschensohn’s debut novel, the barbarians are at the gate. In fact, technically speaking, the barbarians—in the form of rabid Islamist fundamentalists—are well beyond the gate, having achieved world domination, defeated the U.S. military, occupied the White ...

“America is waiting for a message of some sort or another” is just a scrap of “found” talk radio—flatly delivered, inflectionless. Nevertheless it looped persistently through my head this fall while reading David Sheppard’s On Some Faraway Beach: The Life ...

No matter how good or how successful any series of books is, living in the same headspace with the same characters book after book can weary even the most devoted author. Such is the case with Karin Slaughter’s excellent Grant ...

Go-Go Girls of the Apocalypse is half-adventure novel, half-social satire about an insurance salesman named Mortimer Tate who sees the writing on the wall and disappears into the Tennessee mountain wilderness to wait out whatever’s coming down the road. Nine ...

Erin Hogan’s Spiral Jetta is one those unpretentious travel volumes that largely go unnoticed. It’s only 180 pages. It doesn’t tell of perilous journeys or of discovering exotic cultures. Nor is its author, the director of public affairs at the ...

Does Haruki Murakami’s popularity derive from the ubiquity of American culture? Perhaps no other Japanese author has attained such a global following, with translations in over 40 languages, from Arabic to Vietnamese. The author’s new memoir, What I Talk about ...

Bestselling author Terry Brooks has forged a long career writing giant books about epic fantasy worlds, and Charles Maldonado pops in for a visit.

Pulp: Historian Jacques Barzun once observed “that a good deal of [20th-century] art has been instructional, the artist-pedagogue flogging the dead philistine.” That remark could serve as epigram to the essays and music Paul D. Miller has collected in Sound ...