Inspired by a poem called “The Golden Hat,” written by Thorsteinsson, who has autism, Winslet asked famous friends — Angelina Jolie, Meryl Streep, Sting, Oprah, and Steven Spielberg among them — to create a self-portrait wearing a hat. Thorsteinsson’s moving story and “hat portraits” of others with autism are included; proceeds go to… Read More >>

Everyday experiences — from looking at leaves to riding city subways — are funny and fresh and often a source of wonder when depicted by this brilliant graphic designer. As for the plague of headphones, he’s hit it on the nose: "The most venomous of all cables ar headphones. The combination of thin wire and stubborn earplug hooks is an endles… Read More >>

Henry Skrimshander arrives at Westish College on the shores of Lake Michigan with a book called The Art of Fielding in his pocket. Against all the odds, he becomes a champion baseball player in a campus novel that bristles with allusions to Moby-Dick. In some ways, in fact, it's the Moby-Dick of baseball: a novel that seems obsessed by a single theme, but that's actually about far… Read More >>

Eventually, all of us have to grapple our might-have-beens. This is the moving story of a man whose chance for baseball stardom ended in a split-second accident, and it resonates far beyong the baseball field. Read More >>

Perlman's story of modern New York is a big book in every sense. Huge in its scope, it covers two of the most searingly painful aspects of 20th-century history: the Holocaust and the abuse of African- Americans' rights. The framework of the novel is the relationship between Lamont Williams, a black ex-con trying to rebuild his life as a hospital janitor, and… Read More >>

An old Russian folk tale has it that a childless couple, living on the edge of the woods, build themselves a child out of snow, who then comes to life. In a stunning debut novel, Alaskan Eowyn Ivey reworks this story. Mabel and Jack, a couple from Pennsylvania, come to 1920s Alaska to forget the pain of losing a baby. They struggle through a long, dark… Read More >>

Patterson’s back with another addictive page-turner. This time, the suspicious death of a charismatic—and philandering—family patriarch opens a complex tale of secrets, betrayals, and psychological intrigue. Read More >>

An arctic expedition in 1897 was a daunting enough endeavor—but in a hydrogen balloon? The true story of the Swedish explorer S.A. Andree is as suspenseful as a thriller—and a fascinating look at the ambition and spirit of exploration that marked a long-ago time, when so much more about our beautiful planet was unknown. Read More >>

Essayist, novelist, and literary critic William Gass is one of our most original and brilliant thinkers. If you enjoy an intense intellectual journey (with visits to Kafka, Henry James, Proust, and others) , or if you want to dip in and out for a few dazzling insights, this book is for you. Read More >>

It would take far longer than this space to explain the dense plot of this highly impressive thriller, which starts with one of the narrators drugged and paralyzed in the hospital. Ray Lovell is a small-time private investigator who'd been tracking down a missing Romany woman. But as the story of her life proves ever more complicated, Ray is also forced to… Read More >>