Lily Meyer

The protagonist of Clare-Louise Bennett's novel is a determinedly unfixed and unrooted person who marks time by which writers she has read.

The novel is simultaneously wise and silly, moving and inscrutable. It is also indisputably working hard to be new.

Novelist John Darnielle — also singer-songwriter with the Mountain Goats — has a hero who wants to honor the victims he's writing about but doesn't much like them.

Klay won acclaim for his debut story collection Redeployment, about the experiences of soldiers. His long awaited novel looks at how America has developed and exported the idea of a war on terror.

Burnout, Anne Helen Petersen argues, will end only with sweeping labor-policy changes — meaning it will end only when we "vote en masse to elect politicians who will agitate for [reform] tirelessly."

Former CNN journalist Isha Sesay argues that the Nigerian government, the media and the public have failed the 276 Chibok schoolgirls kidnapped by the terrorist group five years ago.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner's debut novel seems like a Portnoy-esque tale of a lovable lout, but halfway through, the story shakes itself up and reorients itself in a completely different direction.

Newly reissued, the intellectual heft of Françoise Gilot's now classic memoir is in its art criticism, even as its emotional arc lies in Picasso and Gilot's unequal romance.

If Melinda Gates had fully owned her goal — writing a book that would strengthen some readers' abortion-rights convictions and open others' minds — she would have called for greater advocacy.