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Sometimes I read a book that wrings me out so thoroughly I barely know who I am anymore. It's disturbing and disorienting, and although I'm glad it doesn't happen often, it is one of my very favorite things about reading. I had no idea that The Pisces was going to be one of those books. I was expecting a fluffy summer beach read about a hot merdude, and instead I got this book which absolutely destroyed me. I can't stop thinking about The Pisces; I already want to read it again...

And Now We Have Everything is the most honest book about becoming a mom I've read. I don't have kids and don't know that I ever will, but I have a lot of anxieties about parenting and childrearing and Meaghan's writing aligns with them perfectly. This book is really funny in a kick-you-in-the-stomach kind of way, and I found myself laughing and sobbing a lot while reading it. As a childless bookseller, I wholeheartedly believe everyone — mothers in any sense of the term and others — would benefit from reading this book...

Korede is her sister's keeper. Managing beautiful, impulsive Ayoola would try anyone's patience, but recently she's started ending her relationships in a more permanent manner — and it's up to dutiful Korede to dispose of the bodies. Is there any emotion as subtly suggestive of violence as jealousy? It's a closely held hatred turned inward and its sufferers burn and seethe with it. Korede certainly does...

Chloe struggles to understand her classmate, Adrian Simcox — he's relentless, messy, and lies. In Adrian Simcox Does NOT Have a Horse, Marcy Campbell eloquently introduces complex themes of class and poverty to children in a tangible way. What Chloe learns is that there is real beauty in Adrian's imagination...

I’ve spent much of my adult life searching for a Native voice that echoes my own experience as an urban Indian...

It’s hard for us to believe that it’s been 17 years since we first toasted the new millennium. In January 2001, a gallon of gas cost $1.46. Facebook was three years from launching. 9/11 hadn’t happened. Huge political and cultural shifts were only months away… and some of the best books we’ve ever read were waiting in the wings. This year, for our fifth annual 25 Books to Read Before You Die list, we’ve selected novels, poetry, short stories, and nonfiction that speak to central concerns of 21st-century life: among them, race, heredity, identity, war, and the vanishing wild. From double agents to Hurricane Katrina to intergalactic travel, these 25 vastly different books create a stunning portrait of the dislocation, perseverance, and hope at the heart of life in 21st-century America.

Siri Hustvedt spans two worlds in her writing, with her gorgeous, lyrical, often dreamlike fiction, and her nonfiction writing on science, art, and culture. The Blazing World is a novel, but an unusual one — a tour de force about a larger-than-life female artist ("Harry") whose three great works used "masks" — male artists who claimed the works as their own. Through journal excerpts, interviews, and critical essays from the art world, and remembrances from Harry's children, friends, and lovers, it warmly and thoroughly depicts an intelligent, fierce life well lived, and tackles feminism...