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Maureen McLane's experimental essay collection, My Poets, blends her academic and intellectual experiences with the poetry that has inspired her. The NYU professor tells her story through a series of reflections on poets from Chaucer to William Carlos Williams.

In The Violinist's Thumb, writer Sam Kean goes inside our genetic code, looking at the stories written by the fundamental building blocks within us. The book explains things like why some people can't handle drinking coffee and why some human babies are born with tails.

In his novel Dream Boy, Jim Grimsley explores the beauty and violence of growing up gay in the rural South. Author Justin Torres offers this devastatingly beautiful novel to anyone who has ever been the target of a bully.

The Williamsburg Bray School was an 18th-century, pro-slavery school for educating enslaved and free Black students. A new partnership is calling to educate the public about this history.

Two new novels should keep science fiction fans happy through the winter: Charlie Huston's Sleepless, the story of an insomnia plague, and Douglas Preston's Impact, in which human beings find themselves threatened by strange bombardments from the direction of Mars.

In his new novel, Sunset Park, Brooklyn novelist Paul Auster confronts the modern-day problems of foreclosure, eviction and familial estrangement. NPR's Lynn Neary visited him in his brownstone to discuss the long journey to find one's sense of home.

Matt Latimer, speechwriter to President George W. Bush during his last months in office, says his old boss didn't always stick to the script. His new tell-all memoir recounts more than one startling comment that Latimer says his boss made behind closed doors.

Poet Tess Taylor says a good poem can "reroute your day" in under five minutes. She offers suggestions for poetry that "takes you to a different place, and then allows you to return a little altered."

Comics veteran Ben Katchor's new book, Hand-Drying in America, examines the spaces we live and work in, and the ways we build and navigate through them. Critic Glen Weldon says Katchor's panels "celebrate the mundane world around us by revealing it to be anything but."

Karen Lord's new The Galaxy Game picks up where her previous novel, The Best of All Possible Worlds, left off — in a complicated galactic civilization trying to come to terms with a genocide.