Books

Turning 50 is rarely easy for a woman, and “Sybil” is no exception.This tarnished classic — “the True and Extraordinary Story of a Woman Possessed by Sixteen Separate Personalities,” to invoke the most carnival-barker of its various subtitles —...

“She didn’t come out of nowhere,” Ng said.Zevin has been publishing at a frenetic pace for nearly two decades, and yet she has rarely repeated herself. Since her debut in 2005, she has written a family drama about war...

There’s a scene around the halfway mark of the latest novel by the perennial best seller Elin Hilderbrand, THE FIVE-STAR WEEKEND (Little, Brown, 384 pp., $30), in which five women engage in a sacred ritual of beach vacations: shopping....

What books are on your night stand?Nothing on the night stand — I keep my going pile on my kitchen table. I’ve got a recent reissue of Edith Wharton’s “A Son at the Front,” and an edition of “The...

The life of a good book can span hundreds of years, but most of the time, a book gets a flash of attention when it is first published — if its author is lucky. Then, it fades away.A company...

Editors were once lionized for issuing banned books (“Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “Ulysses,” “Lolita”). In these times, he wrote, “an editor is in danger of being sacked for publishing something that doesn’t fit someone else’s definition of ‘appropriate.’”He defended what’s...

Martin Amis, whose caustic, erudite and bleakly comic novels redefined British fiction in the 1980s and ’90s with their sharp appraisal of tabloid culture and consumer excess, and whose private life made him tabloid fodder himself, died on Friday...

In a 1937 essay, the English writer Dorothy L. Sayers explained the genesis of her most famous character and one of crime fiction’s most memorable detectives, Lord Peter Wimsey. “When in a lighthearted manner I set out, 15 years...

Hank Green, a novelist and longtime host of quirky YouTube educational videos, announced on Friday that he was recently diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, a form of cancer.“Good news and bad news. One, it’s cancer,” he said in a video...

FOR THE LOVE OF MARS: A Human History of the Red Planet, by Matthew ShindellWhen we trace it back to its etymological origins, a planet is, literally, a wanderer — a point of light that strays. Usually, it moves...