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The debut short-story collection by Nigerian writer and Jesuit priest Uwem Akpan offers a sobering view of a world in which atrocity is commonplace, and the unthinkable is the everyday.

Brenda Wineapple's highly engaging biography White Heat examines the poet's enduring friendship with editor Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

Mohsin Hamid's surreal new novel centers on a white man who awakens one morning to find that his skin has turned brown. The Last White Man only seriously strains credulity at its very end.

In Art and Madness, her memoir of the literary 1950s, writer Anne Roiphe describes going into labor by herself in a snowdrift, unable to wake her sleeping playwright husband. Over the years, she learns her own power, charting her course through feminism and a life in art.

After the Civil War, the United States seemed poised to grant equal rights to blacks. But the Supreme Court's rulings in the late 19th century kept blacks segregated for decades, says constitutional scholar Lawrence Goldstone.

Jane's Fame, Claire Harman's book about the author of Emma and Sense and Sensibility, reveals the gap between her legacy — modest, indifferent to fame and devoted to her characters — and her ambition.

This week, basketball star LeBron James won his second MVP trophy in a landslide vote, but he's been a star since he was a teenager. Now 25, James looked back on his youth in the memoir Shooting Stars, which he co-wrote with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Buzz Bissinger.

Gabrielle Burton's near lifelong obsession with Tamsen Donner — the wife of the leader of the fatal expedition — has produced a haunting novel, Impatient with Desire, and a must-read memoir, Searching for Tamsen Donner. Critic Maureen Corrigan says the stories are unforgettable.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks is famous for his case studies of people with neurological disorders that cause unusual problems with perception. In The Mind's Eye, Sacks turns to himself, explaining how an eye tumor affected his vision and perception of the world.

Authors Philip Furia and Laurie Patterson share the stories behind Hollywood's most beloved songs — from Casablanca's "As Time Goes By" to the melodies from Mary Poppins — in their book The Songs of Hollywood.