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Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel laureate and critic of postwar Japan, dies at 88

He was known for his intense novels and essays challenging a modern Japanese culture that he found morally vacant and suffering from collective amnesia to the evils of the type of nationalism that helped lead to World War II.

Kenzaburo Oe, Nobel laureate and critic of postwar Japan, dies at 88

He was known for his intense novels and essays challenging a modern Japanese culture that he found morally vacant and suffering from collective amnesia to the evils of the type of nationalism that helped lead to World War II.
BOOK REVIEW

Nancy Hopkins and her colleagues challenged a culture of male dominance at MIT in the 1990s — and won. Kate Zernike’s ‘The Exceptions’ tells us how.

Author Zernike relies heavily on biologist Hopkins’s notes, diaries, and memories in this account, and it shows.
BIBLIOPHILES

Sabrina Orah Mark seeks the place where old and new collide

In “Happily: A Personal History — with Fairy Tales” Sabrina Orah Mark looks to stories of elves, talking animals, dragons, and magic to explain her own life as well as the off-kilter world around her.
BOOK REVIEW

An eccentric matriarch takes in the family black sheep in Cathleen Schine’s tender ‘Kunstlers in Paradise’

The tender family story is also a profound meditation on the nature and power of storytelling, inheritance, and legacy, the malleability and perdurability of memory.
BOOK REVIEW

In Idra Novey’s ‘Take What You Need,’ an outsider artist’s legacy is more than the sum of her work

Concerned with characters who fall outside easily defined categories, Novey’s new novel tackles big questions — like what qualifies as art — as well as the aching human need to be seen.

The best books of 2022

Of the countless wonderful titles published in 2022, here’s a highly subjective list of 55 we loved most in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and works for children and young adults.
The year’s best cookbooks showcase culture, connection — and even convenience Here are the 20 new books we’re most excited to read this fall

Latest Headlines in Books

New England Literary News

A debut story collection, a gardening book encourages kids, and more

Literary news from around the region.

STORY BEHIND THE BOOK

Elizabeth Shick imagines coming back to a country after decades of exile

In “The Golden Land,” the journey of Etta, a Bostonian with Burmese heritage, was informed by Shick’s own encounters with Burmese expats, or repats, as some called themselves.

BOOKS

Local bestsellers for the week ended March 5

Based on reporting from the independent booksellers of the New England Independent Booksellers Association and IndieBound.

BOOKINGS

Author readings around Boston March 12-18

All author appearances are in person and free unless otherwise noted.

Ian Falconer, artist who created Olivia the pig, dies at 63

His bossy, brassy porcine star of a series of books charmed her way into millions of children's imaginations.

BOOKS

11 Years after ‘Defending Jacob,’ Newton’s William Landay is back with a new Boston-set crime thriller

Growing up in Brookline, Landay loved stories — but didn’t see novel-writing as a viable career path.

Pieces of a house lost to the flooding of the Quabbin Reservoir live on inside this author’s home

Many of Elena Palladino's home's most eye-catching elements had once been part of a house that stood in Enfield, one of four towns flooded nearly a century ago to create the Quabbin Reservoir.

BOOK REVIEW

In ‘Liliana’s Invincible Summer,’ Cristina Rivera Garza gives a searing account of grief and the quest to bring her sister’s murderer to justice years after the fact

In her punctilious, fury-driven, incandescent memoir Rivera Garza shifts between timelines, her middle-aged anguish a countervailing weight against the light of Liliana’s brief life.