James's detective novels represent the best qualities of the genre: they are absorbing, intellectually challenging, emotionally satisfying, and artfully constructed. The process of unraveling the mystery demands the reader’s attention and patience as the investigators work through the evidence, and yet the solutions that emerge seem simultaneously surprising and inevitable. No matter how chilling, the murderers are sympathetically drawn; and the supposed innocents differ morally from the guilty only in that they happen not to have committed murder.

What Meloy does share with Thoreau is a need for wilderness. As a naturalist and memoirist, she guides her readers toward a conscious relationship with the natural world, urging them to bear witness -- to choose something to care about.

Rush has successfully created that rare and most valuable art form, the novel of ideas.

Gardam didn’t sit down to write what would become her first collection of short stories until she was 41. But even in her first works, written for children, a reader can sense a lifetime of thoughtful observation — and the even hand of a veteran gardener, which, it turns out, she is.

McNair is inventive, original, and has a particular talent for finding language that is surprising without being showy. But his real skill is his deep familiarity with the South as a place, it’s creatures, customs, and yearnings.

In April 2010, Harding's debut won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction – such a surprising selection that The New York Times headlined its profile of Harding after the prize "Mr. Cinderella."

The Center of the World is, simply, the story of a painting. But the painting, a full-figure portrait of Helen of Troy, is imbued, somehow, with Helen’s mystical beauty and erotic life force. The reader is treated to tantalizing glimpses into how this came to be.

If ever there was a writer disappointed with the here and now, it’s André Aciman: “I was never in one place, ever, in my whole life, without thinking of being somewhere else.” The tragedy of feeling out of place and in the wrong time is at the aching heart of his writing, and on grand display in two new books published this year.

In The Trajectory of Dreams, Wolverton has created one of the most haunting unreliable narrators I’ve ever come across. She is both deeply sympathetic and extremely dangerous.

Consider this: Anna Sewell, spinster invalid, wrote one of the most influential and original books to come out of Victorian England.

After a miraculous plane landing, Michener wandered around in a tense stupor until he found himself back on the airstrip. What was he to do with the rest of his life? Did he really want to return to his job as an editor of textbooks? He silenced these questions by swearing an oath: “I’m going to live the rest of my life as if I were a great man.” He had no idea what he meant.

Tillie Olsen’s stories turned me into a fiction writer, as if they pointed to a door in what had looked like a blank wall — a door to which, as it turned out, I owned a key.

Modern readers might be somewhat amused to learn that this bodice-ripper is regarded as one of the early examples of “realistic” fiction. Is there any plot less true to life than the lord of the manor marrying his serving girl? But Pamela’s realism has little to do with the plausibility of the story. It lies, instead, in the novel’s scope and language.

The title of Cain’s story collection is polymorphously suggestive, teasing the reader into attempted decodings in reaction to the individual stories. In its context in the title story, the phrase has to do with a character's complicity in her own idealization, but the collection invites us to think about the title more expansively.

Pollock rockets the reader into a highly particular time and place. He never wastes our time circling about the airfield looking for a spot to touch down. We’re immediately there, in the thick of it. Pinned right where Pollock wants us.

My time was always fairly equally divided between the horses and my writing, the difference being that the horses always came first, and the writing had to be fitted in around their needs and their schedules. But in my imagination, there was always a confluence of visions.

There doesn’t always need to be a dramatic story to later-life publication — sometimes a writer may just be spending a couple of decades reading, writing, working, and living enough to know what it is he’s writing about. Often those intervening years are simply about showing up.