After Adam Johnson’s surprise win of the National Book Award for 'Fortune Smiles' last week, readers new to Johnson's work may also want to make room on their Christmas wish lists for his 2012 novel, 'The Orphan Master’s Son.'

Just like the nature of exile itself, the narrative offers no relief, no place of rest: just fragment after fragment of dry landscapes, lonely characters, and rooms in disarray. Each sentence is stitched together with colons, with no capital letters or periods to emphasize a beginning or an end — a refusal to further disrupt a narrative of displacement.

Sexton injects the modern world into Grimm’s fairy tales, but does so by inserting mundane references and contemporary mood. The result is poems with the architecture of archetype but modern anxiety.

Rereading is one of the only forms of time travel available to us.

The novel, which began as a series of sketches, hurtles from one of Kvachi’s scams, scrapes, or seductions to the next, pausing every so often to drive home the monstrosity of its hero.

The N.W. Ayer advertising agency came up with AT&T's “Reach Out” campaign and its accompanying ditty, which melodically encouraged both telephone users and subway gropers to “Reach out, reach out, and touch someone!”

A unique and compelling stylist, and a charming reporter, Dyer seems to have an absolute bang-up time on this assignment, and it’s a pleasure to go along with him.

One particular image from Baked by Mark Haskell Smith persists in my memory. There is bondage involved. And testicle shaving. It was with this in mind that I began Smith’s new novel, Raw: A Love Story. I hoped to find that same ribald humor, not to mention a few delightful plot twists. I wasn’t disappointed.

There is ambivalence toward authority throughout Sweet Talk, something more than the usual coming-of-age disillusionment, as Gemma confronts the dark side of military culture. It’s an ambivalence that feels especially relevant now, as Americans look back on a decade of war overseas.

I have never cared so much about a character I liked so little.

I like listening to people talk about video games. Not those conversations about who scored a sick no-scope head shot, or which character's passive ability allows them to farm the most efficiently, mind you, but about why video games can be meaningful and why they matter.

Read this dark dirty lovely country-noir masterpiece already.

There's a feeling, reading this book, of encountering something that hasn’t been done before. It seems to me that Terese Svoboda is a true original.

It’s an intimate, fragmented book, written not to tell a story but to hint at stories untold.

By the twelfth and last page, I was in tears. “I Stand Here Ironing” is a story about a working mother, but to call it that — even to call it the best story ever written about a working mother — feels reductive. Work-life balance may now be the stuff of Atlantic cover stories and Lean In, but in 1961, exploring it in fiction was a downright radical act

When we talk about The Fault in Our Stars, we go straight to the unspeakable sadness, out of all the emotions evoked, because we want to convey the incredible emotional resonance of the book. What we’re trying to say is: this book mattered deeply to me, I think it could matter deeply to you too.