“From the start — even before a young man I can now hardly comprehend started writing ‘The Long Walk’ in his college dormitory room — I felt that the best fiction was both [Continue]

Michael Korda’s long, sometimes secondhand but finally satisfying book about T. E. Lawrence starts in a strange way. He opens “Hero” in 1917, when Lawrence, an Englishman leading an Arab guerrilla force and [Continue]

LIFE by Keith Richards with James Fox. Written with uncommon candor, eloquence and humor, this electrifying memoir channels its author’s love of music, even as it creates an indelible portrait of [Continue]

In “Bloodlands,” Snyder concentrates on the area between Germany and Russia (Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic region and Belarus) that became the site of horrific experiments to create competing utopias based [Continue]

The science-fiction novelist Philip K. Dick was standing with his hands in the back pockets of his jeans, rocking on his heels, and gazing at the floor of his house. In his flannel shirt and [Continue]

That kind of illogical disconnect, James Zogby argues in “Arab Voices: What They Are Saying to Us and Why It Matters,” dooms much of what the United States is undertaking in the Middle East. The book [Continue]

In “Shadow Knights: The Secret War Against Hitler,” one of two books in the series that Simon & Schuster released last month, a British spy named Harry Rée wrestles with a Gestapo agent: “He gouged [Continue]

“We come to books,” David L. Ulin writes in “The Lost Art of Reading,” “to be challenged and confounded, made to question our assumptions.” With this principle in mind, here is [Continue]

For a squeamish, atheistic, arachnophobic Easterner — one who, as a child, slept guarded by a stuffed owl to scare away all the pythons and black widows of Washington, D.C. — reading Leslie Marmon Silko’s memoir, “The Turquoise [Continue]

His new novel, “The Accident,” is not one of his major achievements, and readers looking for Mr. Kadare (pronounced kah-dah-RAY) at the top of his form should [Continue]