News on Books

Behrouz Boochani won Australia's richest literary prize earlier this year — but the asylum-seeker, detained offshore, couldn't accept in person. Now, he has made it to New Zealand with a message.

President Trump, we are told in this soon-to-be-published book, has destroyed the guardrails thoughtful people tried to erect around him. Further, he has banished nearly all those thoughtful people.

The literary prize, which honors fiction that tackles tough social issues, has announced a longlist of 16 titles. The nominees for the $35,000 prize include some big names and plenty of debuts.

In their new novel, Kacen Callender builds a vast, immersive landscape based on the colonial history of the Caribbean, but it's their morally conflicted heroine who will really hook readers.

We look at what's contained in the book by an anonymous author, who only self-identifies as "a senior official in the Trump administration."

In the '70s David Rosenhan and seven "pseudopatients" went undercover in mental health wards. Their resulting article rocked the psychiatric world. But Susannah Cahalan struggled to confirm the facts.

Samuel Shem's 1978 novel, The House of God, was a sardonic look at U.S. medicine through a young doctor's eyes. Shem's new fiction checks in with the same crew in the age of medicine by smartphone.

Saud Alsanousi's novel follows a group of Kuwaiti kids growing up in the 1980s — then jumps to a near future torn by sectarian violence. It's a resonant book that asks more questions than it answers.

As "traditional bonds disintegrate in the face of industrialization, urbanization, and secularization, brands and objects become a means to curate and project who we are," writes reporter Adam Minter.

Flea, the bassist for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, is out with a new book, Acid for the Children. But the book is not a typical rockstar memoir — it's about his wild childhood in 1970s Hollywood.