Mary Karr grew up in a small Texas oil town called Leechfield in the 1960s, in a family that was chaotic, sometimes violent, and held together by bonds that didn’t quite resemble anything a social worker would recognize. Her father was a roughneck who drank and told stories; her mother was brilliant, volatile, and periodically…
In 1967, Patti Smith arrived in New York City with four dollars and nowhere to stay. Robert Mapplethorpe arrived separately, equally broke, equally driven by something he couldn’t yet name. They found each other in Brooklyn, became lovers, became collaborators, became each other’s most essential witnesses through the years that followed — the Chelsea Hotel…
Hope Jahren has spent her career studying plants — their chemistry, their growth, their extraordinary persistence in environments that should make survival impossible. Lab Girl is her memoir, but it is more accurately a book about two things running in parallel: the scientific life she has built and the biology she studies. The chapters about…
In the South Pacific, 1,000 feet below the ocean surface, a United States Navy investigation team discovers a spaceship. It is approximately three hundred years old. It is of American manufacture. And it contains, inside its enormous hull, a perfectly smooth golden sphere that none of them can explain. Dr. Norman Johnson, a psychologist who…
It is January 2021 in San Francisco, and most of the Earth’s human population has emigrated to off-world colonies. Those who remain live under a layer of radioactive dust called kipple, which settles on everything and seems to accumulate faster than it can be cleared. Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter for the San Francisco…
Arthur Dent’s house is being demolished to make way for a bypass when he learns that the Earth is also scheduled for demolition — to make way for a hyperspace bypass — and that his friend Ford Prefect is not, in fact, from Guildford, but from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse….
Charlie Gordon is 32 years old and has an IQ of 68. He works as a janitor at a bakery in New York, takes reading and writing classes at the Beekman College Center for Retarded Adults, and wants, more than anything, to be smart. When he is selected for an experimental brain surgery — a…
Dan Simmons published Hyperion in 1989, and the science fiction community has been arguing about where it ranks among the best the genre has produced ever since. The argument usually ends with it near the top. The novel is the first book in the Hyperion Cantos series, and it won the Hugo Award for Best…
Suite Française arrives as an extraordinary document before it arrives as a novel. Irène Némirovsky began writing it in the autumn of 1940, in a French village where she was hiding with her family under German occupation. She completed the first two parts between then and the summer of 1942. In July of that year,…
Cloud Atlas comprises six nested stories spanning roughly five centuries, from a mid-19th century Pacific voyage to a post-collapse Hawaii. Each narrative is interrupted at its midpoint and resumed in reverse order: the novel opens a story, opens another, opens another, keeps opening, reaches the center, then unfolds back out. The stories include a Victorian…