May 16, 2012 Carlos Fuentes, one of the most influential Latin American writers, died Tuesday at a hospital in Mexico City at the age of 83. He was instrumental in bringing Latin American literature to an international audience, and he used his fiction to address what he saw as real-world injustices.

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May 16, 2012 After a museum conservator's lover dies, she becomes consumed with reanimating a 19th-century silver swan automaton. Critic Heller McAlpin says that Peter Carey's new novel is part historical, part fanciful and completely wonderful.

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May 15, 2012 Toni Morrison's latest novel revisits the story of the prodigal son, as a Korean War veteran returns to his hometown in the pre-civil rights era South. Critic Heller McAlpin says Home is as accessible and visceral as anything Morrison has written.

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May 15, 2012 Fuentes was one of the premiere and most prolific authors in the Spanish language. Along with contemporaries like Gabriel García Márquez, Fuentes shone a global spotlight on Latin American culture.

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May 14, 2012 In 1901, President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to dine with his family at the White House. News of the dinner became the subject of inflammatory articles and cartoons and shifted the national conversation around race at the time. Deborah Davis tells the story in Guest of Honor.

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May 14, 2012 Mario Puzo isn't known for his strong female characters — but if you've read his pre-Godfather work, The Fortunate Pilgrim, you might think otherwise. Author Zoe Ferraris recommends this book, which is based on Puzo's own mother. Do you have a favorite literary matriarch? Tell us in the comments.

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May 14, 2012 Darkly funny, suspenseful and cunningly plotted, Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl will be published June 5. In this exclusive selection from the book's opening, we meet Nick and Amy, the seemingly perfect couple whose alternating chapters soon reveal them to be unreliable narrators — and spouses.

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May 13, 2012 Ecologist and "natural security expert" Rafe Sagarin thinks our systems for dealing with natural disasters and terrorist attacks need to be updated. The best place to turn for advice? Other organisms.

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May 13, 2012 Gideon Lewis-Kraus didn't know what to do with his life, so he took three very long walks. In his new memoir, he describes his journeys in Spain, Japan and Ukraine. "The whole idea of pilgrimage is that you're hoping that you're going to rise to the occasion in some way," he says.

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May 13, 2012 The hero and the heroine of Peter Carey's new novel are separated by 150 years — and are brought together by an enormous, 19th-century, mechanical duck. The Chemistry of Tears is the 12th novel by the Australian-born, two-time Booker Prize-winning author.

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May 12, 2012 In 1919, Chicago was called the "youngest great city in the world." World War I had just come to a close, troops were coming home, industry was booming and crime was down. But in mid-July, just about everything that could go wrong in Chicago did.

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