NYT Books

The Ethiopian American novelist also talks aesthetics and the inspiration behind his most recent novel, “Someone Like Us.”

The watercolor cover art for the first edition of “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” was painted in 1996 by a recent art school graduate from Britain who was working at a bookstore.

Richard Hatch gave up a career as a physicist to become a magician — and a one-man historical preservation society dedicated to a German author killed in the Holocaust.

In “The Material,” Camille Bordas imagines the anxious hotbed where the perils of being a college student and the perils of being funny meet.

After getting her start by self-publishing, Freida McFadden is now the fastest selling thriller writer in the United States.

A theoretical physicist-turned-sociologist, he upended his field by focusing on social networks to explain how society works. His writing was compared to James Joyce’s.

A cultural historian, he was dismissed by Stanford over his opposition to the Vietnam War, a stance that became a cause célèbre of academic freedom.

A cultural historian, he was fired by Stanford University in 1972 over an anti-Vietnam War speech that became a cause célèbre of academic freedom.

A fire left Lucy Yu’s literary hub in Chinatown gutted. She was determined to rebuild it.

A fire left Lucy Yu’s literary hub in Chinatown gutted. She was determined to rebuild it.