NYT Books

The writer is remembered, above all, for her ruthlessness. But when I went looking for it, I found something much more complicated.

His savage fiction, set in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, demonstrated his belief that “violence is the most elemental truth of life.”

In his long-running Village Voice comic strip and in his many plays and screenplays, he took delight in skewering politics, relationships and human nature.

In “Farewell to Manzanar,” she wrote about the years she and her family were imprisoned in a camp for Japanese Americans. It became the basis for a TV movie.

Nearly six years after becoming a literary heavyweight with “Read with Jenna,” she’s starting her own publishing venture with Penguin Random House.

Your imaginary audience has a note taped to them: “I can’t read. I can’t talk. I don’t care about stories, plots or characters. What do you have for me?”

He wasn’t just prolific, publishing 32 books. His output also showed an unusual range that included memoirs and forays into historical fiction and even poetry.

A voracious reader, the president liked poetry, Civil War history and Southern fiction. He also sent Erica Jong a fan letter.

He was trained as a mathematician, but he gained fame in France, and won major prizes, for his modern verse.

The celebrity chef’s second children’s book, “Billy and the Epic Escape,” faced accusations that it stereotyped First Nations people in Australia.