NYT Books

John Schu is a best-selling author, a children’s librarian and a tireless evangelist for the power of a blank page.

“I mean that as an organizing principle,” says the U.S. poet laureate, who has edited a new anthology of nature poetry called “You Are Here,” “and also as a slight against prose.”

In “Tuesdays With Morrie,” the 84-year-old actor was eager to tackle “a rich role in a show that asks, ‘What if despair and death are not the end?’”

The children in three illustrated satirical tales are up against something far more complex than ogres, witches and big bad wolves.

His sprawling and boisterous novel “The Sot-Weed Factor,” published in 1960, projected him into the ranks of the country’s most innovative writers.

The actress, known for roles in the “Pitch Perfect” movies, gets vulnerable about her weight loss, sexuality and money in her new memoir, “Rebel Rising.”

By merrily using fiction to dissect itself, he was at the vanguard of a movement that defined a postwar American style.

Three new books explore the complications of liberty and the seductions of authoritarianism in American life.

Judith Butler’s new book, “Who’s Afraid of Gender?,” tries to turn down the heat on an inflamed argument.

In “My Black Country,” the musician and author who cracked a Nashville color barrier is telling her story — and hearing her songs reimagined.