Football’s organizing systems are transformed into metaphors for self-improvement in the ambitious self-help text "The Character Route Tree". Part self-help book, part memoir, Marc R. Schneider’s inventive book "The Character Route... Read More

Questions of identity and historical continuity dominate in "Masks of God", an intricate historical fantasy novel. Set in the fourteenth century, Arnold Hermann’s grounded fantasy novel "Masks of God" concerns supernatural beings,... Read More

Tracy Lynne Oliver’s vibrant, wrenching, and fantastical horror novel "Magician" follows the coming-of-age of a gifted boy born and raised in the absence of love and light. The magician’s mother grew up steeped in hate, educated in... Read More

Ru Marshall’s investigative literary biography "American Trickster" illuminates author Carlos Castaneda’s life and the controversy over the truthfulness of his books. Castaneda published a series of popular books from the late 1960s... Read More

Everyone gets their flowers in "Do What You Fear Most", Richie Unterberger’s excellent history of the Velvet Underground, the beloved and iconoclastic New York rock band. This biography of the influential band includes an exhaustive... Read More

Rod Phillips’s Cats: A History is an exhaustive and engrossing survey of the millennia-long relationship between cats and people. Humans first kept cats to protect grain stores from rodents, Phillips notes, while ancient Egyptians... Read More

Douglas Stuart’s ruminative novel "John of John" breaks through the surface of a dysfunctional family to expose deeper ties and shocking secrets. After years of experimentation in his big-city art school, Cal returns to his... Read More

After centuries of devotion, Kelsey K. Sather’s epic fantasy novel "Lives of a Salvager" asks how devotion survives. Laurel, a salvager, is one of three humans alive at any time with unique abilities. Her purpose is to support the... Read More