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Norman Rush's newest novel takes a geographic hiatus from Botswana, his usual literary location. Instead, reviewer Drew Toal says the book is instead full of irritating intellectuals, postmortem scandal, and a group of collegiate clowns who come together after the death of an old friend.

Anthony Heilbut's essay collection, The Fan Who Knew Too Much, features reflections on the Queen of Soul, soap operas and Jewish immigrants. The highlight of this sometimes harsh collection, says Michael Schaub, is a history of LGBT contributions to gospel.

In the 1940s, U.S. publishers printed paperbacks — everything from romances to Westerns — that were designed for battle. Molly Guptill Manning explores their history in When Books Went to War.

After keeping a nervous world waiting for days, the squabbling politicians of debt-ridden Greece finally announced a new interim government Thursday. It will be headed by a former European Central banker, Lucas Papademos, whose main task will be to ensure that Greece meets the conditions set by its European partners to receive new loan money and avoid default. That means showing that Greece will enforce austerity measures.

In The Battle of Versailles, fashion critic Robin Givhan tells the story of the groundbreaking runway show that pitched French couture designers against American up-and-comers.

If you've used a GPS system — or if you happen to be using the Internet to read this — you can thank DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. For 50 years, the smallish, somewhat secretive division of the Pentagon has been mostly off-limits to reporters. Now author Michael Belfiore has profiled the agency in a new book.

Jane's Fame, Claire Harman's book about the author of Emma and Sense and Sensibility, reveals the gap between her legacy — modest, indifferent to fame and devoted to her characters — and her ambition.

The Iranian-American journalist was imprisoned in Iran, interrogated, tried and eventually released. But the controversy continues. Saberi says she confessed to her crimes in order to get out of jail but asserts that she did nothing wrong. Her new book Between Two Worlds is an account of her time in captivity.

The summer sun may be shining, but vampires don't seem to be going anywhere. NPR's Margot Adler has read more than 100 vampire books this year, and gives a heads-up on two bloodsucking books expected to be summer blockbusters: Christopher Farnsworth's Blood Oath and Justin Cronin's The Passage.

Pajtim Statovci's debut novel follows a Kosovar immigrant to Finland who meets a singularly unpleasant anthropomorphic cat in a Finnish gay bar. But while the story is imaginative, it lacks polish.