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Byline: Ron Charles By Akwaeke Emezi Riverhead. 245 pp. $27 - - - In 2018, Akwaeke Emezi's debut novel arrived like a revelation. With its incantatory prose, 'Freshwater' disrupted conventional [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Hamnet By Maggie O'Farrell Knopf. 305 pp. $26.95 --- On Aug. 11, 1596, William Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet, was buried. He was 11 years old. Almost nothing [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Utopia Avenue By David Mitchell Random House. 574 pp. $30 --- David Mitchell's groovy new rock novel belts out the lives of a fictional band in such [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Make Russia Great Again By Christopher Buckley Simon & Schuster. 275 pp. $28 --- Until now, President Donald Trump has avoided being fully captured by novelists simply [...]

Byline: Ron Charles As Confederate statues finally tumble across America, television networks are marching through their catalogues looking to take down racially offensive content. It turns out that little video [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Friends and Strangers By J. Courtney Sullivan Knopf. 395 pp. $27.95 --- 'Babysitter,' 'nanny,' 'caregiver,' 'au pair' - we have many names for the people we welcome [...]

Byline: Ron Charles The Taste of Sugar By Marisel Vera Liveright. 380 pp. $26.95 --- More recent outrages have obscured the special punishment that President Donald Trump meted out to [...]

Byline: Ron Charles A Burning By Megha Majumdar Knopf. 289 pp. $25.95 --- Megha Majumdar's debut novel, 'A Burning,' is aptly named. This all-consuming story rages along, bright and scalding, [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Devolution: A Firsthand Account of the Rainier Sasquatch Massacre By Max Brooks Del Rey. 304 pp. $28 --- Bigfoot holds a big place in my heart. Two [...]

Byline: Stephanie Merry and Ron Charles The bestseller lists are often a sign of the times. A few weeks ago, John M. Barry's 2004 history 'The Great Influenza' and 2014's [...]

Byline: Ron Charles One of Washington, D.C.'s most cherished events has been felled by the coronavirus. The National Book Festival, set to celebrate its 20th anniversary this year, will not [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Nobody called it that at the time, but the first realistic English novel was a genuine 'beach read.' Daniel Defoe's 'Robinson Crusoe,' published in 1719, is a [...]

Byline: Ron Charles The Motion of the Body Through Space By Lionel Shriver Harper. 352 pp. $28.99 --- Sitting on the couch reading a slaying satire about exercise fanatics should [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Rodham By Curtis Sittenfeld Random House. 432 pp. $28 --- In these Dark Ages of the Reign of Trump, Curtis Sittenfeld's 'Rodham' descends like an avenging angel. [...]

Byline: Ron Charles A Children's Bible By Lydia Millet W.W. Norton. 224 pp. $25.95 --- In the beginning, the kids are alright. The adults, though, are already sliding toward Sodom [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Our favorite novels leave a lasting impression, a sense of private awe that glows even after we've forgotten the details. In rare cases, we are bold to [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Old Lovegood Girls By Gail Godwin Bloomsbury. 339 pp. $27 --- One is tempted to speak in hushed, valedictory tones when talking about Gail Godwin. After all, [...]

Byline: Ron Charles In 1845, a shy young man named Henry David Thoreau 'went to the woods to live deliberately.' Using old boards from a nearby shanty, he and a [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Redhead by the Side of the Road By Anne Tyler Knopf. 178 pp. $26.95 --- Anne Tyler's new novel, 'Redhead by the Side of the Road,' is [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Just a month ago, Bruce Daisley, a vice president of Twitter, published a book about improving office life called 'Eat Sleep Work Repeat.' But now, deep in [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Like some Beltway Dr. Faust, Donald Trump probably imagines he's making a deal with Death: 'Give me a revived economy before the election,' he thinks, 'and I'll [...]

Byline: Ron Charles The Glass Hotel By Emily St. John Mandel Knopf. 301 pp. $26.95 --- Bad timing: Emily St. John Mandel is releasing a novel in the middle of [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Separation Anxiety By Laura Zigman Ecco. 276 pp. $26.99 --- The light from Laura Zigman's new novel, 'Separation Anxiety,' is generated by a kind of literary nuclear [...]

Byline: Ron Charles In the end, Oprah could not be stopped. And we should be grateful that she persisted. Early this morning, the legendary talk-show host posted two one-hour episodes [...]

Byline: Ron Charles 'Writers and Lovers' By Lily King Grove. 324 pp. $27 --- Please don't do this. Don't write a novel about trying to write a novel. It's cliche [...]

Byline: Ron Charles As the highly contagious coronavirus spreads around the world, highly questionable books about the disease are spreading around Amazon.com. On Tuesday, more than 100 titles related to [...]

Byline: Ron Charles 'The Night Watchman' By Louise Erdrich Harper. 451 pp. $28.99 --- Two years ago, Louise Erdrich thought she would never write again. The National Book Award-winning author [...]

Byline: Ron Charles 'Actress' By Anne Enright W.W. Norton. 264 pp. $26.95 --- Anne Enright writes so well that she just might ruin you for anyone else. The deceptively casual [...]

Byline: Ron Charles 'Independence Square' By A.D. Miller Pegasus. 246 pp. $25.95 --- In late January during his profane rant against NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Don't be surprised if you see Cupid's wings drooping. The little naked god may need some encouragement this winter. Just weeks before Valentine's Day, the greeting card [...]

Byline: Ron Charles 'The King at the Edge of the World' By Arthur Phillips Random House. 288 pp. $27 - - - Centuries from now, when our amphibian descendants look [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Run Me to Earth By Paul Yoon Simon & Schuster. 259 pp. $26 - - - The United States never declared war against Laos. The country's destruction [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Processed Cheese By Stephen Wright Little Brown. 400 pp. $28 --- The trouble is Tom Wolfe died too soon. Had he lived longer, the irrepressible New Journalist [...]

Byline: Ron Charles 1. 'The Snowy Day,' by Ezra Jack Keats (1962) 2. 'The Cat in the Hat,' by Dr. Seuss (1957) 3. '1984,' by George Orwell (1949) 4. 'Where [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Cleanness By Garth Greenwell Farrar Straus Giroux. 223 pp. $26 --- Four years ago, Garth Greenwell published a debut novel about an American teacher who falls in [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Dear Edward By Ann Napolitano Dial. 352 pp. $27 --- Don't read this book on a plane. Or if you ever hope to fly again. Ann Napolitano's [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Some 3,000 years ago, the preacher in Ecclesiastes proclaimed, 'Of making many books there is no end,' but how those books are published and enjoyed has changed [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Last month at a book club meeting in a tony Washington suburb, the subject was 'Fleishman Is in Trouble,' by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. It's a novel about the [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Throughout the impeachment hearings, historians and political scientists have been hogging the limelight with their sage commentary, but really this is a crisis designed for literary critics. [...]

Byline: Ron Charles The Revisioners By Margaret Wilkerson Sexton Counterpoint. 280 pp. $25 --- 'We have a ghost in here.' That's how Toni Morrison writes in 'Beloved' about the spiteful [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Bill Gates has released a list of his top five favorite books for 2019. The titles, which address everything from sleep to charter schools and American history, [...]

Byline: Ron Charles The Revisionaries By A.R. Moxon Melville. 600 pp. $29.99 --- I spent 24 hours clawing through the tangled thicket of A.R. Moxon's gargantuan debut novel, 'The Revisionaries.' [...]

Byline: Ron Charles The Story of a Goat By Perumal Murugan. Translated from the Tamil by N. Kalyan Raman Black Cat/Grove. 192. pp. $16 --- Say what you will about [...]

Byline: Ron Charles This Is Happiness By Niall Williams Bloomsbury. 380 pp. $28 --- The Ireland that Niall Williams writes about in this novel is gone - or would be [...]

Byline: Ron Charles The Andromeda Evolution By Daniel H. Wilson Harper. 384 pp. $29.99 --- Grab the Purell. Fifty years after Michael Crichton published 'The Andromeda Strain,' that deadly microbe [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Nothing to See Here By Kevin Wilson Ecco. 272 pp. $26.99 --- Children are weird. Of course, they're also curious, sweet, creative and lots of other delightful [...]

Byline: Ron Charles More than 15 years ago, the late Italian writer Umberto Eco said, 'Books belong to those kinds of instruments that, once invented, have not been further improved [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Girl, Woman, Other By Bernardine Evaristo Black Cat. 452 pp. Paperback, $17 --- If the best thing a literary prize can do is spark lively discussion, this [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Marley By Jon Clinch Atria. 285 pp. $27 --- Soon - far too soon - Christmas Muzak will start crooning in every store and restaurant, and one [...]

Byline: Ron Charles Frankissstein By Jeanette Winterson Grove. 352 pp. $27 --- More than 200 years have passed since that brilliant teenager Mary Shelley first galvanized her monster into life. [...]