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Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY Will 'normal' ever return? That question has resonated with many over the past few years. But a more pressing inquiry is to [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY In referring to Western history's early medieval period, the 6th through 10th centuries, historians have moved away from the term 'the Dark [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY One may read a sentence, write a sentence, be sentenced. The word's meaning is informed by power: who wields it, who is [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY Walter Benjamin has written that memory isn't an instrument for exploring the past but a medium for experiencing it. In 'The Shimmering [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY A middle-of-the-night home invasion. Forced from bed into a car by black-clad strangers. For most of us, this is a violent nightmare [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY Every parent wants the best for her children, up to and including which college they attend. But as true-life events have shown [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House and second in the presidential line of succession, has had an unparalleled political career in America. [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY The story of Weeksville, a free Black community founded in Brooklyn in the 19th century, is a gripping central piece of American [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY One difficult truth of our era's fascination with all things true crime is how the personhood of a 'victim' can get lost [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY In a time of global pandemic, racial justice uprising, and widespread economic hardship, Rumaan Alam's third novel, 'Leave the World Behind' (Ecco, [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY One of a crime novel's great pleasures can be its setting: When conventional story elements (loner protagonist, a puzzling crime, the occasional [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY A drug-addicted movie legend and daughter of Hollywood royalty, whose sharp-edged novels and iconic turn as a space-opera rebel princess have captivated [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY Colorism, a bias against people with darker skin from others within the same race, has a fraught and painful history in America. [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY Promised the rich soil and temperate climate of Virginia, the Mayflower pilgrims found themselves at Plymouth, where frigid winters and coastal terrain [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY Joyce Carol Oates is one of the few American writers who move smoothly among genres, achieving critical and commercial success in very [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY In fairy tales, brothers and sisters rely on one another for love and survival after the worst has happened. Whether they are [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY 'The World Doesn't Require You' (Liveright, 384 pp., ***1/2), a bleak and beautiful collection of short stories, is the second book by [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY Elizabeth Gilbert's sparkling new 'City of Girls' (Riverhead Books, 480 pp., ***1/2 out of four) is the perfect summer novel. Of course, [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY Miriam Toews' astonishing new novel, 'Women Talking' (Bloomsbury, 240 pp., ****), offers a reading experience to simultaneously dazzle and horrify. Toews takes [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY Traveling companions can bring out the best or the worst in each other. Luckily, the unlikely trio in Leah Franqui's debut novel, [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY If you've worked in a restaurant you know the 'family meal' tradition, a preservice gathering for staff, where waiters fill up and [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY Yes, at times it's hard to read. When you pick up Rhiannon Navin's debut novel, Only Child (Knopf, 288 pp., ***), which [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special to USA TODAY The 90 years of Laura Ingalls Wilder's life (1867-1957) encompassed the Indian Wars and the Dust Bowl, desperate poverty and near-starvation, and [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special for USA TODAY How does a writer blend imagination with memory? What happens when a story writer unearths painful emotions about the past? Amy Tan's [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special for USA TODAY Readers have been captivated by stories of prehistoric humans for eons -- well, at least since Jean Auel's phenomenal 1980 best seller [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special for USA TODAY Reader, he marries her. (But you knew that.) What you didn't know but now learn, over the course of Sarah Shoemaker's satisfying [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special for USA TODAY 'Rice is to nourish, tea is to heal,' says the matriarch in Lisa See's sweeping new novel, The Tea Girl of Hummingbird [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special for USA TODAY It's one of the most recognizable images in American art: the young woman in a pink dress sitting -- or collapsed -- [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe 'In the great green room / There was a telephone / And a red balloon / And a picture of -- ' Few parents are unable [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe It's impossible not to root for Shelby Richmond, the broken, goodhearted young woman at the center of Alice Hoffman's poignant new novel, Faithful (Simon & Schuster, [...]

Byline: Emily Gray Tedrowe, Special for USA TODAY This much is clear from the first page of Jade Chang's bright and funny debut novel: The Wangs vs. the World (Houghton [...]