Dana Spiotta's Innocents and Others tells the feminist story of how women make do in a male-dominated world through two female filmmaker best friends, and a third, troubled woman adept at beguiling powerful Hollywood men. 

David Remnick and Deborah Treisman, editor and fiction editor, take us through the fiction at the New Yorker and how it has changed over the years. 

Joshua Cohen's The Book of Numbers  follows the rise of the Internet through a protagonist he modeled after some of the web's biggest shapers, including Google's Sergey Brin, but mostly Apple's Steve Jobs.

Elizabeth McKenzie's half screwball romantic comedy and half critique of the conspicuous consumption of the leisure class, featuring a heroine named after the depressive American economist Thorstein Veblen and a cast that includes advice-giving squirrels.

Philosopher Mark de Silva's debut novel shows what a novel can do when it goes off the beaten track.

Darryl Pinckney talks about the attraction of leaving America to discover how to be an African-American in America.

Ryan Gattis' new book, All Involved, is really a reconstitution of the L.A. riots from a person who wasn't there.

Larissa MacFarquhar writes about do-gooders who practice effective altruism. They don't care what others think of their extreme choices. They care about being effective.

Edmund de Waal takes us on a vast journey into the history and heart, skin and bones of porcelain.

Bruce Bauman's new novel is like a family with everyone, including the reader, struggling to find a place, a home, a sense of community.