In Gary Shteyngart's "Lake Success," hedge fund managers are unhappy and white supremacists have found their voice.

A powerful female character can be hard to find in Western fiction, but bookseller Aaron Cance recommends a novel which delivers just that.

"It's very harsh and it's full of violence and incongruities, but it's also truly fully of the Russian spirit," says bookseller Kate Jacobs, about the novel "A Terrible Country."

"I am making fun of the most weird aspects of higher ed," said Julie Schumacher, author of "The Shakespeare Requirement."

English and Ghanaian culture collide in Michael Donkor's new novel, "Housegirl."

Bookseller Danny Caine recommends a poetry collection that offers "a funny and occasionally devastating portrait of life as a first generation Mexican-American."

Wayetu Moore fled Liberia's civil war when she was five. Now she is reconnecting with her homeland through her novel "She Would Be King" published by Twin Cities-based Graywolf Press.

"More than a history of music, this is actually a history of the United States, and of protest in the early twentieth century," says bookseller Ruth Hulbert.

Innosanto Nagara first built a following with "A is for Activist." His newest children's book opens with the story of a couple who decides to get married in the middle of a protest.

Jason Mott's novels capture dark, unforgiving situations: the dead returning, a new world war, a deadly epidemic. Why do we have a taste for those stories?