“How I Became a North Korean”By Krys LeeViking (244 pages, $27)Forgetting the complexities of other lives is so easy these days, immersed as we are in our daily grinds, our political battles, our iPhones and our Netflix. With her devastating yet ultimately hopeful first novel, Krys Lee provides the reminder that sometimes we need a wakeup call. “How I Became a North Korean” demands that we look outside ourselves, pay attention and bear witness to the world and how it can break so many of us.In t

“This Is Only a Test”By B.J. HollarsBreak Away Books (180 pages, $17)In his essay collection “This Is Only a Test,” B.J. Hollars is buffeted on one side by terrifying cataclysms and on the other by typical new-parent anxiety.These forces converge spectacularly in the opener, “Goodbye, Tuscaloosa,” where Hollars describes huddling in a bathtub with his wife and their dog as a violent EF4 tornado begins tearing apart their neighborhood. She has just learned that she is pregnant with their first ch

“The Blue Bath”By Mary Waters-SayerSt. Martin’s Press (307 pages, $25.99)At first, “The Blue Bath” seems to be just a particularly well-written take on an old story, one often encountered in more sophisticated “chick lit” -- the pleasures and perils of an extramarital affair. Kat Lind, an American married to a very busy English businessman, is conveniently left alone at their posh London home while her husband goes on a long business trip and their little boy stays with her in-laws so she can mo

"Sober Stick Figure: A Memoir”By Amber Tozer(Running Press, $24)Comedian Amber Tozer is 39 years old. She is funny, profane and drop-dead honest. A recovering alcoholic, Tozer walked away from drinking eight years ago, and now she has written a book about it.I picked up “Sober Stick Figure: A Memoir” (Running Press, $24) because alcoholism has run in my family, and because of recent news about the prevalence of binge drinking among young people.“Sober Stick Figure” might be the funniest book abo

“The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo” By Amy Schumer(Gallery Books)Amy Schumer is a powerhouse in the entertainment industry, thanks to her Emmy-winning TV series, “Inside Amy Schumer,” and feature film box-office smash “Trainwreck.” A comedian, actress, writer, producer and director, Schumer is on her way to adding “best-selling author” to her list of achievements with her new book, “The Girl with the Lower Back Tattoo.”Schumer is a talented storyteller. She’s known for standing in a spotlight

The Daesan Foundation, dedicated to supporting and promoting Korean literature, has announced the recipients of this year’s Grants for the Translation, Research and Publication of Korean Literary Works, providing funds for 13 works of Korean literature to be translated into 10 languages.The works selected include those by emerging authors such as Hwang Jung-eun’s novel “Let Me Continue” (unofficial translation), the winner of last year’s Daesan Literary Award. Hwang’s novel about the relationshi

“Not Pretty Enough: The Unlikely Triumph of Helen Gurley Brown”By Gerri HirsheySarah Crichton Books/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (500 pages, $27)If there’s nothing more American than a rags-to-riches story, then Helen Gurley Brown was truly an All-American Girl. The author of “Sex and the Single Girl” and later editor of Cosmopolitan magazine, writes biographer Gerri Hirshey, began life as “a very poor and traumatized child of the Depression,” the fatherless daughter of a miserable mother, a skinny

“American Heiress: The Wild Saga of the Kidnapping, Crimes and Trial of Patty Hearst”By Jeffrey ToobinDoubleday (384 pages, $28.95)In modern media culture, news stories blow up, consume us and then, in a matter of months, devolve into trivia, pop-culture reference material and, in the end, a footnote.Take the 1974 kidnapping of heiress Patricia Hearst. The case dominated America’s consciousness for most of two years, especially after she announced she had joined her captors, a homegrown terroris

“The Woman in Cabin 10”By Ruth WareScout Press (340 pages, $26)Laura Blacklock is a writer for a British travel magazine. When a dream assignment lands in her lap — covering the weeklong inaugural cruise of a five-star “boutique” ship with just 10 swanky cabins for passengers pursuing the Northern Lights in the Norwegian fjords — she leaps at the chance.But the poor girl is off to a rough start. Her flat is broken into just before she leaves for the trip, and her encounter with the masked burgla

In the early 1990s, Robert McKee had a revelation that would change the course of his career and influence the lives of tens of thousands of other writers. At the time, he’d written “Abraham,” a four-hour biblical miniseries, for TNT and had sold several unproduced screenplays.“I looked at ‘Abraham’ and thought, ‘I’m a good writer, but I will never be Ingmar Bergman,’” McKee said. “The creative explosion is not happening. It’s professional, it’s actable, it’s entertaining. But I want to be the b

"The Inseparables"By Stuart Nadler Little, Brown and Co. (352 pages, $27)The best fiction illuminates life’s realities, and Stuart Nadler spotlights the fact that we all skate on a very thin edge between joy and sorrow, respectability and shame, life and death.Or, as Henrietta tells her granddaughter, Lydia, in “The Inseparables,” you can be sitting next to a window in a restaurant having a perfectly nice lunch and, “A bird could come through the window right at this instant and impale you.”One

NEW YORK (AP) - Oprah Winfrey has a new book club pick, Colson Whitehead's “The Underground Railroad,” a historical novel that imagines the network of safe houses and passages that helped slaves escape to free territory is an actual train.Winfrey told the Associated Press during a recent telephone interview that she knew from the first sentence that she would want to share her passion with her audience, an impulse she has relied on with uncommon success for 20 years.“I was blown away by it,” Win

“The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror” By Joyce Carol OatesMysterious Press (336 pages, $24)When not writing fat, complicated novels that are some of the finest of our time, the ever-prolific Joyce Carol Oates churns out mysteries, often in the form of short stories or novellas. Sometimes those lesser works read like careless afterthoughts; other times, they’re quite good. “The Doll-Master” falls into the latter category. Its six stories are especially bone-chilling because they contain no

“Three-Martini Lunch” By Suzanne RindellPutnam (512 pages, $27)“Nobody ever became a writer by just wanting to be one.” This terse advice by F. Scott Fitzgerald sets the scene for a compelling exploration of New York City’s Greenwich Village scene in the late 1950s, when beatniks, berets and big ideas gravitated to jazz clubs, and women and minorities could begin to voice ambition without feeling outright derision. (There was derision, but more politic.)Three ambitious young people intersect: Ed