"We wanted more. We knocked the butt ends of our forks against the table, tapped our spoons against our empty bowls; we were hungry. We wanted more volume, more riots."

The 2012 Man Booker Prize in fiction was announced on Tuesday night, and the winner made history with her work of historical fiction:  Hilary Mantel took the award for her novel Bring Up the Bodies, the second volume in Mantel's reimagnation of the life and career of Thomas Cromwell,  Tudor courtier and ultimately the chief minister to Henry VIII.

Joe Mozingo reveals his family's incredible -- and very American -- story in his memoir, The Fiddler on Pantico Run. Here, he discusses his "funny last name," the legacies of race, and how his family's own lost history speaks to us all, among other things, with Discover Great New Writers.

The consensus history of the detective story credits its natal coalescence to Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," appearing in 1841. So potent was the new fictional idiom, so suited to contemporary times, that in only a couple of decades mystery novels and short stories were a standardized form, although of course many refinements and milestones remained ahead. So in 1864 the appearance of Andrew Forrester's The Female Detective, featuring the first gumshoe of her gender, was a logical but unprecedented landmark. (Some authorities give the groundbreaking credit, however, to Edward Ellis's Ruth the Betrayer; or, The Female Spy, from 1863. In either case, the time seemed ripe for such a figure.)

Congratulations are due to a host of Discover Great New Writers alums nominated for 2012 National Book Awards and named to the "5 Under 35" list.

Robin Sloan, author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and Charles Yu, author of Sorry Please Thank You, talk about first-person vs. third-person narration, How Fiction Works by James Wood, and creating entirely new worlds with text, among other things.

We couldn't be more thrilled with the news that Junot Díaz was awarded a 2012 "genius grant" from the MacArthur Foundation, to pursue whatever creative project he choses. We can't wait to see what this storytelling impresario does next; For years Díaz has hinted at wanting to, trying to write a science-fiction epic...but for the moment, we'll stick to rereading the incandescent stories in This Is How You Lose Her.

If you haven't yet, do spare a moment for Díiaz's recent conversation with fellow writer Francisco Goldman about why he writes:

"I guess we all have our covenants with the world (or at least we should have). For people like my mother, it's her religion. For other people, it's their children or perhaps their families. For me storytelling is my sacred. About the only covenant I have. As reader and writer I believe in the infinite worldmaking power of stories. I'm with Leslie Marmon Silko when she says in Ceremony: 'I will tell you something about stories, (he said). They aren't just entertainment. Don't be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death.' If I have a faith, that's it. Stories are all we have to fight off illness and death."

Somehow, despite haunting three different libraries in search of works of a fantastical nature, I never chanced upon the books of Roald Dahl while still in elementary school. And they began to appear precisely when I would have truly savored them. James and the Giant Peach, the first, was published in 1961, the year I finished first grade. A little too advanced for me then but surely still discoverable on the shelves two or three years later. But no, I chanced to encounter Dahl only in high school, with his "adult" stories. I still recall the thrill of picking up Switch Bitch in a used book store in the small bohemia adjacent to Brown University. Enjoyable, sure, but not a patch on the YA stuff.

Laurie Halse Anderson, the bestselling author of Speak (a National Book Award Finalist and Edgar Allan Poe Award Finalist) talks with Karen Hesse, MacArthur "Genius" Fellow  and author of Safekeeping, a haunting look at a near-future America with chilling overtones of a political dystopia.

Welcome to Mollisan Town, a burg like many another literary venue, full of citizens rich and poor, honest and criminal, loving and mean, where odd and exotic events occur with life-changing regularity. You'd recognize the commingled noir and magic-realist lineaments of the place from books by Jorge Amado and Jeff VanderMeer, from movies like Chinatown and Pan's Labyrinth. Except for one thing. The inhabitants of Mollisan Town are animate stuffed animals. Yes, creatures of cloth and wool batting, fur and buttons, fabricated in factories before being delivered to their designated natal homes, who nonetheless manage paradoxically to eat and breathe, feel, and die.

Nicholson Baker is a scant three years younger than I, and so I expect he feels generationally much the same way about the high quality of E. B. White's essays. Confirmation of my hypothesis arrives in his new book, The Way the World Works, where he achieves superb results on a par and simpatico with White's sturdy, eternal, captivating prose. (Another obvious and acknowledged influence is John Updike.) Such striving and accomplishment surely could not have arisen without the influential vision of the shining essayistic temple built by White on Mount Parnassus. But now White needs to scoot over slightly on his Parnassian throne to accommodate Baker's sacred rump.

I first encountered the work of Jeff Lemire in 2008, when I sat as one of the judges for the Eisner Awards, comicdom's premier prize. Volumes 1 & 2 of what would become his Essex County Trilogy were under consideration and indeed ended up on the final ballot: an easy decision, as I recall, that elicited unanimity from the impressed judges. Since then, he has gone on from strength to strength, becoming one of the best writers at DC Comics for some of their core superhero titles, while also drawing and scripting his own stand-alone project for their Vertigo imprint, Sweet Tooth, a brutally tender tale about chimeric mutants in a postapocalyptic landscape. And the most amazing thing about Lemire's career since 2008 is that he has not compromised his indie vision. He's remained weird and off-kilter and idiosyncratic, failing to succumb to the bombast and swell-headedness that so often infects even the sharpest of the alternative creators when they enter the franchised world of "the Big Two," Marvel and DC.

After reading Rudolph Herzog's Dead Funny with mixed laughter and gasps, head-shaking incredulity and sagely nodding confirmation of the best and worst that humanity has to offer, I find myself channeling the Three Stooges in You Nazty Spy!, John Banner (Sgt. Schultz) in Hogan's Heroes, Roberto Benigni in Life Is Beautiful, and John Cleese in that episode of Fawlty Towers known as "The Germans". In short, I'm trying to use all the familiar, non-German instances of humor about the Nazis to understand this book's revelations:  a heretofore rare glimpse into the incredible pressure cooker of mortality and laughter that Herzog reveals Hitlerian Germany to have been.

Dan Zettwoch's debut graphic novel sings with a sweet simplicity enhanced by a concealed formalist complexity. Birdseye Bristoe, a spare, episodic tale concerning a few momentous weeks in the lives of the citizens of a small, eccentric "Midsouth" town, is Norman Rockwell by way of Twin Peaks. Although not as ambitious or dense as David Mazzuchelli's Asterios Polyp, it shares some of that book's sly blending of macrocosmic and microcosmic concerns, where big issues arise emergently out of the quotidian.

Ken Perenyi, author of Caveat Emptor: The Secret Life of an American Art Forger, teaches readers how to create fakes, fool experts, and laugh their way to the bank.

In an exclusive interview, playwright Lucy Alibar, who adapted the script of art house favorite Beasts of the Southern Wild from her one-act play Juicy and Delicious, talks about the gender of her main character, future plans for her play, and authors she admires.

Be very careful what you wish for -- you might get it! This familiar bit of cautionary and cynical folk wisdom -- with its unspoken but obvious corollary that when you get your wish it will prove distasteful -- would surely have been known to the master American fantasist James Branch Cabell (1879-1958), especially in its contemporaneous incarnation as "The Monkey's Paw," a 1902 story by W. W. Jacobs. In fact, the monitory maxim could almost serve as a recurring motif and theme across all of Cabell's books, in which unrealistic desires and expectations and dreams are often undermined and betrayed by their very fulfillment, proving that the deluded  human heart is never the best judge of what's really healthy for it.

With the news of Gore Vidal's death at 86, our editors' guide to essential reading from the novelist, essayist and provocateur.

The Longlist for the 2012 Man Booker Prize was announced on July 25; among the selections was Rachel Joyce's The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, also chosen as a Discover Great New Writers Fall 2012 selection. In an exclusive interview with Miwa Messer, Joyce discusses writing about the things she believes in, ordinary people, and the search for something bigger in life.

If you're a fan of pulp fiction, of ashcan gutter naturalism, of absurdist caper novels, of rags-to-riches sagas, then pick up Rich Cohen's The Fish That Ate the Whale. This history-embedded, anecdote-rich biography of Sam Zemurray, the bigger-than-life figure behind United Fruit Company at its height of power, is a balls-to-the-wall, panoramic, rocket ride through an acid bath, featuring unbelievable-but-true tales of power-grabbing, ambition, folly, passion, commerce, politics, artistry, and savagery: daydream and nightmare together.

Ben Fountain, author of Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, and Alan Heathcock, author of Volt, discuss provocative and "political" writing, the desire for accuracy, and the compulsion to tell stories in an exclusive conversation.

Readers who encountered the first and second books in this acclaimed series -- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Volumes 1 & 2, which originally appeared  in serial pamphlet form over the years 1999 to 2003 -- had little reason to suspect that they were enjoying anything more ramified and extensive than a steampunk-style, alternate-history-influenced, literary pastiche. 

But Moore surprised everyone with the appearance in 2007 of The Black Dossier, which delivered supporting documents and secret history in Pynchonian spades, fencing in vast tracts of additional literary territory, and catapulting the action to the year 1958. Now the series suddenly and unexpectedly possessed a wider remit than simple steampunk shennanigans. And so arrived The League of Extraordinary Gentleman: Century 1910 and Century 1969. Now the most recent installment, Century 2009, catches up with the present and points the series towards a blazing future all unborn.

What do you make of the "God Particle?" News of the physics breakthrough sent us to the shelf, where books by Ian Sample, Leon Lederman, and others shed welcome light on this scientific milestone.

John Scalzi's droll and even touching new novel, Redshirts, is a space opera which, at first, seems wryly and cynically to posit that a low-level grunt's life aboard a Big Government starship might resemble a Couplandesque cube-farm in space, except with killer ice sharks and carnivorous rock worms when the crew is on-planet. But their throwaway lives are not totally at the mercy of mere bureaucratic incompetence and disdain. No, more sinister cosmic forces are conspiring against Scalzi's crew, in the form of "The Narrative." And these added dimensions open out Scalzi's story into something much more earnest and significant than simple parody.

Karen Thompson Walker’s astonishing debut, The Age of Miracles, is a perfect example of what the Discover Great New Writers program looks for in a comin-of-age novel, and a review in The New York Times reiterates our selection committee's enthusiastic response to the voice of the book's narrator, 11-year-old Julia.

To say that Stephen Cave's metaphysically provocative new book, Immortality, is an extended gloss on the famous Woody Allen joke -- "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work...I want to achieve it through not dying." -- is both accurate and trivializing. Allen (actually quoted for a different quip in chapter 8) gets full props for succinctly and memorably encapsulating two paths to immortality, those that Cave dubs "Legacy" and "Staying Alive." But the comedian utterly neglects to reference the other two strategies of "Resurrection" and "Soul." Cave, however, considers every possible angle of humanity's eternal anti-death quest in his highly readable treatise. His impeccable, insightful, invigorating chain of reasoning about death and its role as the driving force behind nearly every cultural institution and action in human history leaves no tombstone unturned.

During the last decade or so of his life, Raymond Kennedy would occasionally and ceremoniously roll out of Brooklyn in his Lincoln Town Car and travel to western Massachusetts where I would see him now and again. He was drawn there by the countryside and the hill-andvalley towns of his youth, the region that provides the setting for all but one of his eight novels, including Ride a Cockhorse, his comic masterpiece.

Edmund de Waal, author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, a Fall 2010 Discover Great New Writers selection, discusses connecting with readers, Proust, and the "odd correspondence between inheriting a story and inheriting an object."

Maggie Shipstead, the author of Seating Arrangments, our newest B&N Recommends selection, discusses class-conscious WASPs, literary influences from Cheever to Perotta, and exploding whales.

When Bob Rivers's Cessna was stolen and crashed in a rare instance of airplane piracy, the Seattle radio personality had the same thought as local authorities: drug runners had used, abused, and discarded the plane; case closed. To their astonishment, they later learned that the culprit in the 2008 heist was actually seventeen-year-old Colton Harris-Moore, a poor, neglected, troubled kid who'd had no formal flight training. This was the first time Colt had flown a plane, and yet it wouldn't be the last. He was in the midst of a years-long crime spree -- boosting cars, boats, identities, airplanes, and lots of food.