A dozen of our personal favorites from a year in reading fiction.

A dozen of our personal favorites from a year in reading nonfiction.

The ways in which kitchen tools and techniques affect what and how we eat.

The revolutionary painter, in the eyes of his contemporaries, was by turns a genius and simpleton.

The world inside can seem realer than any other.

New lives of folk music legends Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger.

A novelist reveals the real-life inspiration for his hard-luck fiction.

The "closest reader of our time" sets his sights on everything from Keith Moon's drumming to Paul Auster's prose.

Following Bach's music into the digital age and beyond.

A deeply sympathetic examination of the Founding Father's paradoxes.

When the menace of Stalinism knew no borders.

A former National Book Award judge casts an eye over this year's contenders.

A mansion-full of stuffed beasts provides a haunting setting for a novel of secrets and consequences.

The novelist's correspondence shows a determinedly independent sensibility working patiently at becoming a legend.

A wryly observant take on twenty-first-century America through the life of one of its most colorful cities.

Celebrating great works of art in a state of hyper-articulate ecstasy.

When animal infections make the jump to human hosts.

The beginning of a complex relationship.

Can the ghost of 1776 be discerned in the highway-striped landscape of a twenty-first-century nation?

How the powers that had lined up against the Axis shifted positions to begin a chilly new conflict.

Two defining voices of rock look back on lives of creative musical destruction.

From the earliest moving images to the latest blockbusters, a history of our shared love affair with the movies.

The acclaimed Norwegian novelist captures the angst of youth and evokes the work of Raymond Carver.

A record of conflict viewed through the lens of one author's life.

Unearthing family secrets while resisting the impulse to curry sympathy or self-mythologize.

A sprawling aesthetic jumble of a novel finds a unified voice.

An ambitious graphic novel documents the life of a nameless Chicago woman.

Jack Kerouac's journey to the composition of On the Road was long, and filled with detours.

3-D printers and the future of manufacturing.

When the child takes over the bedtime story, the villain -- and the parent -- is put through his paces.