The Violinist's Thumb

Sam Kean's bestseller The Disappearing Spoon romped through the Periodic Table in a compulsively readable history of chemical discoveries. In The Violinist's Thumb -- a reference to the genetic quirk that helped make Paganini's playing legendary -- the writer unveils the mysteries of DNA to equally magical effect.

May 25: On this day in 1938 Raymond Carver was born. Carver's poem "Luck," about a nine-year-old who wakes to an empty house and the leftovers of his parents' party, is all too autobiographical: "What luck, I thought. / Years later,…

Angry robots! Aren't they all? Well, not the line of fine science fiction and fantasy books that comes to readers under the rubric Angry Robot. In fact, their offerings…

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