Saskia's Picks

Sensitive, clever, and innocently sensual, Jael McHenry's remarkable first novel surprised me. It cuts through the usual pitfalls of a book built around a motif and is fresher, more alive, more earnest, than anything I've read in some time. It will awaken you to life's detail and make you want to cook.

Intelligent, well-educated, and humorously self-aware, Arthur Phillips' latest novel is something impossible to put down. In the style of William Goldman's (or, "S. Morgenstern's") classic, The Princess Bride, it's difficult to tell where fiction ends and fact begins, so cleverly does the author blur those lines. I found myself feeling that regardless of what was factual, it was all true. Lovers of Shakespeare, students of literature, and any readers with a sister, a father, or a neurosis will be hooked.

James Shapiro's ability to absorb his reader as naturally as a skilled novelist is once again indisputably proven. His study of the centuries of debate regarding the authorship of the most influential plays of all time is as engrossing as it is informative. Every hoax makes you gasp, and you find yourself screaming at Mark Twain.