To drive these days through Great Lakes cities — Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, among others — is to drive through the nation's industrial past. The iconic images have become Rust Belt cliché: weed-choked parking lots, windowless houses, cold factories stripped of their metals and open to the elements.

But there are human stories behind those static images, and author and journalist Edward McClelland digs deeply into them for his empathetic new book, "Nothin' but Blues Skies: The Heyday, Hard Times, and Hopes of America's Industrial Heartland."

Engagingly written, the book covers...

National Book Award winner Colum McCann's ninth book, "TransAtlantic," is a fictionalized exploration of three historic journeys between North America and Ireland. He talked about his new novel, which hits bookstores on June 4, by phone from his birthplace, Dublin.

How did this book come about?

One of the stories that obsessed me was the idea that Frederick Douglass had gone to Ireland at the age of 27 in 1845. He came to do a lecture tour — he was on the abolitionists' circuit — and at the same time, the Irish famine began in 1845. So I was basically corralled by the notion of a...

Peña's gorgeously dark chronicle revolves around a middle-class Mexican family that seems pretty ordinary, except for Claudia, a young woman who rages with unchecked manic...

The novel opens in 1952, with a man on the eve of a journey telling his son and daughter a story...

After his father's death, Christopher left his own position at Oxford to devote his life to Tolkien's vast oeuvre. In addition to the mammoth "History," Christopher edited "The Silmarillion" and volumes of Tolkien's...

A new novel by Pearl S. Buck will be published in October, more than 40 years after her death. Buck, best known for her novel "The Good Earth," won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1938.

"The Eternal Wonder" was discovered in storage and will be published as an e-book original by Open Road Media. Buck finished the novel not long before she died in 1973.

The novel is, the publisher writes, a coming-of-age story of "an extraordinarily gifted young man whose search for meaning and purpose leads him to New York, England, Paris, on a mission patrolling the DMZ in Korea." He crosses paths with a...

A book can’t rescue the American middle class. But a lot of politicians who say they want to rescue the American middle class are writing books about their travails and their vision — all timed to come out as the 2016 presidential election machinery kicks into gear.

The latest book comes from the newest, biggest hero of American progressives — Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. Henry Holt announced this week it will release a new book by Warren in spring 2014.

“The book will tell the story of Senator Warren’s improbable risefrom a working-class family in...

Those clinging hopefully to the old Borders books gift cards stashed in their drawers or wallets are out of luck, a Manhattan federal judge ruled Wednesday. According to Reuters, there are about $210.5 million worth of such cards that had not been used by the time the bookstore chain went out of business in September 2011. All of which are now "equitably moot."

The gift card drama first entered the headlines when two frustrated shoppers who had about $125 in unused gift cards filed court papers in January 2012arguing that Borders did not give card holders adequate notice to redeem them for...

Lydia Davis, known for writing powerful, compact short stories, was announced as the winner of the Man Booker International Prize for fiction Wednesday. The prize, which was presented at a ceremony in London, comes with an award worth more than $90,000.

"Lydia Davis’ writings fling their lithe arms wide to embrace many a kind. Just how to categorize them?" Sir Christopher Ricks, the chair of the judging panel, said while giving the award. "Should we simply concur with the official title and dub them stories? Or perhaps miniatures? Anecdotes? Essays? Jokes? Parables? Fables? Texts?...