Michael Schaub
Michael Schaub is a writer, book critic and regular contributor to NPR Books. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Portland Mercury and The Austin Chronicle, among other publications. He lives in Austin, Texas.
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Brazilian author Beatriz Bracher's new novel — her first to be published in English — follows a professor who, years later, is still haunted by his arrest and torture during Brazil's dictatorship.
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Simon Rich's new collection welcomes readers to his sweet but twisted world, with laugh-out-loud stories about everything from a competitively ascetic monk to a baby writer born in tweed and glasses.
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Kate Christensen's new novel follows a group of people on a vintage-themed cruise — think cabaret, cocktails and no Internet — who are thrown together unexpectedly when things go wrong on board.
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Evgenia Citkowitz's new novel follows a family attempting to put their lives back together after a loss. The Halls hope their newly purchased country retreat will help — but things soon go awry.
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Fatima Farheen Mirza's first novel follows an Indian-American Muslim family — at its best, a happy family, but torn by tensions between a father and son who keep missing opportunities to connect.
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Critic and novelist James Wood has often dinged other writers for what he calls "hysterical realism," but his new novel Upstate — while beautifully written — goes too far in the other direction.
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In his new book, Richard Rhodes lays out an accessible and surprisingly optimistic history of energy by exploring the lives of scientists and inventors — and a few unlikely people, like Bard of Avon.
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James Pogue — a journalist with his own rebellious streak — gets at the deep-seated anger that led Ammon Bundy to mastermind the ill-fated armed occupation of the Malheur wildlife refuge in Oregon.
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Kevin Powers' bleak, stunning new book is set in both the 1950s and the Civil War era. It's an intricately plotted look at the ways violence can shape a nation in ways that may not be recoverable.
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Some time in the 1990s, author Charles Bowden wrote a memoir of his friendship with prickly but legendary environmentalist Edward Abbey. And then it sat, neglected, on his computer — until now.