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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Lawrence Wright is at his best in this new examination of his home state — a thoughtful, beautifully written book about a place that can be hard for outsiders to understand.
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Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad's new book is a heartbreaking but necessary account of two teenage sisters from a moderate Muslim family who fled to war-torn Syria after becoming radicalized.
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Jon Pineda's new novel follows a young girl living with her father in an old boathouse, somewhere in the Southern United States. It's a well-written book that manages to be both honest and poetic.
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Kent Anderson's new novel is a sequel to 1997's Night Dogs, and it picks up with antihero Hanson, once an English teacher, now working as a police officer in Oakland — bad attitude entirely intact.
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Reading Zadie Smith's big-hearted, eloquent new essay collection is a lot like hanging out with a friend who's just as at home with pop stars as she is with philosophers.
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Lyndon Baines Johnson was an outsize character who gets a lot of credit for his adminstration's successes — but he didn't do it alone, and Joshua Zeitz' new book looks at his most influential aides.
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Denis Johnson finished his first story collection in 25 years just before he died. The pieces in it are stunning, dark, sometimes as bleak as anything he's ever written — but miraculous to read.
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There's nothing quite like the desperation to communicate with loved ones we've lost — and it's that desire that fuels Thomas Pierce's richly imaginative debut novel The Afterlives.
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The characters Neel Mukherjee's new novel all want better lives, and — to say the least — they're seldom rewarded. A State of Freedom is a dark, brutal read, but also surprisingly beautiful.
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Louise Erdrich's new novel is a frequently bizarre near-future dystopia that never really comes close to getting off the ground, but it won't dent her reputation as one of the country's best writers.