Meg Wolitzer

Anjelica Huston's memoir is all Hollywood, all the time. It's full of anecdotes about Jack Nicholson and other stars. But these stories of excess, fame and money lack feeling and subtext.

In her latest collection, Margaret Atwood takes on death, dreadfulness and the use of fantasy. Though these stories are strange and wild, they all somehow ring true.

Akhil Sharma took over a decade to write his novel, Family Life, a mostly autobiographical account of an immigrant family and an accident that shatters their dreams for the future.

Meg Wolitzer says All Our Names, told in the alternating voices of two lovers, is a subtle masterpiece. It tackles huge themes — relationships, violence, identity, racism — but never overreaches.

In 2008, Clark Rockefeller kidnapped his daughter and led police on a weeklong chase. Turned out he wasn't a Rockefeller at all; he was an impostor who happened to be friends with writer Walter Kirn.

Rebecca Mead was 17 the first time she read Eliot's Middlemarch, and the book has remained a favorite ever since. But critic Meg Wolitzer says you don't have to read (or re-read) Middlemarch to love Mead's new book, My Life in Middlemarch, which is a mash-up of literary criticism, memoir and biography of Eliot.

Jenny Offill's sparse and experimental novel Dept. of Speculation is a reminder that bigger isn't always better. Through short vignettes, Offill builds a narrative about an unnamed husband and wife. It's a sly, profound glimpse into a fragile domestic sphere — and, while the form may be unusual, the book is highly readable.

In 1979, Gary Shteyngart's family moved from Leningrad to Queens. Three decades later, he wrote a memoir about growing up in a Russian immigrant family in New York. Reviewer Meg Wolitzer says the book is full of rich, gratifying writing as well as pride, exuberance and sophisticated humor.

Elusive and iconic, author Thomas Pynchon may intimidate some readers, but he has a devoted following. Bleeding Edge, his new new novel, is about a spunky, Upper West Side mother and fraud investigator in the era between the dot-com boom and Sept. 11.