Karisma Price’s debut is rich with aphorism and rhetoric; Will Harris’s second book is a meditation on family; Gabrielle Bates’s debut borrows from fairy tales; and Ellen Bryant Voigt’s collected poems sum up a career, and a life. Starting and ending in her native New Orleans after Hurricane … [Read more...]

For readers who like mysteries that are suspenseful but not frightening, here are five new and recent books that may keep you up late finding out whodunnit — but won’t scare you out of sleeping altogether. (Berkley) Sixty-year-old widow Vera Wong’s rigidly structured schedule — up at 4:30 a.m. … [Read more...]

HISTORY Indonesia Out of Exile: How Pramoedya’s Buru Quartet Killed a Dictatorship Max Lane Penguin, $34.99 In the second week of January, Indonesian President Joko Widodo expressed deep regret for the country’s dark history of human rights violations, chief among them one of the worst … [Read more...]

“In a strange way, what I read coincided with what I was. I read about the raging sea as the sea raged, I read about the whispering forest as the forest whispered, and when I read that to pray was not to speak, but to become silent, that only in silence could God’s kingdom be sought, God’s kingdom … [Read more...]

The fascinating story of how Indonesia came to better know itself through a time of repressive regimes. Australia’s relationships with Indonesia are usually measured through stories of terror and disaster, aid and trade, rarely anything that’s cerebral. That’s been corrected by writer Max Lane … [Read more...]