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In her recent collection of essays, Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat takes readers beyond the rubble, on a journey of history, culture and healing.

Jim Shepard writes what he knows, but he also likes to write what he doesn't know. "I think literature is, in some ways, about the exercise of the empathetic imagination," Shepard says. "I'm always interested in stretching that capacity." You Think That's Bad is his latest collection of short stories.

Most fantasy baseball books have no plot, no dialogue, no women — which is just fine with Tony Horwitz. But when Horwitz wants a little story with his stats, he picks up Fantasyland, by Sam Walker.

Gwendolyn Brooks, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who died in 2000, published only one work of fiction for adults: Maud Martha. Author Asali Solomon says Brooks tells this coming-of-age tale with "minimal drama and maximal beauty."

When David Sax was 11, his father handed him The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and said: "Read this if you want to know where I came from." Mordecai Richler's novel about an ambitious teen from Montreal's Jewish working class helped Sax learn to appreciate the immigrant drive.

If you're only going to read one book this year about getting stabbed in the eye and crushing tiny, helpless bunnies, then run right out and get Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son.

Many avid readers know the sense of sadness that can come along with the end of a book. For Ammon Shea, that feeling led him to an idea: Why not read one of the longest books out there, The Oxford English Dictionary?

Banga is Smith's 11th studio album, her first collection of original material since 2004 and the first record she's released since the publication of her memoir Just Kids. Rock critic Ken Tucker says the music on Banga is marvelously uneven and frequently transporting.

After five days of fighting, Russia has agreed on a provisional peace plan with Georgia. Conditions on the ground are still volatile.

The late Ellen Willis was the first pop-music critic for The New Yorker. A new anthology, Out of the Vinyl Deeps, collects her thoughts on Dylan, Joplin and The Rolling Stones, among others. Critic Ken Tucker says the anthology "resurrects a nearly lost, vital, invaluable voice" in pop music.