Author name: Eleanor Larson

Near the bottom of a list of things crime fiction writer Raymond Chandler hated was that ubiquitous Los Angeles demographic: “actors.” The list, simply titled “THINGS I HATE,” was one of dozens of Chandler’s rare personal items auctioned Friday at Doyle Auctioneers & Appraisers in Manhattan. In pencil, Chandler — author of the acclaimed hard-boiled […]

In keeping with our annual tradition, we asked three of our critics for their favorite books of the last year. Between them, they chose 15 books, three of them reissues, and the majority fiction. The selections include the latest works from a literary power couple — Percival Everett’s “James” and Danzy Senna’s “Colored Television” —

Since 1979, Haruki Murakami has written more than a dozen imaginative novels concerned with the nature of reality. He says he tends to incorporate weird events that occur as he writes into otherwise realistic stories. The filmmaker Arthur Jafa has described a similar process of creating energy by placing dissonant scenes in proximity. In a

In his groundbreaking 1980 account of the baby boomers, “Great Expectations,” Landon Y. Jones predicted that this generation would pioneer a new model for old age. The cohort born between 1946 and 1964 “promises to be relatively healthier, better educated, and more certain of its desires,” Jones wrote. “For the baby boomers, to be old

It was probably inevitable that Patrick Radden Keefe’s gripping 2019 bestseller “Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland” would be adapted by Hollywood. Part thriller, part true-crime investigation, the nonfiction book uses one of the most heinous unsolved crimes of the Troubles — the 1972 disappearance of Jean McConville, a

Hardcover fiction 1. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $29) Two grieving brothers come to terms with their history and the people they love. 2. The Grey Wolf by Louise Penny (Minotaur: $30) The 19th mystery in the Armand Gamache series. 3. The Waiting by Michael Connelly (Little, Brown & Co.: $30) LAPD

A slim science fiction novel that looks at our “precious and precarious” world through the eyes of six astronauts on the International Space Station has won the 2024 Booker Prize. Samantha Harvey, author of “Orbital,” took home the award Tuesday. The book focuses on a single day in the life of the astronauts on the