Novelist, poet and Western Carolina University professor Ron Rash has created a home-grown wonder: His fourth novel, "Serena," aims for a distant target and hits it.

Greg Melville does a smart thing at the start of "Greasy Rider: Two Dudes, One Fry-Oil Powered Car, and a Cross-Country Search for a Greener Future" -- he allies himself with the common man who is all for doing right by the environment -- when it's convenient.

Barton Gellman's carefully reported and vigorously written account of Dick Cheney's role in George W. Bush's administration, "Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency," (Penguin, $27.95, 484 pages) is unique because the subject and his conduct in office are singular.

Book review:Philip Roth, the author of 'Portnoy's Complaint,' explores love and war in the 1950s.

Book review:In "The Forever War," Dexter Filkins -- through gut-wrenching and touching vignettes -- repeatedly reveals the human side of war.

The jacket of this volume of poems about birds features a dazzling photo -- by Thomas Schweda -- of two broad-tailed hummingbirds, wings ablur, as motionless on paper as they often are in midair. The back of the one in focus gleams like an emerald, bronze tail feathers fanned, white tipping the first three on either side.

As intricately and finely stitched as a lacy shawl, "The Seamstress" is a debut novel worth its weight. And considering the novel weighs in at a hefty 641 pages, that's saying something.

The power of Marilynne Robinson's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel "Gilead" lay in the way it registered the pressures of historical change even as it celebrated simple, persistent virtues.

In "The Lizard King," his book about the wild world of reptile-dealing chicanery, Bryan Christy describes a smuggling incident at Miami International Airport.

'The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society" is a sentimental book.

Under the Radar:With help from an independent Raleigh bookstore, Angela Davis-Gardner's third novel found its audience.

They tell of the loneliness when their parents are serving.

What do we make of Evan S. Connell? In the course of a half-century career, he has written fiction, essays, biography and two book-length poems.

Thirty-three summers ago, a normally reserved friend of mine fairly burst through my screen door, fumbling a book in his hand. He stuck it under my nose. "Read this immediately," he demanded.

Any great newsroom worth its salt is an ink-stained asylum, a toxic landfill, a college of cranks and a museum of misfits who never learn, despite years of broken promises to weary spouses, that they will not be home for dinner.

Summer's lease hath all too short a date, as the Bard aptly reminds those who cherish these sultry months for guiltless hours of surfside or hammock reading.

How an administration as fixated on loyalty and conformity as this one ever came to produce so unending a series of defectors eager to tell all to anyone who will listen is a topic that will keep psycho-historically inclined scholars of the presidency employed well into the decade after next.

Sometimes, if I hit a couple of bad books in a row, I have to remind myself why I read novels. Erin McGraw's "The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard" reminded me from page one.

Clyde Edgerton's 'The Bible Salesman' offers the genesis of one thief -- and tempts readers with the revelation of another.

Anthology's gems smash into cultural clichés.

Consider Madonna's sultry come-on from 1990s "Justify My Love": "Tell me your dreams. Am I in them?" That same year, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and critic Richard Howard told literature graduate students at Columbia University, "other people's dreams are boring, unless we are in them." If you stood in rural Indiana and shot an arrow through Madonna and Howard -- an arrow that arced past thunderheads and lighting bolts, to mysteriously ascend out of sight just as the bruised Midwestern sky was dawning -- you'll have some understanding of the trajectory of Trace Pennington, the heroine of Haven Kimmel's spellbinding fourth novel, "Iodine."

Car crash victim goes through hell, finds love with 14th century angel.