Pasadena
By David Ebershoff.

Joan Didion has checked out of California—but as her new memoir, Where I Was From, shows, she can never leave.

James Frey’s barroom machismo is the key to a swaggering recovery in his new memoir of addiction.

From the wilderness (the Adirondacks) comes a voice (Bill McKibben’s Enough) telling us that the end is near unless we repent (technologically). Scientists aren’t likely to listen.

Coming to grips with a changed city.

Steven Pinker aims to make the world safe for genetic scientists. But in debunking the idea of the blank slate, is he fighting the last war?

Jennifer Haigh’s first novel, Mrs. Kimble, breathes new life into an old American archetype—the romantic con man.

A blue notebook holds the key to the overintricate plot of Paul Auster’s new novel about a blocked writer from—how did you guess?—Brooklyn.

Erik Larson’s new book balances beauty and terror in 1890s Chicago; Norman Mailer gives fiction lessons.

In new memoirs, David Denby and Pete Rose explore the dark side of the American Dream. They didn’t plan to be quite so funny.