Michael Schaub
Michael Schaub is a writer, book critic and regular contributor to NPR Books. His work has appeared in The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Portland Mercury and The Austin Chronicle, among other publications. He lives in Austin, Texas.
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Sebastian Barry's relentlessly bleak, stunning new novel follows his character Tom, a retired police detective, as his life is thrown into disarray when he's confronted with a past he'd rather forget. -
Alaska-born author Melinda Moustakis' debut novel Homestead is beautiful; it's also a profound look at how we navigate one another, and what it means to reveal ourselves to the ones we care about.
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Jack Bittle's book takes a look at several communities that have been affected by climate change, and how the lives of their residents — those who have survived — have been altered by extreme weather.
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Keefe recognizes that we're all unreliable narrators of our own lives, and writes about his subjects with a keen sense of understanding.
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It's a testament to Hilary Mantel's brilliance as an author that even though the moments in these stories are subtle, the book somehow feels epic in its own way.
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It would have been easy for the famous journalist to fall into the nostalgia trap with his memoir, which chronicles his earliest years in the newspaper business. Happily, he doesn't.
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Kyle Lucia Wu's debut follows a young Chinese American woman who takes a job as a nanny to a wealthy white family and never feels like she fits in, even though she bonds with her precocious charge.
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Margaret Verble's novel follows a young Cherokee woman whose life as a horse-diver in Tennessee zoo is derailed by a terrible accident. It's unfocused at times, but definitely a ride worth taking.
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Charlie Barnes, the figure at the center of Ferris' A Calling for Charlie Barnes, is 68 and on his fifth marriage, and after a self-diagnosed cancer scare, he wants his son to write his life story.
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Ye Chun's new story collection Hao takes its name from a Chinese word meaning "good," or "everything's OK" — but the characters in these stories are sick, afraid, out of time, and anything but OK.
