Dara Weinberg

The cover of Jennifer Haigh's new book Baker Towers doesn't tell you a thing about what's inside, and we think it's a shame that just because her last novel, the very successful Mrs. Kimble, was about women and marriage, that this one - a detailed, multigenerational historic novel about a Pennsylvania mining town - should have a cover of a forties-era chick reclining on the hood of a car....

Kneel, short-story-writers, at the impeccably groomed, British feet of Matthew Kneale. His new book, Small Crimes In An Age of Abundance, not only has the best title of any short-story collection this year, but this best material between its covers. (It also has the best cover, an etching of a fat pig's behind.) These satiric, chilling, hilarious stories will shake you up like the salt at the table....

The jacket of Jonathan Tropper's new book, Everything Changes, shows a man on a tightrope, carrying an umbrella, trying to make his way across the perils of a woman's body. He seems to have gotten stuck right around her crotch. This is an unfortunately accurate depiction of what seems to have happened to Tropper's writing - it revolves around sex and very little else. Everything Changes is supposed to be the story of a...

What's going on this weekend? How about a trip to Bavaria in the 1620s, to a war-torn region divided between Protestants and Catholics, and all via the rafters of a North Hollywood warehouse? The Antaeus Company's successful run of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage And Her Children: A Chronicle Of The Thirty Years' War has been extended for two more weeks. Laist caught one of the remaining shows this Thursday and was enthralled. The story...

Young adult fiction is the best-kept secret in publishing. Rather than getting stuck in the midlist graveyard, like Daniel Handler before he became Lemony Snicket, authors - and readers - would be doing themselves a favor to check out the genre. Crossover titles from this field have made it onto bestseller lists and into the hearts of us Not-So Young Adults quite a bit recently. If you've already pre-ordered your Harry Potter, and you're...

We acquired Alan Trustman's The Screenplay Sell: What Every Writer Should Know through an improbable chain of circumstances. A high school librarian, who may or may not be our mother, was asked to buy this book by a drama teacher at her school. They sent two copies, and she gave us the other one. Now imagine that on top of that, we had had to snatch this book from the librarian's hand while riding...

When we heard that the fabulous designer Teva Durham was putting out her first book of original knitting patterns, we could hardly wait. If you've stitched, bitched, bought the T-shirt and are ready for the next level, Durham's new book, Loop-d-Loop: More than 40 Novel Designs for Knitters will be an asymmetrical, cabled rip-tide of inspiration. Although the book isn't intended for beginners, the clarity of Durham's directions makes it possible for anyone to...