When he was 10 author Amor Towles put a note in a bottle that read something like “if this makes it to China . . . please write back.”

Erica Armstrong Dunbar was at work on her doctoral dissertation on the lives of black women in the antebellum north when she came across an advertisement that caught her attention.

In You’re the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women’s Friendships, Deborah Tannen examines how female friends communicate and different conversational styles.

When Alyssa Mastromonaco visited the Vineyard as acting chief of staff for President Obama, the beach had to wait. Work didn’t stop for the White House team when the President was on vacation.

Richard North Patterson was a political novelist, but he doesn’t write novels anymore. Non-fiction is too compelling. Fever Swamp, Mr. Patterson’s latest book, is an accounting of the 2016 election.

Julie Buntin was the kind of girl who would take out 25 library books at one time. Growing up in Petoskey, a town of 5,500 in northern Michigan, winters were bleak. Reading was the main activity.

Chefs and eaters everywhere rejoiced when Sarah Leah Chase published New England Open-House Cookbook in 2015, after a hiatus of nearly two decades.

In his new book Life’s Work: A Moral Argument for Choice, Dr. Willie Parker argues against allowing sexism, racism and religion to set the standard of morals in the abortion debate.

How did I get here? Richard Russo’s latest short story collection, Trajectory, takes up this question again and again, looking back over the lives of its characters to trace their journeys.

Ms. Anderson’s book White Rage, a New York Times bestseller and National Book Critics Circle Award winner, presents a brief but incisive look at achieving civil rights in the United States.