Elizabeth Taylor

The Best American Comics 2006 Edited by Harvey Pekar Houghton Mifflin, 293 pages, $22 "While I'm usually not into `best of' collections and awards because of the wide variation in...

Girls wielding field-hockey sticks and running like thoroughbreds probably have no sense that their mothers-even those like the one on this week's cover-grew up in a wildly different time. It's...

Prep time: Six months Ingredients: 5 delicious places 5 hungry writers 1 ravenous photographer 1. Gather locally: Travel writer Al Solomon ventures deep into the Midwest to see the Heartland...

The Keep By Jennifer Egan Knopf, 240 pages, $23.95 Neo-Gothic thriller. Story within a story. Clash of Old World with New. These descriptions, though accurate, fail to capture the full...

"A chair is a very difficult object," claimed architect Mies van der Rohe, the designer of so many buildings associated with the famous Chicago skyline. "A skyscraper is almost easier....

The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life By Edward Mendelson Pantheon, 260 pages, $23 Toss the self-help books and turn to...

Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families Edited by Andrew Carroll Random House, 386 pages, $26.95 "One cannot tell the...

When Internet critic Steve Johnson was reporting his first-ever "50 Best Web sites" last March, it led to a "Predicament." That was the title of the Threadless T-shirt he purchased...

Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them By Francine Prose HarperCollins, 288 page, $23.95 Even for those without...

What It Takes to Pull Me Through: Why Teenagers Get in Trouble--And How Four of Them Got Out By David L. Marcus Houghton Mifflin, 338 pages, $13.95 paper Based on...