Michael Chabon

Two Jewish cousins — a Czech refugee with Houdini-level escape artistry and a Brooklyn teenager with a gift for business — create one of the golden age of comics' most enduring superheroes, The Escapist, while navigating World War II, love, loss, and the American immigrant experience. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

In an alternative history, Jewish refugees settled in Sitka, Alaska after World War II instead of Palestine. Now the Federal District of Sitka is about to revert to Alaskan jurisdiction, and detective Meyer Landsman has a body in his hotel room and a chess piece near the corpse. A genre novel that is also a meditation on home, diaspora, and the limits of belonging.

Grady Tripp, a creative writing professor at a Pittsburgh university, has been working on his second novel for seven years. It is 2,600 pages and shows no signs of ending. Over one chaotic weekend — during a literary festival — everything in his life comes apart at once: his wife leaves, his editor arrives, his student steals a jacket from the chancellor's house.