Salman Rushdie isn’t high up on my list of favorite novelists. I tried to read The Satanic Verses out of curiosity once but gave up after a couple of inscrutable chapters. I made it deeper into Midnight’s Children, but I didn’t connect with that book either and never finished it. What interests me more than Rushdie’s tales of magical realism are the stranger-than-fiction plot points of his life. I still remember reading a riveting excerpt in The New Yorker from his 2012 memoi

When helping a Manhattan Reader family member weed through her bookshelves recently, I came across an out-of-print hardcover that caught my eye. I knew nothing about it beyond the fact that it was about ballet, but I brought it home on a whim. Fokine: Memoirs of a Ballet Master recounts the life and career of Michel Fokine, a Russian-born dancer and choreographer who was instrumental in transforming classical ballet into a more modern and bold art form. He viewed the grand ba

Beth Macy is a journalist who has written several acclaimed nonfiction books, including Factory Man , the story of a Virginia furniture maker who battled to save his company and prevent hundreds of American manufacturing jobs from being lost to offshoring, and Dopesick , a chronicle of America's opioid epidemic. Her newest book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America , published in 2025, recounts her upbringing in the 1970s and 1980s in what was once