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Milan Kundera's new novel is short on plot, but don't mistake that for dullness. Reviewer Jason Sheehan says the book is slim, funny and stunningly profound.

Jess Row's provocative Your Face in Mine uses the rhetoric of transgender experience to imagine a world where race can be changed; reviewer Amal El-Mohtar calls it a grating meditation on white guilt.

In a "window moment," the poet says, a work shifts and expands: "By glancing for a moment at something else, the field of the poem becomes larger. What's in the room with the poem is bigger."

Before Terry Pratchett created the Discworld, he was a young reporter with a sideline in charming little comic stories about dragons and dust motes, now collected in Dragons at Crumbling Castle.

Quindlen's novel Still Life with Bread Crumbs is predictably comforting and readable, even as it details the challenges of a modern middle-aged woman: the fallout of divorce, a career on the wane, and the endless financial and emotional support demanded by her family.

Kent Russell's collection of autobiographical short stories explores the extremes of masculinity — like a man who's developing an immunity to snake venom by letting cobras and black mambas bite him.

The latest book by former New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb, Great Expectations: The Sons and Daughters of Charles Dickens, reads more like scintillating gossip about the famous writer and his family than literary scholarship. NPR's Heller McAlpin is fine with that.

Adam Begley says Updike created an everyman in his Rabbit book series, and inhabited him fully, "allowing that everyman's senses to be totally open to the American experience."

Novelist Julie Otsuka returns with a tale of Japanese "picture brides," while singer Shania Twain shares her account of overcoming poverty and divorce to hold her own as a country music star.

Novelist Mary Gordon looks at love and maturity, while Henning Mankell delivers his last Kurt Wallander mystery. In nonfiction, Jim Rasenberger revisits the Bay of Pigs, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon tells of Afghani women's ingenuity, Charles Ogletree probes the arrest of Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Meagan O'Rourke meditates on her mother's death.