Adrienne Westenfeld

From the blisteringly contemporary to the classic, the lighthearted to the weighty, here are our favorite short novels to get lost in.

Now that "Rings of Power" has returned for season 2, it's time to do your homework.

The season’s best titles will take you to the bleeding edge of imagination, where glam-rock aliens, wacky alligators, and haunted houses abound.

Welcome back to another year in books, dear reader. Just a quarter of the way through 2024, we’re already enjoying an embarrassment of literary riches—and now, we’re here to spread the gospel about our favorites. The best books of the year (so far) are taking us to dazzling new frontiers. In the fiction landscape, a spate of new novels offer visions of humanity from unlikely narrators, including robots, aliens, and the undead. Meanwhile, it’s shaping up to be an outstanding year for memoirs; new…

When you want to learn about something, chances are the first thing you do is go running to Google. But there’s another way to live and to learn—a better way, we’d argue. It’s called cracking open a book. To make sense of an ever-changing world, we recommend skipping Dr. Google and going straight to the experts. Do you want to expand your knowledge about hot-button issues like wealth inequality, algorithmic overload, and conservative culture wars? There’s a book for that. Or maybe you’re more of…

“Love our fans and each other, and we all are just working to make the show as good as possible,” says Ben Stiller.

See if your favorites made our expanded list.

“A dinner party is not an opportunity to impress people. It’s an opportunity to make people feel good.”

Go ahead and get reading. It’ll make Ted Cruz’s day.

Now that ‘Rings of Power’ has ended, it’s time to do your homework.

Where have we heard that one before?

The legendary author reminisces about the decades she spent contributing to Esquire, from the editors who shaped her career to the boxes of outraged letters about her most infamous story.

Buying a book for a bookworm is a gamble. What if they already have it? What if the reason they don’t have it is because it’s not their preferred genre? Or, even if what you choose does fall within their preferred genre, they might not be a fan of that author. Best to leave readers to their own devices when it comes to constructing a literary diet, but that doesn’t mean you can’t give them something wonderful and purposeful to support their favorite pastime. If there’s anything bibliophiles love…

Plenty of imitators have tried to match the heights of our No.1, but none have come close.

“I’ve always seen airports as a window into other worlds, other lives, other stories,” writes Chuck Tingle in our latest round of the Napkin Project.Much like airports, fiction is a window into “other worlds, other lives, other stories.” Perhaps that’s why, when we asked five extraordinary writers to participate in this summer’s round of the Napkin Project, we had travel on the brain. We gave them a simple prompt: “Write a story about a summer vacation.” And boy, did they take us somewhere.In on…

Sun’s out, school’s out, and summer reading season is officially in session. Whether you’ve kept up with your TBR pile or fallen woefully behind on your goals, these long, bright days are the perfect time to turbocharge your reading habits. And luckily, we have just the prescription for you: more books. Our favorite reads of the summer run a broad gamut, but strangely enough, they traffic in similar themes and obsessions. Time travel is clearly having a major moment this summer, judging by the l…

25 books with no obvious road map. Let’s dive in!

The island's capital is an amalgamation of beach, city, and foodie vibes.

“You never know about the people pulling the actual strings of life in America,” author Teddy Wayne tells Esquire, “because they’re completely out of sight.”In Wayne’s newest novel, The Winner, these unseen kingmakers come into stark close-up—and the portrait is none too flattering. We see “the real winners of America” through the wide eyes of Conor O’Toole, a college athlete raised by working-class parents in Yonkers, New York. Fresh out of law school, Conor decamps to coastal Massachusetts for…

Fifty years ago, Stephen King published Carrie, a slim volume about a bullied teenager and the violent revenge she exacts on her high school classmates. Seventy-six books later, King is arguably the most famous writer in America. Through bloodcurdling novels like It, Pet Sematary, and The Shining, the author has carved out his place as the undisputed master of horror fiction. With more than 350 million copies sold and many of his books adapted for the screen (sometimes multiple times over), King…