Fiction | featured news

Welcome to the first installment of the Big City Book Club with Ginia Bellafante. Join us for a live discussion of the novel "Let the Great World Spin," by Colum McCann.

The June 14 issue of The New Yorker, perhaps the premier showcase for American fiction, features a list of “20 Under 40” — that is, 20 accomplished writers under the age of 40. Many of the names are familiar: Joshua Ferris, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nell Freudenberger, Rivka Galchen, Nicole Krauss, Gary Shteyngart, ZZ Packer, Wells Tower.

Imagining the fate of characters pulled from fact or fiction has become standard stuff in the book trade. Gerald Kolpan’s "Etta” (Ballantine Books, $25) gloms on to the story of Etta Place, companion of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (and the latter’s lover), whom Kolpan imagines was a Philadelphia society woman called Lorinda Jameson.

1. Turn Coat by Jim Butcher. (Roc, $25.95.) 2. Just Take My Heart by Mary Higgins Clark. (Simon & Schuster, $25.95.) 3. Long Lost by Harlan Coben. (Dutton, $27.95.)

1. True Detectives by Jonathan Kellerman (Ballantine, $27). In an Alex Delaware novel, interracial half-brothers investigate a young woman's death.

2. Handle With Care by Jodi Picoult (Atria, $27.95). A woman whose daughter has a dangerous birth defect must decide whether to sue her obstetrician.

3. Outcast by Aaron Allston (Del Rey/Ballantine, $27). A "Star Wars" novel about the extended Skywalker family.