Michael Dirda is impressed with Store of the Worlds: The Stories of Robert Sheckley, edited by Alex Abramovich and Jonathan Lethem, calling the author a “master of satirical science fiction.” (Washington Post)

Mary Pols calls Sadie Jones’ The Uninvited Guests “a sublimely clever book about generosity, discovered late, yet just in time.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

Robin Harding slices and dices Paul Krugman’s End this Depression Now! (Financial Times)

Beth Jones declares Sátántangó by László Krasznahorkai “a Hungarian masterpiece about the nature of storytelling.” (The Telegraph)

Stephan Lee gives Meg Howrey’s novel, The Cranes Dance, a B+, praising its “an addictive, absorbing take on competition and sisterhood.” (EW.com)

Andrew Riemer points to “the eloquence and vividness” of Andrew Motion’s writing in Silver: Return to Treasure Island. (Sydney Morning Herald)

John Barrell says Andro Linklater’s evidence is “intriguing” (though “impossible to prove”) in Why Spencer Perceval Had to Die. (The Guardian)

Moira E. McLaughlin declares Laura Vanderkam’s All the Money in the World a “welcome primer in how to find meaning in how you spend your money.” (The Seattle Times)

Joan Franks says that Tania James’ “prose is clean, deep, limpid; the stories she builds throw strange, beautiful light on completely unexpected places” in her new collection, Aerogrammes And Other Stories. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Yunte Huang compares Wenguang Huang’s The Little Red Guard to Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. (Chicago Tribune)

Leyla Sanai discovers “a touching story about love, loyalty and tragedy” in Stephen May’s Life! Death! Prizes! (The Independent)

Dwight Garner calls Buzz Bissinger’s memoir, Father’s Day, “riveting and a bit frightening.” (NYTimes)

Stephen Abell concedes that a lot of Timothy Mo’s story of a Thai ladyboy-turned-spy-turned jihadist, Pure, “sounds rather silly,” but that that’s “part of the charm.” (The Telegraph)

Stephen Lee gives Anouk Markovits’ I Am Forbidden an A-, noting that reading it “richly rewards your efforts and heralds a promising new writer.” (EW.com)

Miriam Di Nunzio joins Gerry Marshall as he “traverses his life’s path — from his upbringing in New York to his college years at Northwestern University (his three children also are grads) to a stint in the Army and to Hollywood, where he experienced the good, the bad and the bankrupt” in his memoir, Happy Days in Hollywood. (Chicago Sun-Times)

Leah Umansky declares Dorothea Tanning’s poetry collection Coming to That “a book full of imagination, creativity and intellect.” (The Rumpus)

Judith Newman says that Anne Enright is “a poet of the gross, explicating our newfound repulsion and fascination with a body no longer completely under our control” in her memoir, Making Babies. (NYTimes)

David Daley says that, in John Irving’s newest, In One Person,  the author is “a master of the big-hearted social epic, but the earnest tone sometimes wears…” (USAToday)

Ian Thompson declares Bernard Wasserstein’s On The Eve: The Jews Of Europe Before The Second World War a “moving and scrupulous history” that “recreates a world on the edge of its extinction.” (The Independent)

Vikas Swarup experiences “a depiction of despair and dreams in an Indian megacity that is as vivid as great fiction” in Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Slum, by Katherine Boo. (Financial Times)

Mary Ann Gwinn calls Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies a “wonderful, terrible sequel to Wolf Hall.” (Seattle Times)

Thomas Marks is underwhelmed by Tim Parks’ The Server, noting that “this novel’s flaw is not so much its lukewarm plot as its largely uninspiring narration.” (The Telegraph)

Seth Greenland’s The Angry Buddhist is “a wild entertainment as well as a novel about the way we live now that dares to dance with the profound,” says Richard Rayner. (LATimes)

Michiko Kakutani declares Robert A. Caro’s latest installment in his LBJ biography, The Passage of Power, “magisterial.” (San Jose Mercury News)

Patrick Anderson says that, in The Family Corleone, (a prequel to The Godfather, based on a screenplay left behind by the author), Ed Falco “has captured Puzo’s rich prose style and eye for detail, even as he equals or exceeds Puzo’s extravagant violence…” (Washington Post)

Toby Litt heaps the praise on Peter Stamm’s Seven Years. (The Guardian)

Richard Rayner finds a “true thriller” in Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer’s The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. (LATimes)

Toni Morrison’s latest, Home,  is almost eerie in its timeliness,” according to reviewer Tayari Jones. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Helen Greenwood reviews a trio of works by food writers that offer “a smorgasbord of culinary reading.” (Sydney Morning Herald)

Ben Fountain’s first novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, impresses Janet Maslin, who finds “an artfully detailed microcosm of America in general, and George W. Bush’s Texas in particular, during the Iraq war.” (NYTimes)

Toby Clements declares David Hewson’s The Killing a “huge success.” (The Telegraph)

Alexander Heffner says that, in The Spirit of Compromise Why Governing Demands It and Campaigning Undermines It, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson “articulately identify the conundrum that has made compromise unlikely, if not impossible, in Washington.” (Philly.com)

Ken Armstrong finds “a stunning description and dissection of a corporation’s struggles to balance technical expertise with occasional forays into social engineering” in Pulitzer Prize-winners Steve Coll’s Private Empire: Exxon Mobil and American Power. (The Seattle Times)

Gregg Allman’s memoir My Cross to Bear earns three stars from Marco R. della Cava, who says, “Allman comes across as a simple man who knows what and who he likes, and can’t be bothered with the rest.” (USAToday)

In Harriet Levin’s new collection, Girl In Cap and Gown, Lori Bassen finds “perspectives are varied but unified by intense focus, much like the eyes of bees.” (The Rumpus)

Peter Carty declares Adam Thorpe’s political thriller, Flight, an “exhilarating trip.” (The Independent)

Rob Brunner awards Hilary Mantel’s newest - Bring Up the Bodies - an A, taking particular pleasure in “watching Mantel build, with remarkable skill and emotional sensitivity, toward the inevitable” in the story of Henry Tudor and Anne Boleyn. (EW.com)

John Charles reviews a quartet of new romance novels. (Chicago Tribune)

H.W. Brand, who “reconsiders an American villain” in his new biography The Heartbreak of Aaron Burr, takes a look at 4 other books on “misunderstood lives.” (The Daily Beast)

Kevin G. Keane says that, in White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You, economist Simon Johnson and lawyer James Kwak “point out the absurdities of a budget debate dominated by partisan exaggerations and warnings of pending doom.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

Becky Krystal says that, in addition to profiling her three subjects (Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag and Angela Davis), Alice Kaplan “serves up a compelling biography of Paris itself” in Dreaming in French. (The Seattle Times)

Jeff Turrentine declares Ben Fountain’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk a “a masterful gut-punch of a debut novel.” (Washington Post)

Steve Jelbert discovers “a great tale” (but overuse of a thesaurus) in Here Comes Everybody: The Story of The Pogues, By James Fearnley. (The Independent)

Clive James digs into Carol Ann Duffy’s “entertaining new anthology,” Jubilee Lines, and finds “a high quality carival.” (Financial Times)

Kate Peterson says Elizabeth Ellen’s 94-story collection, Fast Machine, is “not for the faint of heart.” (The Rumpus)

Tom Bower sets off on a quest for a celebrity’s “Rosebud” in Sweet Revenge: The Intimate Life of Simon Cowell, but Marina Hyde comes away not knowing much more than she did when she cracked it open. (The Guardian)

Craig Fehrman declares Jonathan Franzen’s essay collection, Farther Away, “beautifully written, but bland.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

Janet Maslin says there is “something jolting at work” in Christopher Buckley’s satire They Eat Puppies, Don’t They?. (NYTimes)

Susan Wloszczyna awards three stars to Sissy Spacek’s memoir, My Extraordinary Ordinary Life. (USAToday)

Never Fall Down, by Patricia McCormick, impresses Susan Carpenter for its “detailed look at what it was like to live under such a cruel government from the perspective of one of its best-known survivors, Arn Chorn Pond.” (LATimes)

Lucy Beresford calls Elif Shafak “an unflinching writer,” and her novel, Honour, “a gripping exploration of the darkest aspects of faith and love.” (The Telegraph)

Lev Grossman says that Laurent Binet’s HHhH’s “quirky, clever, stunt-yness is typical of what tempered with uneasiness my enjoyment of this otherwise smart and accomplished book.” (TIME)

Melissa Maerz gives Toni Morrison’s latest, Home, an A-, noting that is  told “in the stark, economical tone of a short story, with all the philosophical heft of a novel.” (EW.com)

Alec Russell discovers an “impassioned account of Bosnia’s divided and violent past” in The War is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia, the Reckoning by Ed Vulliamy. (Financial Times)

Martin Ruben says that to read Nobel Laureate Nadine Gorimer’s latest, No Time Like the Present, is to “plunge into the caldron that is South Africa today, a chaotic now which cannot avoid the dark shadow of a heavy past…” (Chicago Tribune)

With the weekend coming up, check out Jimmy So’s “Hot Reads” of the week. (The Daily Beast)

Steven Heller peruses “the the quirks and artifacts of Freemasons, Elks, and their ilk” in Adam Parfrey and Craig Heimbichner’s Ritual America: Secret Brotherhoods and Their Influence on American Society. (The Atlantic)

Anthony Cummings declares Peter Stramm’s “tale of lust and deceit,” Seven Years, “an existentialist classic in the making.” (The Telegraph)

Michael Dirda finds “great fun” in Christopher Fowler’s new mystery, The Memory of Blood. (The Washington Post)

Helen Keller in Love, a fictional account of the icon’s love life by Rosie Sultan, “will surely prompt controversy” as the threads “don’t weave together to make an entirely credible read,” according to Holly Weiss. (Blogcritics)

David V Barrett goes between the covers of Glyn Parry’s The Arch-Conjuror of England: John Dee. (The Independent)

Alexandra Yurkovsky reviews a trio of collections released during National Poetry Month: Dana Gioia’s Pity the Beautiful, A.E. Stallings’ Olives and Jonathan Galassi’s Left-Handed. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Nicole Weaver declares The Girl Who Fell from the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow “a handy resource for anyone looking to getting a genuine look at what it means to be of mixed race.” (seattlepi.com)

In Jeff Ragsdale’s Jeff, One Lonely Guy, “we relate face-to-face — more accurately, device-to-device — with the man with the iPad in the café, the woman on the train clicking through her cell phone, the executive who can’t stand to be away from his Blackberry for one minute, the teen who sends hundreds of texts a day,” writes Joel Drucker. (Huffington Post)

Peter Craven says of Jeffrey Archer’s The Sins of the Father: “God knows how fiction this humble scintillates and sizzles but it does.” (Sydney Morning Herald)

Susan Carpenter finds “a prequel that is well crafted and elegantly written, yet playful” in The Extraordinary Education of Nicholas Benedict by Trenton Lee Stewart. (LATimes)

Martin Chilton calls Jack Lasenby’s Uncle Trev And His Whistling Bull “a charming tale, full of tall stories.” (The Telegraph)

Chris Lites observes that Daniel Levin Becker “goes where few have gone” in Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature. (The Rumpus)

Irene Wannersays Julie Zickefoose’s “drawings and paintings have the skilled detail of a passionate observer, as does her writing” in The Bluebird Effect: Uncommon Bonds With Common Birds. (Seattle Times)

Danielle Ofri discovers “a remarkable journey into the essence of medicine” in Victoria Sweet’s God’s Hotel: A Doctor, a Hospital, and a Pilgrimage to the Heart of Medicine. (San Francisco Chronicle)

Warren Bass calls Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson’s Why Nations Fail “a sweeping attempt to explain the gut-wrenching poverty that leaves 1.29 billion people in the developing world struggling to live on less than $1.25 a day.” (Washington Post)

Kathra Pollitt joins the search for the true essence of the presumptive GOP presidential nominee in her examination of Michael Kranish and Scott Helman’s The Real Romney. (The Guardian)

Adrian Turpin declares Scenes from Early Life, by Philip Hensher,a “remarkable piece of ventriloquism.” (Financial Times)

Patty Rhule awards Penny Vincenzi 3 and a half stars for her “delicious, dialogue-driven drama,” More Thank You Know. (USAToday)

Richard Rayner finds “a novel about the way we live now that dares to dance with the profound” in Seth Greenland’s The Angry Buddhist. (LATimes)

Paul Muldoon appreciates the core essence of Philip Larkin’s The Complete Poems, but casts a jaundiced eye on much of the filler provided by editor Archie Burnett. (NYTimes)

Sean Singer says A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon, CA Conrad’s book of (Soma )tic exercises, is “highly original, creative, but dramatic, over-the-top, showy, and a little pretentious.” (The Rumpus)

Emma Young discovers “an uncommon air of assurance for a debut” in M.L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans. (Sydney Morning Herald)

Susan Carpenter finds the “horrors of war and children’s fight for survival in a chaotic world… imaginatively detailed” in Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel, The Drowned Cities. (LATimes)

Alsion Flood cheers Stephen King’s The Wind Through the Keyhole: A Dark Tower Novel. (The Guardian)