Peter Manseau, the curator of American religious history at the Smithsonian, offers his definitive description of Thomas Jefferson's eclectic efforts to remake the Bible in the Catholic Book Club's latest selection.

“Prison Journal" recounts the first five months of Pell’s 404 days in solitary lockup.

Come to Yaa Gyasi's fiction, all you who are weary and burdened, and she will give you heartbreak.

Anne Tyler's new novel can help us realize that life often is not spectacular or about jumping from one big event to the next.

Those familiar with the Gilead story will find in Marilynne Robinson's latest novel another beautiful meditation on grace operative in spite of habits of despair and the social sins that feed them.

A longtime historian of Los Angeles explores and deconstructs the mythical city of boosters, developers and "perpetual reinvention."