100 Notable Books of 2014

The year’s notable fiction, poetry and nonfiction, selected by the editors of The New York Times Book Review.

Prize-Winning Books of 2014

'Tis the season for gold stickers on fresh book covers. Here's the lowdown on the best of the best of this year.

Read if you want to: Fix, forgive or, at least, accept those flawed family relationships.

Typography Book Explores What It Feels Like To Have Dyslexia

"Being dyslexic, one thing always stood out," Sam Barclay explains in his Kickstarter video. "The available help was always aimed at making me read better. Very little effort was made to help the people around me understand what it feels like to struggle with reading."

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31 Great Summer Books

Looking for your next great read? Look no further. Real Simple's Facebook fans have you covered for the best books to read this summer.

A Pocket Guide to Vietnam

A Pocket Guide to Vietnam, 1962 was published by the Department of Defense and meant for soldiers in the field.

Written in simple, declarative sentences—“South Vietnam has a typically tropical climate of two seasons: hot and dry and hot and rainy”—the book is deeply respectful of Vietnam’s culture and people. (“Don’t think Americans know everything,” it instructs.) This makes it a fascinating distillation of the things we knew (or thought we knew) about a very old country we never did come to understand—and fills it with all sorts of dramatic ironies.

Oxford’s Bodleian Library published a cheap and elegant reprint last year; it carries a new foreword by U.S. Army veteran Bruns Grayson. (“I must have received this handbook sometime in the spring of 1968, before heading off to Vietnam that summer,” Grayson writes.) And the book’s also available as a (free) PDF.

Ultimate Parent Book!

Johnny Got His Gun remains the most revolutionary, searing document against war and injustice ever written. It says it all, and it tells people what to do. It calls for revolution, for picking up the gun and pointing it in the right direction -not against the poor and the powerless, but against the slime that rule, those "who would have one cobbler kill another cobbler...one man who works kill another man who works...one human being who wants only to live kill another human being who wants only to live."

Johnny Got His Gun...goes on record for all time as a warning to all governments that would send their young men to war -that their heads will be on the block next time and that no matter how important they think they are, what office they may hold or military rank they may have attained, all the power they have means nothing to us, for if they try to take our sons or harm us with their stupid policies, we will fight back by whatever means necessary?   Ron Kovic, paralyzed Vietnam veteran, in his introduction to Dalton Trumbo's 1991 edition of Johnny Got His Gun