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Journalist Jason Schreier walks readers through the development of 10 recent games, finding marked similarities in the essential infrastructure of their design and production.

Today, Eleanor Flood will only wear yoga clothes for yoga — which today she will actually attend. Novelist Maria Semple says her frazzled heroine "has decided ... to set the bar very low for herself."

Nickolas Butler's second novel unfolds over three generations at a Wisconsin Boy Scout camp. The story echoes Butler's own experience both at camp and learning about his father's affair.

Get your comic fix this week with Bryan Lee O'Malley's Seconds and The Shadow Hero, by Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew. Both books take up the idea of re-writing the past — but in very different ways.

In Emily St. John Mandel's novel, Station Eleven, a Shakespearean troupe clings to scraps of civilization after a deadly pandemic. Mandel and NPR's Scott Simon talk about art at the end of the world.

Writer and psychoanalyst Adam Phillips explores the paradox of dissatisfaction: Although not getting what we want may cause us pain, Phillips concedes, we should think of frustration as a natural part of existence, and one that can provide us pleasure if we let it.

Spanish novelist Javier Marías is well-known in Europe, but not as popular in the United States. Critic John Powers says Marías' latest work — an unsettling, slightly sinister twist on the mystery novel — ought to raise the author's profile here in America.

Skottie Young's comic may horrify (or delight) the parents of princess-obsessed kids. It's the story of a not-so-little girl who's gone a little violent after 27 years trapped in a sparkly fairyland.

Mohsin Hamid combines the personal and political in his new book, Discontent and Its Civilizations. NPR's Scott Simon talks with the Pakistani author about his new collection of essays.

Mark Doten's debut novel has some beautiful writing in it, but critic Jason Sheehan says the book suffers from too much verbal and typographical trickery, and not enough actual story.