The stairway to the Goodnight Moon room at The Blue Marble serves as a portal to a simpler, more magical time most of us recall as childhood. The local Fort Thomas children’s bookstore this month celebrates 33 years providing literature for children of all ages and interests.

Written in a slow, languid, lyrical style so light that it nearly floats, Richard Ford’s new novel, Canada, further solidifies the author’s position among the best American writers of our time.

A beautiful married woman suddenly and mysteriously disappears and her husband immediately becomes the chief suspect in her murder. It’s a storyline so frequently used in books and films that it’s almost become a worn-out cliché. But that is definitely not the case in Gillian Flynn’s third and latest psychological thriller, Gone Girl.

The theme of The Mercantile Library’s Harriet Beecher Stowe Lecture series is “writing to change the world.” Few writers live up to that idea better than Chris Abani, who was imprisoned in his native Nigeria after the publication of his first novel, 1985’s Masters of the Board.

Cincinnati writer Dale Patrick Brown says, in her lively new book Literary Cincinnati, the city “can point to an impressive literary history, but rarely does.” Brown proceeds to remedy the situation with eminently readable accounts of literary figures, homegrown and visiting.