Books

With bylines in publications that include the London Review of Books, Harper’s and The New Yorker, Lauren Oyler has established herself as a cultural critic whose fresh, and often contrarian, assessments are well worth reading. Her first nonfiction book, No Judgment, comprises eight previously unpublished essays that will please Oyler’s admirers and serve as an

Welcome to Today in Books, where we report on literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. It’s Friday. The sun is out. Baseball is back. March Madness has begun. And I’ve got a case of the wiggles. Let’s keep it lighter today. Worth a Thousand Words T, the New York Times’s style

The Norfolk coast, where marsh meets sea, is the perfect habitat for a whole range of bird species. And for people who want to get away from the hustle and bustle of bigger towns, it’s the perfect place to escape to… or to hide. However, the wind feels colder, the shadows seem darker and what

A little black box appears on health care and employment forms, census surveys and other official documents, requiring respondents to confine their racial identity to a single space that allows no fine distinctions. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out in his eloquent and powerful The Black Box: Writing the Race, such boxes are metaphors

Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoirs Persepolis and Persepolis II—and the Oscar-nominated film adapted from the books—tell the story of the author-illustrator’s coming of age in 1980s Iran. Her new work is concerned with the life of another young Iranian woman, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody after being arrested, detained and severely beaten because

Savage Ridge is a thriller named for the tiny town in the Northwest United States where the action takes place. Ten years before the now of the story, three teenage best friends – Nicholas Pips, Emmy Nailer, and Peter Sachs – committed murder. This isn’t a spoiler; you find it out on page one. Past

When Sarah McCammon was growing up in the Midwest in the ’80s and ’90s, every aspect of her life was governed by her family’s evangelical faith, a faith underscored at her sprawling nondenominational church and her Christian school with expectations of an obedient childhood and “pure” young adulthood that forbid sex and, essentially, dating until

Kelly is a former librarian and a long-time blogger at STACKED. She’s the editor/author of (DON’T) CALL ME CRAZY: 33 VOICES START THE CONVERSATION ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH and the editor/author of HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD. Her next book, BODY TALK, will publish in Fall 2020. Follow her on Instagram @heykellyjensen. View

Kao Kalia Yang’s mother grew up in a Hmong village near the juncture of two rivers that run through the forests and highlands of Laos, a land that Yang writes evocatively about in the opening chapters of Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother’s Life. The Hmong, an ethnic minority in southwest China, Laos

ITV in the UK and Masterpiece on PBS in the US have announced the sixth season of Unforgotten, the hit cold case crime show set in London. Sinéad Keenan and Sanjeev Bhaskar will return in their roles as CDI Jess James and DI Sunny Khan respectively. The cast had their first read through of the

In Root Fractures, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s second collection of poems, the speaker is haunted by echoes of the past that reverberate into the present, and by generational, individual and collective traumas. In deft and surprising ways, the forms of the poems interact with their content, both shaping and breaking it. The poems center on the

Emily has a PhD in English from the University of Southern Mississippi, MS, and she has an MFA in Creative Writing from GCSU in Milledgeville, GA, home of Flannery O’Connor. She spends her free time reading, watching horror movies and musicals, cuddling cats, Instagramming pictures of cats, and blogging/podcasting about books with the ladies over

An astonishing 30-40% of food goes to waste in the U.S. “As well as being financially foolish, wasting food damages the planet because it accelerates climate change,” notes food writer and cookbook author Sue Quinn in her latest cookbook, Second Helpings: Delicious Dishes to Transform Your Leftovers, which aims to keep food from our own

As more state legislative sessions come to a close for the season, let’s catch up on where the host of anti-book ban bills across the country currently stand. This is not a comprehensive list, as sometimes good legislation — like its not-good counterparts — gets buried in other bills. Those bills proposed to encourage book

Home is where the heart is—but what makes that heart want to live in that home forever? As someone who’s moved 10 times in his adult life and is “fascinated by the kind of people whose grandchildren visit the home that they raised their children in,” interior designer Jeremiah Brent found himself wondering what makes

It’s been a newsy week in the world of books and reading, and I’ve got a smorgasbord of stories that didn’t make the cut for the full Today in Books treatment. Let’s catch up!  💸 Publishing models that rely on gig workers are bad for everyone.  🪐 The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association has announced the finalists

Crime fiction is often used as a medium to consider the human condition or provide social commentary through storytelling. Serious stuff. But a little humour goes a long way in a crime novel, giving it charm and casting a little light in some otherwise dark places. So if you’re ready for a comic thriller with

If reading is a way to get whisked away to a whole new world, reading via audiobook allows you to dive even deeper into an author’s imagination. With advances in recording technology, audiobooks can incorporate music, sound effects, and talented voice actors to build an atmosphere of total immersion for the reader. Frequent readers of

A Man Downstairs is the ninth book written by the acclaimed Canadian author Nicole Lundrigan. It’s a taut psychological thriller that brings to mind the expression that you can never go home again. When her father Gil has a massive stroke, Molly Wynters returns to the town where she grew up so that she can

There’s rural noir and then there’s the territory multi-award winning bestseller CJ Box operates in – the wilds of northern Wyoming. His novels are wilderness tales. Can we say wilderness noir? The reader numbers don’t lie – people love his Joe Pickett character and Paramount+ is producing a series based on the books. Three-Inch Teeth

The title of Laura Bontje’s playful picture book is a palindrome sentence that can be read forward or backward. Palindromes are something that Hannah, protagonist of the delightful Was It a Cat I Saw?, loves: As Bontje tells us, “Anything Hannah could do forwards, she could do backwards too.” Hannah likes palindromes so much that

Last year’s Scorched Grace, my favourite book of 2023, introduced readers to one of the most memorable, sympathetic and unique private eyes of recent years. Sister Holiday is a tattooed, punk, queer nun, music teacher at New Orleans’ Saint Sebastien’s School, who is a member of Sisters of the Sublime Blood. Such a character could

A successful fantasy plunges readers into a world that feels removed from the ordinary, while still maintaining a familiarity or unexpected resonance. National Book Award finalist Traci Chee’s Kindling does exactly that as it takes readers into an unknown world ravaged by a war in which “kindlings”—teenage warriors trained since childhood to wield a dangerous

Welcome to Today in Books, where we report on literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. I go away for a week and we get both a new online bookstore from RuPaul (didn’t have that one on my publishing bingo card) and a new publishing startup from some industry heavy hitters! If you’re in catch-up

Every year, Muslim students from different Los Angeles high schools celebrate Independence Day together at Monarch Beach. But this year, while everyone’s waiting for the fireworks, an offshore explosion detonates, destroying the beach, injuring many and even causing death. Police detain six Muslim teenagers at the scene, calling it terrorism. Samia, Nasreen, Qays, Muzhda, Abdullahi

While the Irish broadcaster RTÉ may not have the resources of the BBC or HBO, it has canny knack for collaborating with producers in other countries to jointly invest in high-quality crime shows. Hidden Assets was surprisingly good, given the unlikely linkup between an Irish fraud squad and a Belgian counter terrorism unit. North Sea

In her latest spellbinding collection of poems, The Moon That Turns You Back, Hala Alyan renders rich, intricate landscapes of heritage and place that arise from her own experiences. A Palestinian American novelist, poet and clinical psychologist, Alyan is familiar with diaspora and displacement. Born in America, she moved to Kuwait with her Palestinian father

Agnes Lee’s debut graphic novel, 49 Days, opens with a series of short vignettes about a young woman trying to make a journey but being foiled—sometimes in dramatic and frightening fashion—by the forces of nature. Every day, she must start her journey only to fail again. These opening sections are intentionally disorienting for the reader,

Welsh author Dylan H Jones is an internet bestseller with his Detective Tudor Manx series, set on the island of Ynys Mon – AKA Anglesey – in North Wales. His debut novel, Anglesey Blue, hit Amazon’s top spot in Welsh crime fiction on its first day of release in 2017. As we’ve been saying, dragon

Podcasts, subreddits and social media: There are countless ways to feed constantly hungry true crime fanatics. But where does lore end and truth begin? Lucy Chase is an Angeleno with a deadly secret . . . that she can’t even remember. The snarky antihero of Amy Tintera’s Listen for the Lie has spent years away