Books

For a collection titled Modern Poetry, the latest offering from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss spends a fair amount of time communing with the past. In the title poem, named after a textbook she studied in college, she reminisces about how she and her roommate referred to William Carlos Williams as “Billy C. Billygoat,” and

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

Past and present collide in Jeffrey Round’s engaging The Sulphur Springs Cure, which jumps back and forth between 2009 and 1939 as our central character, Violet McAdams recalls what happened in Sulphur Springs in the Dundas Valley in Ontario, Canada, in the last summer before World War II broke out. Violet was just 13 then,

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Is there spring madness in the air? Scrolling through this week’s new releases, there’s something a little odd about each of them. In a good way, of course. We do like it when crime novels deviate from the norm. So… vampires and detectives, anyone? How about hardboiled in a World War I milieu? Or a

Kendra Winchester is a Contributing Editor for Book Riot where she writes about audiobooks and disability literature. She is also the Founder of Read Appalachia, which celebrates Appalachian literature and writing. Previously, Kendra co-founded and served as Executive Director for Reading Women, a podcast that gained an international following over its six-season run. In her

This is the second novel in the entertaining historical mystery series Bridget Walsh launched last year with The Tumbling Girl. The stories are set in Victorian London, in a particular world we less often read about – a music hall called the Variety Palace. The Innocents takes its title from a mass-casualty event that occurred

In his haunting debut, Death Row Welcomes You: Visiting Hours in the Shadow of the Execution Chamber, Tennessee journalist Steven Hale sheds light on a rarely seen part of American society: the places where more than 2,700 people await execution by the state. Hale’s reporting began when, after a decade-long lull, Tennessee began executing the

We’ve reviewed several of his New York-based police procedurals featuring NYPD Detective Mike Stoneman on this site, and Kevin G Chapman sticks with the Big Apple for his latest work, The Other Murder. The action begins inside one of the city’s landmark green spaces, Washington Square Park, where talented young basketball player Javier Estrada is

MacArthur fellow and National Book Award finalist Hanif Abdurraqib is a prolific poet and author, writing across genres of poetry, essay and cultural criticism to great acclaim. Abdurraqib turns his sensitive lens towards basketball in his newest work, There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension. With carefully constructed and imaginative prose, he immerses us

There isn’t much Argentinian crime fiction that makes it into English translation, but when does arrive it’s usually very interesting. Recently, the indie publisher Corylus Books introduced us to a new author – Elsa Drucaroff – with her novel Rodolfo Walsh’s Last Case. Its title is unusual. Rodolfo Walsh? Sounds like he might be a

Early in the shattering true crime memoir Rabbit Heart: A Mother’s Murder, A Daughter’s Story, Kristine S. Ervin pauses mid-sentence to tackle a question of grammar. Which tense does one use when discussing a relationship in which one person has died? It is a question that seems to form the crux of this stunning debut:

Jimmy Fallon announced yesterday the return of his book club, the Fallon Book Club. Previously, the book club would announce a short list of options to choose from. This time, though, there are 16 books facing off in a March Madness-style bracket to select the spring read. [embedded content][embedded content] The books range across genres,

Take a look at this! Close to Death, the fifth novel in Anthony Horowitz’s wonderful Hawthorne series, is due to go on sale on 16 April, and our friends at Harper Collins in the United States have sent us this beautiful hardback copy. We love to celebrate sumptuous book design here at Crime Fiction Lover

Jennifer Thorne’s Diavola is an exercise in delicious twists and masterful suspense, told in the smart, snarky voice of Anna Pace, a jaded Manhattanite on a vacation quite literally from hell. Anna’s swanky upcoming family trip certainly doesn’t seem monstrous on the outside. A marketing artist by trade and a painter by passion, she’s thrilled

At first glance, task #7 of the 2024 Read Harder Challenge might sound a little intimidating, especially if you’re not a poetry reader: Read an indie published collection of poetry by a BIPOC or queer author. Here’s the good news, though: if you go out looking for queer and BIPOC poetry, you’ll find that most

Translated by Slava Faybysh — Fact and fiction overlap, reinforce, and illuminate each other in this historical ‘true crime’ novel by Argentine novelist and literature professor Elsa Drucaroff. In real life, as in the novel, Rodolfo Walsh was a well-known Argentinian writer of detective fiction and an investigative journalist during the politically tumultuous 1950s and

The National Book Critics Circle honors excellence in literature and focuses its work on elevating the conversation about books, reading, and criticism nationwide. The group formed in 1974 at New York’s legendary Algonquin Hotel. There are currently 600 members who are editors or literary critics. Every year, the group honors the best of the prior

Good news: the final story in Don Winslow’s Danny Ryan trilogy is here. Bad news: its author is retiring. He’s one of the finest in the genre and he will be missed. And now, our roundup of the latest crime releases which also includes a new Judge Dee story, a retro LA mystery from Gary

What happens in Vegas . . . never stays in Vegas. It’s no secret that the bright lights of Sin City just barely disguise a dark legacy of bad deals, gangsters and buried bodies. What happens when post-COVID craziness and cryptocurrency fads come on the scene, fatalities pile up and two estranged sisters are caught

Here’s a heads-up for UK-based crime fiction lovers who enjoy mystery board games. Rent, Shuffle and Roll is an interesting startup that gives you the chance to play hundreds of tabletop games without having to buy them – and they’ve just launched their Mystery Vault. In it are over 100 boxed games you can rent, play

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