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NPR’s Book Concierge

Our Guide To 2017’s Great Reads

Produced by Nicole Cohen, Rose Friedman, Petra Mayer and Glen Weldon | Executive Producer: Ellen Silva
Designed by Juan Elosua, Geoff Hing, Katie Park and Matthew Zhang – Published Dec. 5, 2017

Showing all books (374)

Use the filters below to explore more than 350 titles NPR staff and critics loved this year. (You can also combine filters!) Want even more recommendations? Check out our favorite books from 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008

Sherman Alexie once went three years without talking to his mom. It's not that they were estranged; they'd be in the same room, but they just wouldn't talk. The ...
Read David Greene's full recommendation »
You Don't Have To Say You Love Me: A Memoir
Marvin Kalb, 87, was a Moscow bureau chief and diplomatic correspondent for CBS and NBC, and he has ...
Read Robert Siegel's full recommendation »
The Year I Was Peter The Great: 1956 – Khrushchev, Stalin's Ghost, and a Young American in Russia
I talk about Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat the way people talk about beloved pets or newborn babies; like I was a different person before I ...
Read Catherine Whelan's full recommendation »
Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering The Elements Of Good Cooking
What happens to desire left alone? Can it exist unattended? Will it mutate, grow fangs and claws? In ...
Read Mina Tavakoli's full recommendation »
Calling A Wolf A Wolf
Middle school is hard enough as is, right? But when your best friend seems like she's pulling away, and your ultra-strict uncle from Pakistan shows up for an extended ...
Read Lisa Yee's full recommendation »
Amina's Voice
Startup is a morality play for the era of sexting. Tech company TakeOff is looking for funding, but a young tech reporter is ...
Read Anya Kamenetz's full recommendation »
Startup: A Novel
Roxane Gay's highly anticipated memoir chronicles her relationship with her body, her ongoing struggle with weight and a rape that left her reeling for decades, which ...
Read Kat Chow's full recommendation »
Hunger: A Memoir Of (My) Body
Shutter Volume 5 is the final chapter in the Shutter comic series, written by Joe Keatinge and illustrated by Leila del Duca. At the beginning of the series, main ...
Read Mallory Yu's full recommendation »
Shutter Volume 5: So Far Beyond
Manhattan Beach is less structurally daring than Jennifer Egan's Pulitzer Prize-winning A Visit From The Goon Squad, but she started researching this novel years before ...
Read Ari Shapiro's full recommendation »
Manhattan Beach: A Novel
Jane Harper's debut novel opens with three dead bodies – an apparent murder-suicide – in a small Australian town beset by drought. Federal agent Aaron Falk is lured ...
Read Shannon Rhoades' full recommendation »
The Dry: A Novel
John Green has written another young adult novel that is part adventure story and part love story – but this book is a ...
Read Samantha Balaban's full recommendation »
Turtles All The Way Down
Magpie Murders is a whodunit about whodunits and a mystery within a mystery. It opens on a rainy day in ...
Read Lynn Neary's full recommendation »
Magpie Murders: A Novel
Here's a terrific example of the current wave of great comics from Europe. Dominique Goblet's approach is postmodern ...
Read Etelka Lehoczky's full recommendation »
Pretending Is Lying
Spoiler alert: Girls can be superheroes, too. I picked up this book as my then 3-year-old daughter was being told ...
Read Renita Jablonski's full recommendation »
Lucia The Luchadora
There are wry, everyday insights in Ordinary Beast, and then there are things poet Nicole Sealey draws ...
Read Sydnee Monday's full recommendation »
Ordinary Beast: Poems
Like Paul Kalanithi's When Breath Becomes Air, Nina Riggs' gorgeous, morbidly irreverent posthumous memoir about facing terminal cancer in her 30s has earned her a ...
Read Heller McAlpin's full recommendation »
The Bright Hour: A Memoir Of Living And Dying
Sally Rooney is an astute observer of conversation – in this case, the conversations of 21-year-old Frances, a ...
Read Maggie Penman's full recommendation »
Conversations With Friends: A Novel
Julia and Cassie have been thisclose since nursery school. But when this novel opens, it's the last summer of their ...
Read Samantha Balaban's full recommendation »
The Burning Girl: A Novel
Joe Ide's second book in a planned series features his hero, Isaiah Quintabe (IQ), a brilliant high school dropout who has morphed into a private eye for home folks ...
Read Karen Grigsby Bates' full recommendation »
Righteous
Yotam Ottolenghi, who has won legions of fans with his Middle Eastern-inflected recipes in Jerusalem and Plenty, has ...
Read Heller McAlpin's full recommendation »
Sweet: Desserts From London's Ottolenghi
Thrillingly, we seem to be upon a moment in contemporary poetry wherein young women of color feel empowered to gather the forms, sounds and ...
Read Mina Tavakoli's full recommendation »
WHEREAS: Poems
In The Answers, a woman named Mary responds to an ad for a mysterious job. It turns out to be a social experiment in which a famous actor hires a fleet of "girlfriends ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
The Answers: A Novel
Full disclosure: I worship Joan Didion. She could publish a volume of her old grocery lists and I would read it. But I ...
Read Jessica Reedy's full recommendation »
South And West: From A Notebook
This memoir is a bracing account of one of the civil rights movement's greatest heroines. It's no surprise to learn about Coretta Scott King's brave and bounteous ...
Read Neda Ulaby's full recommendation »
My Life, My Love, My Legacy
I've been charmed by the writing of American chef David Lebovitz for years – his 2009 memoir, The Sweet Life in Paris ...
Read Hannah Bloch's full recommendation »
L'Appart: The Delights And Disasters Of Making My Paris Home
James Forman Jr. may change the way you think about the mass incarceration of African-Americans on drug charges. Forman is a Yale University law professor who used to ...
Read Robert Siegel's full recommendation »
Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America
It begins the way all great stories should: with a boy, a girl, a shotgun and a cheap motel room. Three hundred lightning bolt pages later, it ends the same way – a ...
Read Jason Sheehan's full recommendation »
White Fur: A Novel
I read a lot of mysteries, and Peter Swanson's The Kind Worth Killing was one of my absolute favorites of the last several years. This new book doesn't quite hit that ...
Read Shannon Rhoades' full recommendation »
Her Every Fear: A Novel
Creating the perfect picture-book fiasco requires finesse, timing and a keen sense of the ...
Read Elizabeth Bird's full recommendation »
Accident!
Gabourey Sidibe is hilarious – as in laugh-out-loud, smile-so-big-your-face-hurts funny. You might not know it from the serious fare she's tackled in film and TV, but ...
Read Rachel Martin's full recommendation »
This Is Just My Face: Try Not To Stare
A lot of times, with certain hot-button political issues, it feels like we're saying the same things over and over again. I feel this way especially about race, an ...
Read Sam Sanders' full recommendation »
New People
No one is better suited to adapting King Lear – Shakespeare's most excruciating family tragedy – than Edward St. Aubyn ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
Dunbar (Hogarth Shakespeare)
Clifton Fadiman was many things: author, critic, editor, radio/television personality – and wine lover. He loved wine so much that his daughter, Anne Fadiman, thought ...
Read Samantha Balaban's full recommendation »
The Wine Lover's Daughter: A Memoir
Like an abstract painting that reveals new colors and shapes the longer you look at it, Karen Gernant and Chen Zeping's translation of Can Xue's Frontier is more ...
Read Amal El-Mohtar's full recommendation »
Frontier
On March 11, 2011, an unprecedented earthquake and tsunami slammed the Tohoku region of northern Japan, leaving towns destroyed and thousands killed, including most of ...
Read Michael Schaub's full recommendation »
Ghosts Of The Tsunami: Death And Life In Japan's Disaster Zone
Alice Dartle is a witch, from a long line of witches, seeking her fortune as an independent woman of the 1920s in Cassadega, Fla., learning from and living among a ...
Read Amal El-Mohtar's full recommendation »
Brimstone
Mercy is a human impulse, but so is murder. In Human Acts, Han Kang's novel of the 1980 Gwangju Uprising in South Korea, people spill blood and people brave death to ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
Human Acts: A Novel
In From Here To Eternity, mortician Caitlin Doughty travels the word to learn how other cultures care for their dead ...
Read Samantha Balaban's full recommendation »
From Here To Eternity: Traveling The World To Find The Good Death
Filmmakers and animators Sharon Kisses and Mel Vaught are creative partners, best friends and platonic soulmates. Hot ...
Read Jessica Reedy's full recommendation »
The Animators: A Novel
Jillian Tamaki's short comics are propelled by contemporary phenomena: One character joins a skin-care pyramid scheme, while another ...
Read Etelka Lehoczky's full recommendation »
Boundless
Each essay in BuzzFeed writer Scaachi Koul's collection begins with an email exchange with her father, who is often simultaneously furious and magnanimous (you can see ...
Read Emily Bogle's full recommendation »
One Day We'll All Be Dead And None Of This Will Matter: Essays
Transposing the cruelties of a Southern plantation to outer space, this book was the best debut I read ...
Read Amal El-Mohtar's full recommendation »
An Unkindness Of Ghosts
It's no secret that America is going through a fake news moment. There are people in this country who continue to believe that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and that ...
Read Michel Martin's full recommendation »
Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, And Fake News
Quick: What's Palestinian food? Think you don't know? In fact, you do. Kibbeh, flatbreads, tabbouleh and za'atar are all ...
Read T. Susan Chang's full recommendation »
The Palestinian Table
I confess to a weakness for sprawling , messy epics – books that embrace the evolution of history and culture, with ...
Read Karen Grigsby Bates' full recommendation »
The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness: A Novel
Longtime public radio listeners may recognize Celeste Headlee's name – she has hosted a handful of public ...
Read Parth Shah's full recommendation »
We Need To Talk: How To Have Conversations That Matter
I only discovered Theresa Romain this summer, and then I lost several weeks of my life reading everything she had ever written ...
Read Petra Mayer's full recommendation »
Scandalous Ever After (Romance Of The Turf Book 2)
The fourth book from Chicago author Lindsay Hunter follows Greg, an emotionally distant West Virginia accountant who eats and drinks too much, as he searches for his ...
Read Michael Schaub's full recommendation »
Eat Only When You're Hungry: A Novel
In this haunting novel, an unnamed boy flees home to escape sexual and physical abuse. He is taken in by an old ...
Read Martha Anne Toll's full recommendation »
Out In The Open: A Novel
This year's subcontinental excitement comes from Chetna Makan, a popular YouTube star and Great British Bake Off. The focus is ...
Read T. Susan Chang's full recommendation »
Chai, Chaat & Chutney: A Street Food Journey Through India
In Wild Things, Bruce Handy explores "the joy of reading children's literature as an adult," beginning at Margaret Wise Brown's Goodnight Moon, moving on through Dr ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
Wild Things: The Joy Of Reading Children's Literature As An Adult
Rachel Khong's debut novel is a book I know I will read over and over again. It's a stunning and hilarious portrait of Ruth, a woman who has to reset her ...
Read Kat Chow's full recommendation »
Goodbye, Vitamin: A Novel
Delphine de Vigan's Based on a True Story is a powerful novel of suspense that may or may not be based on truth. Like the author, "Delphine" is a middle-aged Parisian ...
Read Bethanne Patrick's full recommendation »
Based On A True Story: A Novel
Adrian Shirk's debut is a lyrical pilgrimage through faith traditions and the stories of the female spiritual leaders, astrologers and preachers who helped shape ...
Read Juan Vidal's full recommendation »
And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Stories From The Byways Of American Women And Religion
Since I couldn't give the kids in this story a hug, I hugged the book instead. Erin Entrada Kelly skillfully weaves together the story of three very different ...
Read Lisa Yee's full recommendation »
Hello, Universe
A talented British actress with a too-easily-typecast face, voice and figure auditions for a role in a London debut production directed by a cranky, stressed and unwillingly ...
Read Sarah Wendell's full recommendation »
Pretty Face
Ostensibly a picture book for children, this collection is an absolute joy – age be damned. Kwame Alexander and collaborators ...
Read Shannon Rhoades' full recommendation »
Out Of Wonder: Poems Celebrating Poets
Risotto in six minutes! Mashed potatoes in eight! Beans in under an hour! The hottest kitchen appliance right now is a ...
Read T. Susan Chang's full recommendation »
Dinner In An Instant: 75 Modern Recipes For Your Pressure Cooker, Multicooker And Instant Pot
Writer, filmmaker and Iraqi expatriate Hassan Blasim asked 10 Iraqi authors to answer a simple, yet complicated question: What do you imagine our country looking like ...
Read Jason Heller's full recommendation »
Iraq +100: The First Anthology Of Science Fiction To Have Emerged From Iraq
One of Salman Rushdie's characters in The Golden House tells an American, "Your country is young – one thinks differently when one has millennia behind one; you have ...
Read Ari Shapiro's full recommendation »
The Golden House: A Novel
The Inhumans are among Stan Lee and Jack Kirby's weirdest – and most troublesome – creations, and Black Bolt, their silent ...
Read Michael Katzif's full recommendation »
Black Bolt Vol. 1: Hard Time
Pure joy. That's the feeling the reader gets from A Greyhound, A Groundhog. Add to that delight ...
Read Justine Kenin's full recommendation »
A Greyhound, A Groundhog
Shea Serrano's Basketball (And Other Things) is equal parts hilarious and enlightening. Paired with gorgeous illustrations by Arturo ...
Read Juan Vidal's full recommendation »
Basketball (and Other Things): A Collection Of Questions Asked, Answered, Illustrated
In the early 1800s, adventurous Americans made their fortunes by slaughtering fur seals and selling them to China. The U.S.-China relationship has a long and rich ...
Read Greg Myre's full recommendation »
The Beautiful Country And The Middle Kingdom: America And China, 1776 To The Present
The first time I read Corinna Luyken's stunningly detailed, concept-driven, off-kilter debut with my son, I worried it would go right ...
Read Jacob Ganz's full recommendation »
The Book Of Mistakes
I never knew a book about competitive eating could be so charming, funny – and descriptive. When David, a high school ...
Read Lisa Yee's full recommendation »
Slider
In a near-future, post-apocalyptic world where patents last indefinitely, governments are indistinguishable from corporations and the creation of artificial ...
Read Amal El-Mohtar's full recommendation »
Autonomous: A Novel
Every year there are books we discover far too late and have to cram them into the Book Concierge at the last minute because ...
Read Petra Mayer's full recommendation »
Jade City
Julie Lekstrom Himes' thought-provoking novel Mikhail and Margarita explores one of the most oppressive periods in ...
Read Martha Anne Toll's full recommendation »
Mikhail And Margarita: A Novel
Once upon a time, Bianca Bosker was a casual wine drinker who, as she put it, generally preferred wines from a bottle ...
Read Samantha Balaban's full recommendation »
Cork Dork: A Wine-Fueled Adventure Among The Obsessive Sommeliers, Big Bottle Hunters, And Rogue Scientists Who Taught Me To Live For Taste
Once again, the author of The Leftovers and Little Children has written what feels like a narrow peek into a wide world, just one chapter in a vast, ongoing soap opera ...
Read Tasha Robinson's full recommendation »
Mrs. Fletcher: A Novel
Erika Carter's debut novel revolves around Ellie, Chloe and Rachel, three sort-of-friends navigating ...
Read Michael Schaub's full recommendation »
Lucky You: A Novel
The 10 instantly immersive tales in Tessa Hadley's latest meticulously observed collection zoom forward and back decades, resulting in rich complexity, breadth and ...
Read Heller McAlpin's full recommendation »
Bad Dreams And Other Stories
Robin Sloan's new novel, Sourdough, is like Fight Club meets The Great British Bake Off. It's like Fight Club if no one got punched. It's like Fight Club if Fight Club ...
Read Jason Sheehan's full recommendation »
Sourdough: A Novel
A few times while reading Jennifer McVeigh's page turner, I wondered whether this was what might happen if you mashed ...
Read Kirk Siegler's full recommendation »
Leopard At The Door: A Novel
Maja killed her best friend, Amanda, and her boyfriend, Sebastian, at their school. We know she has confessed; we know ...
Read Bethanne Patrick's full recommendation »
Quicksand
Janesville is narrative-driven long-form reporting at its best. Amy Goldstein spent years following roughly a dozen workers who were affected by the closing of General ...
Read Edith Chapin's full recommendation »
Janesville: An American Story
Men are far more likely than women to kill, making Lady Killers' title a grim pun – though Tori Telfer does her gruesome best to even up the body count. For ages, the ...
Read Jean Zimmerman's full recommendation »
Lady Killers: Deadly Women Throughout History
Eve Babitz's 1979 novel Sex and Rage – reissued this year – is that third drink you stay out for, knowing ...
Read Rommel Wood's full recommendation »
Sex And Rage: A Novel
Every kid has a favorite thing, whether it's a color (red, because that's the best Power Ranger) or hobby (playing dress-up because dad's ...
Read Sydnee Monday's full recommendation »
Now
After spending 25 years studying one of the last hunter-gatherers on Earth, James Suzman has an incredibly unique perspective. He has glimpsed what life was like for ...
Read Michaeleen Doucleff's full recommendation »
Affluence Without Abundance: The Disappearing World Of The Bushmen
Pity the poor starling. Considered an invasive species, it may be the world's most despised bird. But naturalist Lyanda Lynn Haupt's book offers a delightful balm to ...
Read Tom Huizenga's full recommendation »
Mozart's Starling
Mike Duncan's popular podcast, The History of Rome and Revolutions, packed facts, dry humor and historical parallels into ...
Read Scott Detrow's full recommendation »
The Storm Before The Storm: The Beginning Of The End Of The Roman Republic
Alison Weir's novel is a persuasive attempt to restore the humanity of a tragic, misrepresented figure, one of ...
Read Jean Zimmerman's full recommendation »
Anne Boleyn, A King's Obsession: A Novel
Critics have rightly heaped praise on this slender treasure of a novel. It's a tale of war and refugees and how we carry ourselves in the places we call home. It is ...
Read Mary Louise Kelly's full recommendation »
Exit West: A Novel
Middle school and first crushes are hard enough to navigate without the added inconvenience of having an alien welded to your DNA, but such is Felix's lot. All he ...
Read Elizabeth Bird's full recommendation »
Felix Yz
Sometimes love isn't all sunshine, roses and forever, as Kristan Higgins reminds us in this contemporary romance about two sisters grappling with the sudden demise of ...
Read Maya Rodale's full recommendation »
On Second Thought
This book made me cry three times in the first 30 pages without once making me feel manipulated – that's ...
Read Margaret H. Willison's full recommendation »
Far From The Tree
Dan Chaon's Ill Will is an intelligent, layered and painfully suspenseful thriller about a psychologist whose childhood was shattered by a series of murders in the ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
Ill Will: A Novel
Many were stunned by this monumental, eccentric achievement from an artistic outsider. On page after page, Ferris' painstaking yet emotionally ...
Read Etelka Lehoczky's full recommendation »
My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
How do you recount the life of someone who obsessively cultivated a self-mythology? Kathy Acker was an ...
Read Julia Melfi's full recommendation »
After Kathy Acker: A Literary Biography
The premise Theodora Goss lays out in her novel The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter is simple, elegant and rich with promise: The daughters of some of ...
Read Jason Heller's full recommendation »
The Strange Case Of The Alchemist's Daughter
"The point of Walkaway is the first days of a better nation," says one of Cory Doctorow's characters in this brilliant, occasionally life-altering new novel. Walkaway ...
Read Jason Sheehan's full recommendation »
Walkaway: A Novel
Nobody gives "ordinary" human beings their due with the grace and precision that Richard Ford does. His slim new memoir about his parents is so gently spellbinding that ...
Read Maureen Corrigan's full recommendation »
Between Them: Remembering My Parents
Bao Phi's poetry collection ambitiously meditates on loss, on police brutality and on how Phi, who fled ...
Read Kat Chow's full recommendation »
Thousand Star Hotel
Janet Benton's wonderfully imagined debut examines the consequences of a Quaker woman's decision to keep her baby born out of wedlock. Set in 1880s Philadelphia, this ...
Read Martha Anne Toll's full recommendation »
Lilli De Jong: A Novel
It's incredible how much insight can be wrung from familiar stories when they are approached thoughtfully and grounded by close observation. For example, while the ...
Read Margaret H. Willison's full recommendation »
Piecing Me Together
Fans of Roxane Gay's short fiction shouldn't miss this debut collection, a magical-realist anthology focused on fierce black women who break the rules and awkward black ...
Read Tasha Robinson's full recommendation »
What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky: Stories
When a picturesque scene is disrupted by a wandering bear, everything quickly takes a turn for the worse (unless, of course, you're ...
Read Minh Le's full recommendation »
A Perfect Day
Elderly Myriam lives a quiet suburban life with her curmudgeonly husband until she starts seeing strangler vines sprouting from her television and ...
Read Glen Weldon's full recommendation »
A Thousand Coloured Castles
We Southerners tend to brag about the quality of our potlikker – the flavorful broth (perfect for cornbread sopping) left when you cook a pot of greens. But you won't ...
Read Debbie Elliott's full recommendation »
The Potlikker Papers: A Food History Of The Modern South
Ellen Johnson Sirleaf – a Nobel peace laureate and Africa's first democratically elected female president – is poised to bow out of power after 12 years in charge of ...
Read Ofeibea Quist-Arcton's full recommendation »
Madame President: The Extraordinary Journey Of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf
A mystery built around a set of letters hidden in various old books – stories within stories within a story. How delicious! Claire Fuller's Swimming Lessons is a kind ...
Read Bethanne Patrick's full recommendation »
Swimming Lessons
Water is a primary environmental concern of our age. The Colorado River Compact, determining water usage rights across ...
Read Genevieve Valentine's full recommendation »
Where The Water Goes: Life And Death Along The Colorado River
Set in the marshlands of eastern England, Daisy Johnson's spooky stories are populated by albatrosses, foxes and cats that all seem to know more than they ought to ...
Read Michael Schaub's full recommendation »
Fen: Stories
Sentences can be about anything, but writing is about clarity. That's the central idea of Do I Make Myself Clear?, Sir Harold Evans' memoir-cum-craft manual in which he ...
Read Eric McDaniel's full recommendation »
Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters
Amid the hype of the holiday season, you might walk right past this cookbook, with its modest title and quiet design, but take my advice and ...
Read T. Susan Chang's full recommendation »
Dining In: Highly Cookable Recipes
"I like to think I know what death is." With that first line, Jesmyn Ward's latest novel takes off like a shot, with 13-year-old Jojo, stoic and old beyond his years ...
Read Melissa Block's full recommendation »
Sing, Unburied, Sing: A Novel
With lucid, easily readable prose – as befits the chief foreign affairs columnist of the Financial Times – ...
Read Nishant Dahiya's full recommendation »
Easternization: Asia's Rise And America's Decline From Obama To Trump And Beyond
It's like Ocean's Eleven, set in the Wild West … but with hippos! What more could you want? Sarah Gailey's novella takes off from a real, but justly-forgotten early ...
Read Petra Mayer's full recommendation »
River Of Teeth
This riveting blend of personal memoir, biography and World War II military history grew from Keggie ...
Read Heller McAlpin's full recommendation »
Dadland
We are always looking for the roots of the Trump revolution, and in this book, Angela Nagle ...
Read Hanna Rosin's full recommendation »
Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan And Tumblr To Trump And The Alt-Right
Why is the world so angry? Why Brexit? Why the rise of nationalism? Why are large swaths of the world suddenly so attracted to demagogues? Pankaj Mishra, attempting to ...
Read Nishant Dahiya's full recommendation »
Age Of Anger: A History Of the Present
Durga Chew-Bose breaks form constantly in her debut collection of essays. The first, "Heart Museum," clocks in at 93 pages and slides in and out of meditations ...
Read Kat Chow's full recommendation »
Too Much And Not The Mood: Essays
It's hard not to be familiar with Thor, Loki, Odin and the other characters of Nordic mythology who populate our operas, video games and TV shows. But I was a bit ...
Read Tamar Charney's full recommendation »
Norse Mythology
An insightful memoir by former New Yorker food editor Emily Nunn, who launched herself on a comfort food tour after the "darkest winter of her life," when she lost her ...
Read Nina Martyris' full recommendation »
The Comfort Food Diaries: My Quest For The Perfect Dish To Mend A Broken Heart
Let the title of this beautiful novel entice you. Set in a Washington, D.C., readers don't often see, The Wide Circumference of Love is a generous rendering of a black ...
Read Martha Anne Toll's full recommendation »
The Wide Circumference Of Love
The second book in Laura Anne Gilman's "The Devil's West" series follows the further adventures of Isobel, the 16-year-old girl whose job it is to be the eyes, ears ...
Read Jason Sheehan's full recommendation »
The Cold Eye (The Devil's West Book 2)
Elizebeth Friedman (and her husband, William) practically invented cryptology, and by World War II, they ...
Read Genevieve Valentine's full recommendation »
The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story Of Love, Spies, And The Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America's Enemies
Donte Collins' Autopsy does the work you'd associate with its title, but instead of reflecting on the cause of death, it examines the effect. This collection cuts into ...
Read Sydnee Monday's full recommendation »
Autopsy: Poems
Who can resist a quickie quiz that promises to reveal the secrets of our psyches? Especially when the quiz includes those arresting, mysterious inkblots. For decades ...
Read Nancy Shute's full recommendation »
The Inkblots: Hermann Rorschach, His Iconic Test, And The Power Of Seeing
With a slew of sharp and expansive essays, poet and critic Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib delivers a much-needed collection for our time. He is a firm but ...
Read Juan Vidal's full recommendation »
They Can't Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Essays
Following the events of Shadowshaper, Sierra Santiago and her friends are experimenting with their new powers when they receive a warning: Something called the Deck of ...
Read Amal El-Mohtar's full recommendation »
Shadowhouse Fall
In Sunshine State, Sarah Gerard's penetrating and deeply felt debut collection of essays, she draws on ...
Read Jason Heller's full recommendation »
Sunshine State: Essays
In Aravind Adiga's charming novel of cricket and adolescence, the narrator swoops in and out of his characters' inner voices with frightening precision and speed ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
Selection Day: A Novel
Don't judge a book by its … length. At 880 pages, and with an old photo of a Soviet leader on the cover, I was ...
Read David Greene's full recommendation »
Gorbachev: His Life And Times
Rock-and-roll memoirs should have lots of sex, drugs and drama, and Sebastian Bach's 18 and Life on Skid Row hits all the marks. I was never really a fan of his band ...
Read Sarah Handel's full recommendation »
18 And Life On Skid Row
Meddling Kids is a story about what might've happened to the Scooby Doo gang if they'd ever actually grown up. It's ...
Read Jason Sheehan's full recommendation »
Meddling Kids: A Novel
John Shepherd and Jessica Harlow were rivals in their FBI training class. Now experienced agents assigned to the same ...
Read Sarah Wendell's full recommendation »
The Thing About Love
The novel Days Without End follows the life of Thomas McNulty, who flees the Great Famine of Ireland as a boy and winds up a soldier on the Great Plains of the United ...
Read Sam Briger's full recommendation »
Days Without End: A Novel
George Orwell got one thing wrong in his classic novel 1984: Big Brother isn't the government, it's a few deeply ...
Read Richard Harris' full recommendation »
World Without Mind: The Existential Threat Of Big Tech
Matthew Palmer is a master of the diplomatic thriller. In an era of increasingly dramatic and hyperbolic headlines, he takes us to Central Asia for a fictional look at ...
Read Edith Chapin's full recommendation »
Enemy Of The Good
Before this novel was published in June, I was at a gathering of famous mystery writers; all of them were ...
Read Maureen Corrigan's full recommendation »
The Force: A Novel
I started this novel in July with low expectations. The title suggested something breezy, but the book opens with the musings of a ...
Read Hannah Bloch's full recommendation »
The Little French Bistro: A Novel
Laini Taylor's fantasy-duology kickoff seems expressly designed to appeal to book lovers who know what it's like to fall hard for a fantasy world. Her protagonist, a ...
Read Tasha Robinson's full recommendation »
Strange The Dreamer
This summer's Showtime series Twin Peaks: The Return was a rich and dizzying affair, though its narrative abstraction proved ...
Read Glen Weldon's full recommendation »
Twin Peaks: The Final Dossier
Priscilla is one of those kids with an obsession: Hers is gorillas. That enthusiasm sends her to her classroom's thinking corner again and ...
Read Justine Kenin's full recommendation »
Priscilla Gorilla
Those who have read Yiyun Li's fiction can recognize her tone anywhere: calm, but not soothing; matter-of-fact, yet ...
Read Mina Tavakoli's full recommendation »
Dear Friend, From My Life I Write To You In Your Life
Like the best short story collections, The Dark Dark chews on some delicious, evergreen themes in extraordinary ways. In particular, that of pregnancy – its mysterious ...
Read Carmen Maria Machado's full recommendation »
The Dark Dark: Stories
Kanishk Tharoor's debut collection of short stories, Swimmer Among the Stars, tackles topics ranging from the trickiness of language to technology, history and myth ...
Read Jason Heller's full recommendation »
Swimmer Among the Stars
I loved this book by first-time novelist Weike Wang, one of the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35." Full of fun ...
Read Ellen Silva's full recommendation »
Chemistry: A Novel
The characters in Deb Olin Unferth's story collection Wait Till You See Me Dance are often people whose potential is unfulfilled – an adjunct professor, an ineffective ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
Wait Till You See Me Dance: Stories
Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life gives the eminent historian Robert Dallek the chance to pull together ...
Read Ron Elving's full recommendation »
Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Political Life
Milo is a wise man who is making his own meandering way toward perfection, who has already lived 9,995 of his allotted ...
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Reincarnation Blues: A Novel
Chester Himes' life story, as described in this vivid biography, is just as surreal as those detective novels (like Cotton Comes to Harlem) that boosted his literary ...
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Chester B. Himes: A Biography
I wasn't sure who to root for in Lucky Boy; my allegiances kept changing, which kept me reading all 61 chapters and 400-plus pages. Who is the victim? Who is the ...
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Lucky Boy
It has been four years since Nelson Mandela died and 19 since he began chronicling his tenure as South Africa's first democratically elected (and first black ...
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Dare Not Linger: The Presidential Years
What's the phrase – kid-tested, mother-approved? Two years ago, my then-9-year-old worked her way through ...
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Baking Class: 50 Fun Recipes Kids Will Love To Bake!
The Ninth Hour begins with a suicide. The aftermath is handled with indisputable authority by a nun who works with the sick and poor, Sister St. Saviour, who arranges ...
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The Ninth Hour: A Novel
This book is an epic achievement in comics. Wertz has drawn dozens of New York streetscapes, past and present, in meticulous detail, presenting ...
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Tenements, Towers and Trash: An Unconventional Illustrated History Of New York City
This is not a book about why vinyl sounds better; it's way more interesting than that. Damon Krukowski ...
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The New Analog: Listening And Reconnecting In A Digital World
If you're a parent who is in a panic over some think piece about screen time (seriously, pick one), I have some good news for ...
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I'm Just No Good At Rhyming: And Other Nonsense For Mischievous Kids And Immature Grown-Ups
Author and artist Oliver Jeffers takes young readers to the stars and back in Here We Are: Notes for ...
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Here We Are: Notes For Living On Planet Earth
Meet 12-year-old Maria Luisa – everyone calls her Malú – the main character in The First Rule of Punk. She calls her ...
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The First Rule Of Punk
This debut novel showcases a dazzling and doomed collection of human beings assembled under one bohemian roof in 1930s Australia. One, an adolescent named Lily, sees ...
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The Strays: A Novel
Lindsey Fitzharris' The Butchering Art isn't about carving meat for cooking. It's about surgery the way it used to be done, and it's about one surgeon in particular who ...
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The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine
It has been a long year of questioning and redefining what makes America and what makes an American. Kids who ...
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Blue Sky White Stars
A collection of unpublished work by a well-known author? Meh, I've heard enough of that guy, probably. I gotta be a fan. But there is another type of posthumous ...
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Whatever Happened To Interracial Love?: Stories
This beautifully shot tribute to Turkish cuisine is organized by region, traveling clockwise from Istanbul to the Black Sea to ...
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Istanbul And Beyond: Exploring The Diverse Cuisines Of Turkey
Love doc Esther Perel has made a career of addressing a central question: How do we get both stability ...
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The State Of Affairs: Rethinking Infidelity
This thrilling conclusion to the Broken Earth trilogy more than sticks the landing – it rearranges the terrain on impact ...
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The Stone Sky
Howard Norman's newest novel is set in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and revolves around a photograph at auction. The image shows a dead World War II soldier, and during the ...
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My Darling Detective
Cathy Malkasian's previous graphic novels combine fabulist fiction with social satire, and ...
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Eartha
A gay teenager believes that starving himself gives him superpowers: The less he eats, the more he can feel his supernatural abilities sharpening, making it possible ...
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The Art Of Starving: A Novel
It may feel too soon to look back at the New York music scene of the 2000s with a nostalgic or historical eye: For one thing, many of the most influential and popular ...
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Meet Me In The Bathroom: Rebirth And Rock And Roll In New York City 2001-2011
Eleanor Oliphant is a quirky loner and a model of efficiency with her routine of frozen pizza, vodka and weekly phone calls with Mummy. But that all changes when she ...
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Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
I'm not sure how writer Julie Fogliano and illustrator Christian Robinson managed to stuff 365 days' worth of enthusiasm and anticipation into one slim book, but they ...
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When's My Birthday?
Compassionate, smart, and suspenseful, La Belle Sauvage is a worthy companion to Philip Pullman's splendid His Dark ...
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The Book Of Dust Volume One: La Belle Sauvage
Think of Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich as the Studs Terkel of the former Soviet Union. Her books are compilations ...
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The Unwomanly Face Of War: An Oral History Of Women In World War II
After World War I, many women worked in factories painting light-up dials. Not long after, they started to get sick. The ...
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The Radium Girls: The Dark Story Of America's Shining Women
What happens in Vegas definitely does not stay in Vegas in The Betting Vow. Leila Darling is a supermodel with a temper ...
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The Betting Vow
Sometimes, you just want a book about something someone loves. The Way of the Hare isn't particularly interested in poetic turns of phrase; it's interested in ...
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The Way Of The Hare
There are lots of books out there by writers and about writing, but this one is the best (and not just because it's funny). Longtime New Yorker contributor John McPhee ...
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Draft No. 4: On The Writing Process
I love writing letters. I love Christmas magic. My twin 13-year-old girls still let me believe in Santa Claus. If the kids in your ...
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Love, Santa
When Nancy Borowick learned that both her parents were facing deadly cancers while still in their 50s, she cried, then picked up her ...
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The Family Imprint: A Daughter's Portrait Of Love And Loss
A vibrant collection of vignettes evokes the author's childhood in Damascus, Syria, and Jerusalem and her coming-of-age in Amman, Jordan, and Cairo in the 1950s and ...
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The Scent Of Jasmine: Coming Of Age In Jerusalem And Damascus
We can all agree that chickens are seemingly uncomplicated creatures, right? Not according to this book. In this fun and empowering ...
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Tyrannosaurus Rex Vs. Edna The Very First Chicken
Monica Hesse's book reads like a great article you never want to end. The Washington Post feature writer has turned a ...
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American Fire: Love, Arson, And Life In A Vanishing Land
The distinctive writer and illustrator Jeff Lemire's most personal work yet, Royal City centers on a struggling author who returns home to a decaying factory town after ...
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Royal City Volume 1: Next Of Kin
Everyone in this short story collection is dealing with a crisis. Whether it's a quieter disruption like coming to grips with a changing friendship or the full-on panic ...
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Fresh Complaint: Stories
Wow, this one's a cracker. It's dynamite. You may not be steeped in South African politics, or the whys and wherefores of the late Nelson Mandela's African National ...
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The President's Keepers: Those Keeping Zuma In Power And Out Of Prison
Have you ever read a book so funny and warm and insightful that the writer becomes your imaginary best friend? No? Just ...
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We Are Never Meeting In Real Life.: Essays
Readers will find Lijia Zhang's debut novel rich in Chinese proverbs. After the titular Lotus loses face, she keeps on going despite the hurt, because "a cracked jar ...
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Lotus: A Novel
The Backstagers Volume 1 is set, well, backstage, following a ragtag stage crew as they deal with snooty actors, friendship drama, and otherworldly monsters. Wait ...
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The Backstagers Volume 1
Jabari Jumps. No exclamation or question mark on the cover – just an African-American boy dressed in orange chevron swim ...
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Jabari Jumps
Seth roams New York's streets recording everything he hears – including a voice that seems to come from nowhere singing ...
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White Tears: A Novel
I dare you to start reading Uncommon Type pretending you haven't yet seen the author's name – bet you'll love it anyway. The fact that it's Tom Hanks is a bonus that ...
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Uncommon Type: Some Stories
You & a Bike & a Road is cartoonist Eleanor Davis' chronicle of a bike trip she took in 2016, riding from ...
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You & A Bike & A Road
Glass Houses, the 13th in Louise Penny's series about Chief Inspector (now Superintendent) Armand Gamache, is what I think of as one of the "Great Gamaches." This ...
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Glass Houses: A Novel
"Her Right Foot" appeared at just the right time, serving as a palate cleanser to ...
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Her Right Foot
I first experienced this book as an audio play written by Mac Rogers and meticulously directed by Jordana Williams for Tor Labs, with stellar performances and ...
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Steal The Stars
Mukta, the daughter of a temple prostitute, and Tara, the daughter of an upper middle-class family, form an unlikely bond in Mumbai. But when Mukta is kidnapped, that ...
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The Color Of Our Sky: A Novel
Sympathy is a sneaky, subtle debut novel about intimacy, aspiration and the Internet. As the protagonist, Alice, stalks and befriends her Instagram hero in a worsening ...
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Sympathy
Following a singular family of dysfunctional psychics between the 1960s and 1990s, Spoonbenders is a wacky, heartfelt ...
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Spoonbenders: A Novel
Lea is a descent into that place where obsession and brilliance collide to produce the heights of creative expression in one moment … and self destruction in the next ...
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Lea: A Novel
With artist Andrew DeGraff's whimsically stylized yet painstakingly constructed maps, you can track Luke Skywalker's ...
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Cinemaps: An Atlas Of 35 Great Movies
I love fractured fairy tales, and 21st-century magical realism master Victor LaValle uncovers a doozy in The ...
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The Changeling: A Novel
Don't care about The Beatles? Weird! But totally fine. Love and know everything about The Beatles? This book might make you re-evaluate how much you thought you knew ...
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Dreaming The Beatles: The Love Story Of One Band And The Whole World
Gabrielle Bell has a touch of the kismet that's indispensable for a great memoirist: Like David Sedaris ...
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Everything Is Flammable
I am not a big reader of post-apocalyptic fiction. I don't have much patience for all that world building. But this ...
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American War: A Novel
We all need some laughs these days, and Paula Poundstone provides a hootfest in this hilarious quest for the missing key to human happiness, which captures the ...
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The Totally Unscientific Study Of The Search For Human Happiness
In the 1920s, members of the Osage Nation seemed fortunate: They were getting huge royalties on the oil that had been ...
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Killers Of The Flower Moon: The Osage Murders And The Birth Of The FBI
The desire – no, make that the need – to have a child is the driving force of this novel set in Nigeria at the turn of this century. A young couple, Akin and ...
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Stay With Me: A Novel
In The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Hollis Robbins have assembled an incisive collection of pieces by over 50 ...
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The Portable Nineteenth-Century African American Women Writers
Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie offers advice we all need in Dear Ijeawele, which is structured as tips for ...
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Dear Ijeawele, Or A Feminist Manifesto In Fifteen Suggestions
A 12-year-old kid, scorned by society, comes into possession of magical abilities and discovers, in fact, that the ...
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Akata Warrior
Look, I get it: The name doesn't exactly scream page turner. I admit I was skeptical, too, before I cracked this one ...
Read Colin Dwyer's full recommendation »
Arabia Felix: The Danish Expedition Of 1761-1767
Just when you thought the world had no room for another weeknight pasta book, along comes Back Pocket Pasta, wedging itself in between your wallet ...
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Back Pocket Pasta: Inspired Dinners To Cook On The Fly
It's safe to say most NPR listeners are familiar with the work of humorist David Sedaris – but who was he before he was ...
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Theft By Finding: Diaries (1977-2002)
In a blog post in 2014, British journalist Reni Eddo-Lodge wrote that she would no longer talk about race with white people who "refuse to accept the legitimacy of ...
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Why I'm No Longer Talking To White People About Race
Wonder Valley starts and ends on a freeway. Just like everything in Los Angeles, right? Ivy Pochoda's ...
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Wonder Valley: A Novel
Despite paying attention to the flood of news reports, documentaries and articles about the Syrian refugee crisis, I've had a hard time getting a grasp on the big ...
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The New Odyssey: The Story Of The Twenty-First Century Refugee Crisis
No one builds a world like Ian McDonald does. Piece by piece, brick by brick, spare and simple when he needs to be, deep and meaty when he wants to be. Here, he gives ...
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Luna: Wolf Moon: A Novel
In The Essex Serpent, Sarah Perry's glorious historical novel, nature is not inertly beautiful, but dangerous and alive: A sheep is sucked into the mud, boats are taken ...
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The Essex Serpent: A Novel
Retired LAPD detective Harry Bosch may be even busier in his golden years than he was in his prime. Now volunteering for the ...
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Two Kinds Of Truth
Statistician Ben Blatt loaded thousands of books – classics and contemporary best-sellers – into various databases and let his hard drive churn through them, seeking to ...
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Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve: What The Numbers Reveal About The Classics, Bestsellers, And Our Own Writing
The Inexplicable Logic of My Life has the word count of a book with worlds to build, but rather than using its pages to explore the confines of an imaginary land, it ...
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The Inexplicable Logic Of My Life
The sublime, as novelist Mary Shelley would describe it, marks a strange midpoint of sensations that occur when mixing both fear and beauty – that state of wooziness ...
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At The Lightning Field
Eleanor Roosevelt was famously indifferent to food: During her tenure, White House lunches were moments of dread, or at ...
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What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women And The Food That Tells Their Stories
For many Americans, skipping trips to the dentist isn't about forgoing pearly whites worthy of an actor's ...
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Teeth: The Story Of Beauty, Inequality, And The Struggle For Oral Health In America
You wouldn't normally look to a branded comic book novelization to provide profound insights into the experience of growing up black and Latino in Brooklyn. Or the ...
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Miles Morales: Spider-Man (A Marvel YA Novel)
Eleven-year-old Deming's mother, Polly, is a Chinese immigrant, in the country illegally. One day she goes to her job at a nail salon and never returns. Ten years ...
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The Leavers: A Novel
In Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, the cultural critic Anne Helen Petersen writes about celebrities and other cultural figures who have been called "too strong, ...
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Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud: The Rise And Reign Of The Unruly Woman
It has been more than 35 years since Muhammad Ali's last match, but he is still considered "The Greatest," not just because of his one-time dominance in the ring, but ...
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Ali: A Life
Legendary American dancer Isadora Duncan lost all three of her children before she died in a freak accident; Amelia Gray's biographical novel about the dancer covers ...
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Isadora: A Novel
The question that Susan Rieger explores in The Heirs is a fascinating one: Does death root us in memory as the people ...
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The Heirs: A Novel
What feels at first like fragments and vignettes of narrator Thandi's life (watching her mother die, graphs depicting ...
Read Heidi Saman's full recommendation »
What We Lose: A Novel
I frankly find most musician biographies more useful than compelling, but Jonathan Gould's account of Otis Redding's tragically short life is gripping because Gould ...
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Otis Redding: An Unfinished Life
"Several angry looking people sat in hot cars, their faces carrying the uncomprehending disappointment of boiled crabs." That is how Tim Gautreaux describes the ...
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Signals: New And Selected Stories
Gabe Habash's brilliant debut novel follows Stephen Florida, a megalomaniac college wrestler in North Dakota, as he tries to win the NCAA championship that has been his ...
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Stephen Florida
If you've ever wanted to understand why hospitals charge $20 for one measly Advil, or why they're busily upgrading the marble in their lobbies, here's a book for you ...
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An American Sickness: How Healthcare Became Big Business And How You Can Take It Back
This is a wonderfully imagined origin story of the silly game kids – and some grown-ups – play to figure out who gets ...
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The Legend Of Rock, Paper, Scissors
Irish novelist Roddy Doyle has always been known for his uproariously funny books, but his latest novel doesn't have ...
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Smile: A Novel
You would think this book, written in one long sentence, with only commas for punctuation, would be a slog, but instead ...
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Solar Bones: A Novel
Each story in Men Without Women is about a man dealing with who they are in relation to the women around them, whether it's their lover, deceased wife or ...
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Men Without Women: Stories
You know those "impressive" literary passages that are 13 million words long with no punctuation ...
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literally show me a healthy person
If you are the parent of a 9- to 12-year-old who shows interest in politics or injustice and isn't prone to nightmares, Refugee is an intelligent, human, harrowing ...
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Refugee
Parents and other over-and-over-again readers love subtext, sly references and hidden meanings, but some of the ...
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Triangle
Another year, another Japanese home cooking book! Yet as common as they've become, there is still something new to celebrate in each ...
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Cook Japanese At Home
In a just world, there will be people who, after exhausting themselves of the tired "dirty realist" establishment (Raymond Carver, Charles ...
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The Sarah Book
Where can a young black man be treated like royalty? The barbershop, where the pro at the chair will make you feel like the king of the world. With ...
Read Elizabeth Bird's full recommendation »
Crown: An Ode To The Fresh Cut (Denene Millner Books)
Japan's bright, noisy pachinko parlors hide a dark secret. These pinball emporiums are run mostly by Japan's Korean minority ...
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Pachinko
Straddling the line between picture books and graphic novels with evident ease, Sean Rubin brings to life the ...
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Bolivar
Five-Carat Soul is a jubilant and generous story collection from James McBride, who won the National Book Award for his novel about John Brown's uprising, The Good ...
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Five-Carat Soul
When Liliane Bettencourt, the aging heiress to the L'Oreal fortune, fell under the spell of a handsome, talented artist and began to shower him with gifts amounting to ...
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The Bettencourt Affair: The World's Richest Woman And The Scandal That Rocked Paris
This collection of the late surrealist artist Leonora Carrington's published and unpublished short stories – many newly translated from ...
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The Complete Stories Of Leonora Carrington
Fifteen years ago, almost no one had heard of Botox. Then the FDA approved using botulinum toxin to ...
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Botox Nation: Changing The Face Of America
While the new Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War has received more attention this year, Thi Bui's masterful graphic novel is required reading ...
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The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir
World Fantasy Award nominee Kat Howard takes sorcery to the streets of New York in her urban flight of fancy, An Unkindness of Magicians. Briskly paced yet intricately ...
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An Unkindness Of Magicians
Shattered was conceived as a behind-the-scenes account of how the first female president won the White House. But ...
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Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign
For many New Yorkers, "Bellevue" is synonymous with "hospital," and the institution has had an outsized effect on the evolution of modern medicine, treating presidents ...
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Bellevue: Three Centuries Of Medicine And Mayhem At America's Most Storied Hospital
Devil's Bargain by Joshua Green is a fascinating investigation into the ideological bricks with which Steve Bannon has ...
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Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, And The Storming Of The Presidency
Grace Thomas is about to start college and has a secret she keeps from her closest friends: She is deeply involved in ...
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Grace And The Fever
In 1869, William Mumler was brought to trial in New York City. Technically, it was for consumer fraud. But the "spirit ...
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The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, And The Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost
Of all the new generation of vet writers, Elliot Ackerman has seen the most war – he earned a Silver Star in the second battle of Fallujah and later hunted Taliban with ...
Read Quil Lawrence's full recommendation »
Dark At The Crossing
Jenny Zhang's short story collection lit up my text messages with friends for weeks. We couldn't stop dissecting ...
Read Kat Chow's full recommendation »
Sour Heart
Everything about Sin Bravely is unexpected. It's a deeply personal examination of what can happen when you take religion to the extreme, but it's also hilarious. Maggie ...
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Sin Bravely: A Memoir Of Spiritual Disobedience
One of my top three books this year. Beneath the earth, the folk of Caverna craft wonders: The right cheese will give you visions of the future, while the wrong wine ...
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A Face Like Glass
The ingenious conceit of Bill Goldstein's book is to follow, using excerpts from correspondence and diaries, the intertwined personal and literary lives of four writers ...
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The World Broke In Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, And The Year That Changed Literature
The not-quite-poems, not-quite-essays that make up Autumn are a gentle introduction to this Norwegian author who ...
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Autumn
In this, Alan Bennett's third volume of nonfiction prose, the British screenwriter/playwright/cultural institution proves as wry, self-deprecating and fabulously fusty ...
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Keeping On Keeping On
Not for the faint of heart, this exquisitely painful collection of stories by writing professor Paul Yoon will take you to several countries in a couple ...
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The Mountain: Stories
Turtle is a 14-year-old girl who eats raw eggs for breakfast and carries a gun. She has learned everything about survival from her gritty father, which doesn't always ...
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My Absolute Darling: A Novel
Ever had a "hate-ship"? That's how author Yewande Omotoso characterizes the relationship between Hortensia and Marion, the neighbors in her novel, The Woman Next Door ...
Read Sarah Handel's full recommendation »
The Woman Next Door: A Novel
When asked at the start of their career which musicians they'd most like to meet in America, the Beatles ...
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Muddy: The Story Of Blues Legend Muddy Waters
Brazilian artist Marcelo D'Salete draws extensively on historical documents to tell these harrowing stories of Africans living under slavery. In striking ...
Read Etelka Lehoczky's full recommendation »
Run For It: Stories Of Slaves Who Fought For Their Freedom
When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton took over the immediate task of running the government in the final throes of the Civil ...
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Stanton: Lincoln's War Secretary
Two years after the end of World War II, American college student Charlie St. Clair is looking for a ...
Read Nicole Cohen's full recommendation »
The Alice Network: A Novel
Extraordinary young girls fighting to survive are familiar in YA novels, but the protagonist of this confident, breathless debut thriller is something special ...
Read Tasha Robinson's full recommendation »
City Of Saints And Thieves
Amanda Gallo is a local TV anchor until she covers a breaking-news story, without pants, and lands her dream job on a national network run by a ratings-obsessed media ...
Read Samantha Balaban's full recommendation »
Amanda Wakes Up: A Novel
A lonely figure skater glides across the ice, cutting an elegant and dynamic path across the blank page. Suzy Lee's Lines uses this simple ...
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Lines
A touching tribute to a mining town (where author Joanne Schwartz grew up), this ...
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Town Is By The Sea
Oh, to have the brilliant eye of the late photographer Helen Levitt. These photos, taken between 1934 and ...
Read Melissa Block's full recommendation »
One, Two, Three, More
We all know that Humpty Dumpty had a great fall, but then what? Wracked with fear and insecurity, Humpty has become terrified of heights ...
Read Lisa Yee's full recommendation »
After the Fall (How Humpty Dumpty Got Back Up Again)
Sherry Thomas' Lady Sherlock series, of which this is the second book, takes a straightforward premise – what if ...
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A Conspiracy In Belgravia (The Lady Sherlock Series)
"I like to think I sprang from a head; I like to think the head was mine," writes Patricia Lockwood in Priestdaddy, her affectionate memoir of growing up with a ...
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Priestdaddy: A Memoir
What does home mean when you no longer have a house – or a homeland? This beautiful novel traces one Palestinian family's struggle with that question and how it can ...
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Salt Houses: A Novel
Rosecrans Baldwin's novel of young love, small-town desolation and bloody murder plays out like a crowded and oddly modern version of The Scarlet Letter, but one ...
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The Last Kid Left: A Novel
Amy Stewart has written a series of novels inspired by Constance Kopp, a real woman and sheriff's deputy who regularly made headlines in early 20th century New Jersey ...
Read Barbara Campbell's full recommendation »
Miss Kopp's Midnight Confessions
There's no question that Julio Cortázar is among the most revered Latin American writers of any age. In Literature ...
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Literature Class, Berkeley 1980
Uncannily pertinent to today's hypercharged partisan battles, Shining City is a political thriller that opens with the sudden death of a Supreme Court justice. The ...
Read Martha Anne Toll's full recommendation »
Shining City: A Novel
Laurent Binet's follow-up to HHhH is a postmodern intellectual romp and hilarious mystery for the Mensa set and fans of Umberto Eco and Tom Stoppard. With a lineup of ...
Read Heller McAlpin's full recommendation »
The Seventh Function Of Language: A Novel
If you love father-son adventure novels, meet the father-daughter adventure novel, starring Samuel Hawley and his ...
Read Bethanne Patrick's full recommendation »
The Twelve Lives Of Samuel Hawley: A Novel
Along with his work as a contributor and critic at The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn ...
Read Sam Briger's full recommendation »
An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, And An Epic
The phenomenon of the witch – once used as a shorthand for women who fall outside of certain acceptable parameters, now ...
Read Carmen Maria Machado's full recommendation »
Literary Witches: A Celebration Of Magical Women Writers
The thing I love the most about the blog Smitten Kitchen isn't the recipes – it's the way Deb Perelman writes them. Equal ...
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Smitten Kitchen Every Day: Triumphant And Unfussy New Favorites
Ruthanna Emrys takes on a formidable challenge in Winter Tide: Reworking the world of H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos in a way that will appeal to Lovecraft fans ...
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Winter Tide (The Innsmouth Legacy)
In his second story collection, Daniel Alarcón delivers 10 enthralling tales on migration, lost love and broken ...
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The King Is Always Above The People: Stories
Emily Fridlund's electrifying debut novel doesn't follow the now-familiar narrative arc that other coming-of-age novels do. The book tells the story of 14-year-old ...
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History of Wolves: A Novel
Why buy another mediocre retelling of a Greek myth for your kid, when you can introduce them to a gorgeously told fairy tale that originated outside of Europe? Jumbies ...
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Rise Of The Jumbies
After the ecological and psychological collapse of North America, indigenous people all over the continent – the only ones who can still dream – are hunted by the ...
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The Marrow Thieves
Inside Studio 54 is true to its title, taking us past the velvet rope, into the heat and sweat and coke ...
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Inside Studio 54
Archibald Isaac Ferguson is born on March 3, 1947, at the start of Paul Auster's miraculous 4 3 2 1. After that, this book splits into four narratives as the same boy ...
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4 3 2 1: A Novel
This is how George Saunders will get you: He'll start with some premise that sounds absurd or gimmicky (previously – human lawn ornaments! This time – Abraham Lincoln ...
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Lincoln In The Bardo: A Novel
When was the last time you stayed up to finish a thriller? I usually answer that question with Ken Follett's Eye of the Needle or Geoffrey Household's Rogue ...
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Not A Sound: A Novel
Ambitious, cautious Portia Carmichael manages a hotel in the Arizona Territory. Kent Randolph, who may have finally grown up and wised up, is courting her, one step at ...
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Breathless
Food is culture, but what happens to your culture's traditional cuisine after well over a century of forced assimilation? Oglala Lakota chef Sean Sherman ...
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The Sioux Chef's Indigenous Kitchen
Mona will do just about anything to save her late mother's art gallery. Enter Malcolm, a mysterious (sexy) stranger with an unusual (and sexy) proposition – permission ...
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The Red
In the near future, a space station called CIEL circles the dying Earth like a bloated star, peopled by mutated humans baroquely decorated with skin grafts. Below them ...
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The Book Of Joan: A Novel
Sociologist Eve L. Ewing's debut poetry collection moves fluidly among scholarship, teaching, writing and ...
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Electric Arches
The slogan "Moxie Girls Fight Back" is a call to arms for all the girls who are slipping quietly through the halls, trying hard to be invisible. Vivian Carter is one of ...
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Moxie: A Novel
This year, there seems to be a mini-trend of women reworking classic horror and science fiction tropes, and Strange Practice is my favorite of the bunch. Dr. Greta ...
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Strange Practice (A Dr. Greta Helsing Novel)
Andrea Bern is a single, childless, almost 40-year-old art school dropout working in advertising. She is remarkably good at avoiding her life – not taking on promotions ...
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All Grown Up
Mike Wallace's fabulous new work of encyclopedic nonfiction gives readers kaleidoscopic glimpses of ...
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Greater Gotham: A History Of New York City From 1898 To 1919
What Happened is Hillary Clinton's account of running for, and eventually losing, the presidency to Donald Trump. It's at times a chatty campaign memento, a policy ...
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What Happened
This book of short stories grew out of Elizabeth Strout's novel My Name is Lucy Barton. The stories are linked by the town where the characters grew up, and ...
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Anything Is Possible: A Novel
The Dinner Party is a dark and delicious chocolate box of dysfunction – stories about inept, entitled, cruel or merely stupid men, often in failing relationships. In ...
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The Dinner Party: And Other Stories
After decades of publishing trenchant essays on politics, feminism and the environment, Rebecca Solnit is ...
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The Mother Of All Questions
If you've ever mentally shouted "NOW KISS" at a pair of fictional male best friends, this is the book for you – particularly if you like stories that acknowledge that ...
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The Gentleman's Guide To Vice And Virtue
The Color of Law lays out in clear, accessible prose "A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. ...
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The Color Of Law: A Forgotten History Of How Our Government Segregated America
Innocence cases spotlight the many corruptions of our justice system: Mistakes beget mistakes – some intentional, some not. An epic bureaucracy protects a deeply flawed ...
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Ghost Of The Innocent Man: A True Story Of Trial And Redemption
Musician Jonathan Coulton turned to writer Matt Fraction and artist Albert Monteys to tranform his concept album ...
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Solid State
I know what you're thinking. A memoir about dementia? So depressing. But trust me on this: Gerda Saunders doesn't wallow in ...
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Memory's Last Breath: Field Notes On My Dementia
In Bleaker House, Nell Stevens describes her time living almost entirely alone on barren, cold Bleaker Island in the Falklands. Though she was isolated, she reached a ...
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Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel To The End Of The World
I didn't expect these 128 pages to haunt me. Mexican writer Valeria Luiselli volunteered as a translator in a New York immigration court, asking undocumented Central ...
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Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay In 40 Questions
As every schoolchild knows, little girls in red-hooded outerwear rarely fare well when ...
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Wolf In The Snow
Standing perfectly well on its own and in no way diminishing Code Name Verity (to which it's a prequel), The Pearl Thief is a gorgeous coming-of-age story. Julia ...
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The Pearl Thief
Colm Tóibín, no stranger to fraught family dynamics and themes of loss, exile and return, wanders far from the Ireland and Brooklyn we've seen in his earlier books to ...
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House Of Names: A Novel
Cartoonist Peter Bagge sweeps through Zora Neale Hurston's life at a breakneck pace, sacrificing poignancy to sustain a sense of electricity. Like his subject, Bagge's ...
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Fire!!: The Zora Neale Hurston Story
The 15th in Lauren Tarshis' meticulously researched series is, like its predecessors, a clever marriage of history and character. The title is a spoiler: Each ...
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I Survived The American Revolution, 1776
Bird, Balloon, Bear is a sort of missed-connections, timing-is-everything life ...
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Bird, Balloon, Bear
Did you know trees can talk? An impressive, more-than-200-year-old oak named Red is the narrator of Katherine Applegate's Wishtree. For centuries, neighbors have ...
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Wishtree
From the Creole sounds of New Orleans in the early 1900s to the cyborg-like divas of the 21st century ...
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Good Booty: Love And Sex, Black And White, Body And Soul In American Music
Christophe André, a Doctors Without Borders administrator assigned to the Caucasus region in 1997, spends the bulk of Guy Delisle's 432-page graphic ...
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Hostage
If you find yourself incapable of resisting goofily premised, made-for-TV romantic comedies but wish they had a bit more emotional depth and fewer white people, Maurene ...
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I Believe In A Thing Called Love
What does the song "Satisfaction" by the Rolling Stones have in common with the novel Frankenstein and the periodic table of elements? They're all products of dreams ...
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Why We Sleep: Unlocking The Power Of Sleep And Dreams
Max Brooks made his name writing (in almost clinical detail) about the aftermath of the war against the zombies (in ...
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Minecraft: The Island: A Novel
Julie Buntin understands that a brief but intense best-friendship is not necessarily a coming-of-age tale, but rather an origin story. Fifteen-year-old Cat moves to ...
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Marlena: A Novel
Touch, Courtney Maum's satire of bougie techies, is a zany, manic pleasure. It follows a successful trend forecaster ...
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Touch
Her Body and Other Parties – a finalist for the National Book Award – is an abrupt, original and wild collection of stories that somehow catch at familiar, unspoken ...
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Her Body And Other Parties: Stories
In this beautifully written and thoughtfully produced book, Kassia St.Clair, who writes a column on color for Elle ...
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The Secret Lives Of Color
Following up 2015's The Oven, Sophie Goldstein continues to put a fresh spin on sci-fi with her Aubrey Beardsley-influenced style. In this ...
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House Of Women
Elif Batuman's novel The Idiot encapsulates those years of humiliating, but vibrant confusion that come in your late teens. A confusion that's not even sexual, but ...
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The Idiot
After his departure from America's Test Kitchen, Chris Kimball founded another cooking company, Milk Street, where he has ...
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Milk Street: The New Home Cooking
Must we merge completely when we partner up? What do we really know about one another? A mystery undergirds this tale of a wife who goes to a foreign locale to ...
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A Separation: A Novel
Giorgio De Maria's cult novel was published in Italy in 1977, at a time when the country was wracked by constant terror attacks and consequent police state crackdowns ...
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The Twenty Days Of Turin: A Novel
Marion Palm is on the lam. She has a backpack full of money embezzled from the private school where she works. Left ...
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The Misfortune Of Marion Palm: A Novel
I love a breezy domestic novel, and Standard Deviation certainly scratches that itch. Graham is married to Audra, a ...
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Standard Deviation: A Novel
Like her 2016 smash hit The Widow, Fiona Barton's new book centers on a cold case involving a little one. This time, the child is a newborn's skeleton, discovered at ...
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The Child: A Novel
Starr Carter lives in the heart of a black neighborhood but goes to a private school across town, where ...
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The Hate U Give
A beautiful, pitch-perfect sequel to Kenneth Grahame's The Wind in the Willows, with characters original ...
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The River Bank: A Sequel To Kenneth Grahame's The Wind In The Willows
A mother and her little boy are enjoying an afternoon at the zoo when shooting erupts. I don't want to share anything ...
Read Shannon Rhoades' full recommendation »
Fierce Kingdom: A Novel
Do you love a good dose of hot-and-heavy romantic angst? Get yourself a copy of Alisha Rai's Hate To Want You, a reworking of Romeo and Juliet set among rival ...
Read Petra Mayer's full recommendation »
Hate To Want You: Forbidden Hearts
Most of the 20 sumptuous tales in Sofia Samatar's collection Tender take place on Earth – although not ...
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Tender: Stories
Manga artist Nagata Kabi's autobiographical graphic novel My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness is both deeply specific and universal. Nagata is extremely ...
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My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness
Think of this book as a collection of those individual sentences in a novel that hit you with a sense of knowing, leave you haunted for a split ...
Read Meghan Keane's full recommendation »
300 Arguments: Essays
Campy, rage-drenched hilarity with a side order of Norse mythology, retold through a cast of diverse characters, The Unyielding is Part 3 of a trilogy wherein the Norse ...
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The Unyielding
Celeste Ng's second novel about family and adoption benefits from perfect timing and great, immersive writing. The opening pages – a beautiful suburban house in flames ...
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Little Fires Everywhere
Set in Japan, My Brother's Husband follows Yaichi, whose life is upended by a visit from Mike Flanagan, his estranged – now deceased – brother's husband ...
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My Brother's Husband
Tom Gauld cooks up clever cartoons that have everything to do with books and little ...
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Baking With Kafka
Made For Love is a philosophical and outrageously imaginative comic novel about love, mortality, surveillance and dolphin fetishism. Having escaped her billionaire ...
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Made For Love: A Novel
I didn't expect this rom-com to melt my cold, black heart. Dimple winces every time her mother mentions marriage – she would rather focus on college and her love of ...
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When Dimple Met Rishi
If, like me, you grew up spending summers at Boy Scout camp, this book cuts right to your soul. But even if you've never built a fire or tied a square knot, Nickolas ...
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The Hearts Of Men: A Novel
Maria Qamar's drawings of Pakistani émigré culture are just pure fun. Her unique adaptation of Roy Lichtenstein's style conveys the sometimes-histrionic ...
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Trust No Aunty
An abandoned baby set adrift in an old boat, the whisper of pirate treasure, and a cat named Mouse? Be warned, once you ...
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Beyond The Bright Sea
Michael W. Twitty is one of the most fascinating people in food today. A cook, writer, Judaic studies teacher, self-taught historian and historical interpreter (he ...
Read Maria Godoy's full recommendation »
The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History In The Old South
The title of Owen Egerton's new novel refers to the idea that our earth is hollow – we live on its crust, just above another world accessible only through special ports ...
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Hollow: A Novel
More travelogue than cookbook, more journey than destination, Tasting Georgia is an exhaustive, lavish look at the foodways of a country ...
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Tasting Georgia: A Food And Wine Journey In The Caucasus
Francis Spufford's ingenious historical novel, Golden Hill, is set in 1746, in the teeming streets of what is now Lower Manhattan – a place of dark alleys and twisted ...
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Golden Hill: A Novel Of Old New York
A dream matchup between longtime friends and prolific comics creators Scott Snyder and Jeff Lemire, .A.D. is the kind of format-breaking ...
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A.D.: After Death
What if women could summon electricity from their fingers? How would the world change? Naomi Alderman's novel The Power ...
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The Power
In this memoir, New Yorker writer Ariel Levy reflects on her life leading up to a breathtakingly painful period that – ...
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The Rules Do Not Apply: A Memoir
The dedication of this short story collection could be its mission statement: "For difficult women, who should be celebrated for their very nature." The women in these ...
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Difficult Women
He seethes and rages at the press, which he casts as his enemy. He spends decades with his nose pressed up against the glass, looking in on the establishment, longing ...
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Richard Nixon: The Life
This is a book about soup, noodles and noodle soup – specifically the addictive (and increasingly ubiquitous) beef noodle soup ...
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The Pho Cookbook: Easy To Adventurous Recipes For Vietnam's Favorite Soup And Noodles
This book pulled me in with its girl-meets-boy story, but it quickly becomes something bigger and more complicated than I expected. With a range of perspectives and a ...
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Home Fire: A Novel
I've been captivated by the emerald green Gulf of Mexico since I was a kid, and now I have more reason to be in awe ...
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The Gulf: The Making of An American Sea
Author Rowan Hisayo Buchanan was struck by lightning as she finished Harmless Like You. I'm not setting up an overburdened metaphor, I just want you to know it's a ...
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Harmless Like You: A Novel
Whether with his band The Mountain Goats or in his debut novel, Wolf In White Van, John Darnielle has always demonstrated a keen understanding and care for even the ...
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Universal Harvester: A Novel
On Aug. 28, 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched in Mississippi after he allegedly flirted with a white woman in a grocery store. Timothy B. Tyson's ...
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The Blood Of Emmett Till
This standalone prequel to Practical Magic is mostly set in the 1960s and features the lives of the Owens siblings – Frances, Bridget and Vincent. Coming of age ...
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The Rules Of Magic
After only a couple of pages of this epic graphic novel, I was hooked. The Five Worlds can only be saved if five iconic ...
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5 Worlds Book 1: The Sand Warrior
Shortlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize, Ali Smith's beguiling, beautifully written novel is about a dying centenarian and a young woman who used to be his ...
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Autumn: A Novel
Viet Thanh Nguyen's short story collection was published at a critical moment at the start of 2017, as ...
Read Kat Chow's full recommendation »
The Refugees