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NPR’s Book Concierge

Our Guide To 2016’s Great Reads

Produced by Nicole Cohen, Rose Friedman, Petra Mayer and Beth Novey | Executive Producer: Ellen Silva
Designed by David Eads, Juan Elosua and Clinton King – Published Dec. 6, 2016

Showing all books (309)

Use the filters below to explore more than 300 titles NPR staff and critics loved this year. (You can also combine filters!) Want even more recommendations? Check out our favorite books from 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008

Fifty years after the birth of mainstream comics' first black superhero, MacArthur "genius grant" recipient Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a rich take on this formidable ...
Read Etelka Lehoczky's full recommendation »
Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet
"Enthralling" might seem like a bizarre way to describe the stories of real people teetering on the brink of homelessness in Milwaukee, but this account of how ...
Read Neda Ulaby's full recommendation »
Evicted: Poverty And Profit In The American City
To compare The Heavenly Table to Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian is too simple. To set it against Sam Peckinpah's blood-and-thunder Western films is silly because ...
Read Jason Sheehan's full recommendation »
The Heavenly Table: A Novel
Not all of us Hamilton nerds will be lucky enough to be in the room where it happens. But poring over the musical's accompanying book will ...
Read Jessica Reedy's full recommendation »
Hamilton: The Revolution
The Familiar is a massive, ambitious, flawed, brilliant and deeply weird endeavor projected to run through 27 volumes, all centering around a special (possibly magical ...
Read Jason Sheehan's full recommendation »
The Familiar, Volume 3: Honeysuckle & Pain
Are you looking for a picture book to help your darling nieces and nephews drift to dreamland, like a lost doll swept to sea? This is not ...
Read Barrie Hardymon's full recommendation »
The Beach At Night
This memoir isn't the funny book you'd think a funny man would write. Nor do you read it just for the rags to riches journey, though what a journey — from a South ...
Read Gregory Warner's full recommendation »
Born A Crime: Stories From A South African Childhood
From the very first page, this rich, soulful book celebrates the loyal friendship between a fox and his boy: "The fox felt the car slow before the boy ...
Read Justine Kenin's full recommendation »
Pax
The history of the enslavement of people from North America and the Caribbean is deliberately murky; those who practiced it often did so in places where slavery was ...
Read Genevieve Valentine's full recommendation »
The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story Of Indian Enslavement In America
There is no historian who writes like Svetlana Alexievich. She's the Studs Terkel of the former Soviet Union, composing history with the voices of others ...
Read Gregory Warner's full recommendation »
Secondhand Time: The Last Of The Soviets
A boyfriend takes his girlfriend on a long drive to the remote farmhouse where he grew up. It's dark, it's snowing and the trip feels as doomed as the relationship: She ...
Read Shannon Rhoades' full recommendation »
I'm Thinking Of Ending Things
Andrew Harding's The Mayor of Mogadishu is an intimate and nuanced portrayal of one man's effort to bring back to life a city destroyed by clan warfare, Islamist ...
Read Didrik Schanche's full recommendation »
The Mayor Of Mogadishu: A Story Of Chaos And Redemption In The Ruins Of Somalia
Set in Atlanta just after World War II, Darktown chronicles the progress of two young black veterans who've been chosen to integrate the Atlanta Police Department — ...
Read Karen Grigsby Bates' full recommendation »
Darktown: A Novel
There are few animals with as terrible a reputation as the pit bull, but according to Bronwyn Dickey's terrific, wide-ranging account of the breed, also few so tightly ...
Read Carmen Maria Machado's full recommendation »
Pit Bull: The Battle Over An American Icon
There's a matter-of-fact surety to Jo Walton's books that makes the most implausible ideas seem as prosaic and sensible as warm socks. In her Thessaly trilogy, wrapping ...
Read Tasha Robinson's full recommendation »
Necessity: A Novel
If you loved Yann Martel's Booker Prize-winning novel, Life of Pi, his newest novel offers some familiar pleasures. Like its blockbuster predecessor, The High Mountains ...
Read Ari Shapiro's full recommendation »
The High Mountains Of Portugal: A Novel
In The Sport Of Kings, C.E. Morgan weaves several centuries of American history into an ambitious and epic tale of a thoroughbred racehorse born to win the Triple ...
Read Jane Ciabattari's full recommendation »
The Sport Of Kings
Nix has spent her whole life sailing the seas with her father, who possesses the ability to transport his ship and crew to any time and place — as long as he has a map ...
Read Caitlyn Paxson's full recommendation »
The Girl From Everywhere
A woman named Lucy stares out the window of a hospital room, recovering from an infection. She turns and sees her mother, from whom she has been estranged for ...
Read Lynn Neary's full recommendation »
My Name Is Lucy Barton: A Novel
Sarah Glenn Marsh paints a portrait of a little Manx fishing village in 1913, where people are disappearing and mythical creatures may be to blame. Bridey has hated the ...
Read Caitlyn Paxson's full recommendation »
Fear The Drowning Deep
What is it like to live in a dictatorship? What is it like when your father opposes that dictatorship and takes your family into exile? What is it like when your father ...
Read Kelly McEvers' full recommendation »
The Return: Fathers, Sons And The Land In Between
Korean cookbooks are everywhere right now, but this one's different. Author Robin Ha is an artist and graphic novelist, and every page features a variety ...
Read T. Susan Chang's full recommendation »
Cook Korean! A Comic Book With Recipes
Remember Jane Eyre, that Victorian orphan whose sad story begins with a bullying cousin and a cruel headmaster? Now imagine an alternate version in which Jane fights ...
Read Nicole Cohen's full recommendation »
Jane Steele
Michael Chabon's latest novel, a playful twist on family memoirs, purports to be the amazing adventures of the author's maternal grandfather, as confided to him when ...
Read Heller McAlpin's full recommendation »
Moonglow: A Novel
You may have heard that The Girls is a fictional version of the infamous Manson Family murders. Really it is more about the toxic mixture of neediness and naiveté that ...
Read Lynn Neary's full recommendation »
The Girls
Julia Turshen is one of those cooking insiders who have remained largely behind the scenes, improving recipes and making authors ...
Read T. Susan Chang's full recommendation »
Small Victories: Recipes, Advice + Hundreds Of Ideas For Home Cooking Triumphs
Jacqueline Woodson says Another Brooklyn came to her in a "kind of dreamlike series of vignettes." And that is just how this slender novel unfolds. It's the story of a ...
Read Lynn Neary's full recommendation »
Another Brooklyn: A Novel
As the Arab Spring raged across the Middle East in 2011, New York Times correspondent Robert Worth was there, documenting the revolutions and the characters who drove ...
Read Melissa Block's full recommendation »
A Rage For Order: The Middle East In Turmoil, From Tahrir Square To ISIS
Looking at crimes from a different angle has become something of a trope these days, but Fiona Barton's years as a British journalist make this debut novel — told from ...
Read Bethanne Patrick's full recommendation »
The Widow: A Novel
Margaret Atwood's best books delve deep into her characters' souls, but her funniest work is faster and broader. Her retelling of The Tempest is the latter: a modern ...
Read Tasha Robinson's full recommendation »
Hag-Seed
Cathleen Schine's charming novel takes a wise, witty look at a potentially unfunny subject: the upset that occurs when the seesaw of care tilts from elderly parents to ...
Read Heller McAlpin's full recommendation »
They May Not Mean To, But They Do: A Novel
This is a book about the millions of microbes that live inside us, and yet — it's not gross! As you might guess from the Walt Whitman reference in the title, Ed Yong is ...
Read Rebecca Hersher's full recommendation »
I Contain Multitudes: The Microbes Within Us And A Grander View Of Life
All the best art history books carry the sense that they're telling secrets, and Erin Thompson knows it; reading Possession feels like sneaking through a dark museum ...
Read Genevieve Valentine's full recommendation »
Possession: The Curious History Of Private Collectors From Antiquity To The Present
"Walk a mile in someone else's shoes" is a tough lesson to get across to the under 7 set ...
Read Melissa Gray's full recommendation »
They All Saw A Cat
In this celebration of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, we discover the circumstances that ignited his passion for painting. Basquiat was ...
Read Lisa Yee's full recommendation »
Radiant Child: The Story Of Young Artist Jean-Michel Basquiat
Robin Wasserman's terrifying thriller is the story of two teenage girls, outcasts in their small western Pennsylvania town in the early 1990s. The girls' hatred of a ...
Read Michael Schaub's full recommendation »
Girls On Fire: A Novel
If you're looking for an encyclopedia of tricks, The Book of Magic might not give you much, but if you're hoping to trace how magic has been defined and perceived ...
Read Genevieve Valentine's full recommendation »
The Book Of Magic: From Antiquity To The Enlightenment
In post-Civil War Nevada, wealthy and powerful rancher Rhine finds Eddy lost and near death in the desert, and nurses her back to health — but though Rhine comes to ...
Read Sarah Wendell's full recommendation »
Forbidden
Raghavan Iyer has published some of the most inspiring Indian cookbooks on the market, but here the beloved ...
Read T. Susan Chang's full recommendation »
Smashed, Mashed, Boiled, And Baked — And Fried, Too! A Celebration Of Potatoes In 75 Irresistible Recipes
Flavorwalla (or "vendor of flavors") is chef Floyd Cardoz's exciting contribution to the bustling market of "chef cooks at home" books, and it's ...
Read T. Susan Chang's full recommendation »
Flavorwalla: Big Flavor. Bold Spices. A New Way To Cook The Foods You Love
You don't have to have read Isabel Greenberg's 2013 wry, fabulist love story An Encyclopedia of Early Earth to make sense of this similarly ...
Read Glen Weldon's full recommendation »
The One Hundred Nights Of Hero: A Graphic Novel
Any chef worth her kosher salt will tell you that sous vide (or, cooking vacuum-sealed food in a water bath at a controlled ...
Read T. Susan Chang's full recommendation »
Sous Vide At Home: The Modern Technique For Perfectly Cooked Meals
Lindy West's memoir is a witty and cathartic take on toxic misogyny and fat shaming. She comes to accept her body just as Internet trolls congregate en masse to try to ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
Shrill: Notes From A Loud Woman
The good news: Nothing's really haunted except by the spirits we imagine for ourselves. The bad news: We'll make anything haunted. The great news: There's ...
Read Genevieve Valentine's full recommendation »
Ghostland: An American History In Haunted Places
Award-winning basketball writer Jonathan Abrams takes a deep dive into the lives and careers of a special group of basketball prodigies in his book Boys Among Men ...
Read Juan Vidal's full recommendation »
Boys Among Men: How The Prep-To-Pro Generation Redefined The NBA And Sparked A Basketball Revolution
In his masterful debut novel Grief is the Thing with Feathers, Max Porter offers a poetic and beautifully rendered meditation on love, grief and the transformative ...
Read Juan Vidal's full recommendation »
Grief Is The Thing With Feathers: A Novel
As a British-born American citizen, I bought wholeheartedly into one of America's founding myths: That Americans, through some rare good fortune, escaped the burdens of ...
Read Jane Greenhalgh's full recommendation »
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History Of Class In America
The incomparable Roz Chast puts her unique, delightful stamp on this book right up front, writing about how she once tried to get into ...
Read Etelka Lehoczky's full recommendation »
The Best American Comics 2016
Set in the fictional Jamaican town of River Bank, this novel follows three women struggling to keep their lives together in the wake of a long drought and a ...
Read Michael Schaub's full recommendation »
Here Comes The Sun: A Novel
The pressure-cooker country of Singapore – tiny and polyglot, globally competitive and politically repressive – seems to have been poured out into this dense book ...
Read Etelka Lehoczky's full recommendation »
The Art Of Charlie Chan Hock Chye
In the earlier volumes of her acclaimed biography of Eleanor Roosevelt, historian Blanche Wiesen Cook described Eleanor's emotionally deprived childhood and delved into ...
Read Maureen Corrigan's full recommendation »
Eleanor Roosevelt, Volume 3: The War Years And After, 1939-1962
It's fair to say that every baseball fan ever has grumbled over their team's strategy, but in this era of advanced statistics, that second-guessing has given way to a ...
Read Mike Katzif's full recommendation »
The Only Rule Is It Has To Work: Our Wild Experiment Building A New Kind of Baseball Team
Why? Why? Why does Ada Twist ask so many questions? In this clever, fun and breezy book, Ada's boundless curiosity propels her ...
Read Lisa Yee's full recommendation »
Ada Twist, Scientist
A change of pace from last year's A Bollywood Affair, Dev's latest romance is emotional, intricate, and will squeeze your heart with painstaking precision ...
Read Sarah Wendell's full recommendation »
A Change Of Heart
From the New York Review of Books' new imprint, New York Review Comics, Peplum challenges and confounds with its unorthodox story and ...
Read Etelka Lehoczky's full recommendation »
Peplum
Originating as a minicomic, Jason Shiga's Demon has grown to four planned volumes centering on one mystery: Why can't Jimmy Yee die? In this ...
Read Etelka Lehoczky's full recommendation »
Demon, Volume 1
The Mothers follows three young adults growing up in a black Southern California community. Nadia, the protagonist, loses her mother to suicide, and finds herself ...
Read Barrie Hardymon's full recommendation »
The Mothers: A Novel
The name of Melissa Broder's book of personal essays says it all; in 2012, as she struggled with anxiety and panic attacks, Broder started the Twitter account ...
Read Rommel Wood's full recommendation »
So Sad Today: Personal Essays
The next time I hear someone say "Oh, please — slavery ended centuries ago; discrimination against African-Americans can't only be the fault of slavery," I'm ...
Read Karen Grigsby Bates' full recommendation »
Homegoing: A Novel
Readers may approach a doorstop novel of some 700-plus pages with a mixture of hope and dread, but Steven Price's By Gaslight proves engrossing enough to warrant its ...
Read Jean Zimmerman's full recommendation »
By Gaslight: A Novel
Count Alexander Rostov is a resourceful man who loves the finer things in life. When he is sentenced by the Bolsheviks to a lifetime of house arrest in a tiny room in ...
Read Lynn Neary's full recommendation »
A Gentleman In Moscow: A Novel
The radiant Faith is long overdue in comics. This superhero who fights crime using powers of flight and telekinesis is formidable, pulchritudinous and — remarkably ...
Read Etelka Lehoczky's full recommendation »
Faith Volume 1: Hollywood And Vine
What can one child do to make an impact on her community? A lot. In Book Uncle and Me, 9-year-old Yasmin's cherished free lending library is about to be shut ...
Read Lisa Yee's full recommendation »
Book Uncle And Me
Winston Churchill, FDR's stalwart partner in World War II, burned with ambition and visions of grandeur from his earliest years. Candice Millard tells of his quest for ...
Read Edith Chapin's full recommendation »
Hero Of The Empire: The Boer War, A Daring Escape And The Making Of Winston Churchill
The setup for Jade Chang's debut novel, The Wangs vs. the World, is so rich in conflict and pathos, it's hard to realize at first that it's a comedy. Not that she takes ...
Read Jason Heller's full recommendation »
The Wangs Vs. The World
Paper Girls Volume 1 collects the first five issues of writer Brian K. Vaughan and artist Cliff ...
Read Glen Weldon's full recommendation »
Paper Girls Volume 1
Imbolo Mbue's debut novel begins like any story about the American dream; a young, Cameroonian couple move to New York to find a better life for themselves and their ...
Read Lucy Perkins' full recommendation »
Behold The Dreamers: A Novel
At first glance, Molly on the Range looks like just another young person's blog-to-book adventure, albeit one attractively shot in a ...
Read T. Susan Chang's full recommendation »
Molly On The Range: Recipes And Stories From An Unlikely Life On A Farm
A beautifully constructed novel told in four disparate though loosely linked parts, The Fortunes tackles the experience of being Chinese in America. Peter Ho Davies ...
Read Michael Schaub's full recommendation »
The Fortunes
The House at the Edge of Night is a misty Mediterranean dream of a book. It's so simple that there is only room for the emotions found in children's tales: sad ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
The House At The Edge Of Night: A Novel
There aren't any swords or lasers in Charlie Jane Anders' All the Birds in the Sky — instead, it mixes science fiction and fantasy in a profound alchemy. The love story ...
Read Jason Heller's full recommendation »
All The Birds In The Sky
Philosopher John Kaag hits the sweet spot between intellectual history and personal memoir in this chronicle of how a neglected library of philosophical treasures ...
Read Heller McAlpin's full recommendation »
American Philosophy: A Love Story
Over the past few years, American veterans of the war in Iraq have published quite a few works of fiction that focus on the moral quandaries of soldiers and their ...
Read Laila Lalami's full recommendation »
The White Donkey: Terminal Lance
I approached Ian McEwan's fetal Hamlet with the healthy skepticism of one who has sat through many dumb Shakespeare adaptations. But wit and self-awareness will ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
Nutshell: A Novel
This novel about a down-on-his-luck young Englishman in Cambodia reads like a thriller. Lawrence Osborne weaves in the country's past and present, and he has ...
Read Nishant Dahiya's full recommendation »
Hunters In The Dark: A Novel
On a cold, dark night, a stranger arrives in an Irish village. In this novel about a Bosnian war criminal in hiding, the tragic is marbled with the quotidian, the ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
The Little Red Chairs
Today, stories about Egypt often conjure up images of Tahrir Square protests and political unrest, but so much of Yasmine El Rashidi's novel — which documents ...
Read Heidi Saman's full recommendation »
Chronicle Of A Last Summer: A Novel Of Egypt
This is a beautifully curated collection of an award-winning author's best work, with stories ranging from hard science fiction to historical fantasy to surreal ...
Read Amal El-Mohtar's full recommendation »
The Paper Menagerie
The year is 1976, and a wealthy New England family learns that their inheritance has evaporated. Cast adrift, the husband and wife each leave home, unaware of the ...
Read Michael Schaub's full recommendation »
Sons And Daughters Of Ease And Plenty: A Novel
How to explain the magic of this book? This is physics as philosophy. It's a heartfelt appreciation of the power of the simple to explain the profound. Carlo Rovelli's ...
Read Felix Contreras' full recommendation »
Seven Brief Lessons On Physics
In a time when racial issues and identity politics are widely discussed, it's hard to imagine growing up with your biological background hidden from you. But that's ...
Read Eric Westervelt's full recommendation »
Black Lotus: A Woman's Search For Racial Identity
Commonwealth isn't as soaring or as lush as Ann Patchett's earlier novels, but wow does it ever suck you in. This is a story of families and marriage and love and the ...
Read Mary Louise Kelly's full recommendation »
Commonwealth
Yep, it's precisely what it looks like: a book about dust. Well, that and the ways this all-but-invisible matter, this ever-accumulating nothing ...
Read Colin Dwyer's full recommendation »
Dust (Object Lessons)
This is the story of Samuel Andresen-Anderson. Of the boy who became him and the man that he is in 2011 — obsessed with an online game called World Of Elfscape and ...
Read Jason Sheehan's full recommendation »
The Nix: A Novel
Don't let the sugary title fool you. In this memoir, David Kushner takes us down a dark path as he unravels the senseless crime that has haunted his family: In 1973 ...
Read Melissa Block's full recommendation »
Alligator Candy: A Memoir
Before I'd read a page of My Marathon I assumed it would be your fairly typical "how I became a champ" autobiography by a sports legend. I was dead wrong. In this ...
Read Eric Westervelt's full recommendation »
My Marathon: Reflections On A Gold Medal Life
If you read only one science-fiction book this year about a spaceport in the middle of embattled Tel Aviv, it should be this one. If you read only one book about the ...
Read Jason Sheehan's full recommendation »
Central Station
Elizabeth McKenzie's quirky romantic comedy is a frisky charmer about a brainy, off-center couple who face up to their differences – and their difficult, eccentric ...
Read Heller McAlpin's full recommendation »
The Portable Veblen: A Novel
An air of Soviet-era menace engulfs The Fox Was Ever the Hunter, the remarkable new novel by Herta Müller, who was described by the Swedish Academy upon her 2009 Nobel ...
Read Jean Zimmerman's full recommendation »
The Fox Was Ever The Hunter: A Novel
If jazz is audible poetry, then how fitting to find a poetry/fiction/nonfiction book about graphic designer Art Kane's 1958 pitch to Esquire magazine ...
Read Betsy Bird's full recommendation »
Jazz Day: The Making Of A Famous Photograph
To my mind, this compilation of Annie Dillard's essays would be worth reading for this line alone (from my favorite of her essays, "Total ...
Read Melissa Block's full recommendation »
The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old And New
If you're familiar with Tana French's mysteries, I can probably just stop here and tell you her new one is called The Trespasser, so you can hop off the Internet and go ...
Read Barrie Hardymon's full recommendation »
The Trespasser: A Novel
Cat is a Kingmaker, with the coveted power to tell when someone is lying — and in doing so, upend the power structure of her world. So she conceals herself as a member ...
Read Sarah Wendell's full recommendation »
A Promise Of Fire
The love affair between first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and journalist Lorena "Hick" Hickok — something of an open secret for the better part of a century — has never been ...
Read Carmen Maria Machado's full recommendation »
Eleanor And Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped A First Lady
"Our stories are us," writes former Esquire editor-in-chief Lee Eisenberg. Maybe that's a point of view especially appealing to journalists; it certainly grabbed me ...
Read Hannah Bloch's full recommendation »
The Point Is: Making Sense Of Birth, Death, And Everything In Between
Elephant Complex made me add Sri Lanka to my bucket list, but armchair travelers will enjoy settling in for an evocative visit with John Gimlette as guide. There ...
Read Edith Chapin's full recommendation »
Elephant Complex: Travels In Sri Lanka
If you like cakes, you're not alone. For 250 years, Americans have been making whatever cake they could with whatever they could find. Anne ...
Read T. Susan Chang's full recommendation »
American Cake: From Colonial Gingerbread To Classic Layer, The Stories And Recipes Behind More Than 125 Of Our Best-Loved Cakes
A lot of children's books have a doting older relative hovering around, looking cuddly and offering cookies and hugs. Don't ...
Read Barrie Hardymon's full recommendation »
Don't Call Me Grandma
The second novel from Jansma follows a tightknit group of friends living in New York who are suddenly forced to confront mortality when one of them falls ill. The book ...
Read Michael Schaub's full recommendation »
Why We Came To The City
Before it even came off the presses, Night Sky with Exit Wounds had a mythos about it that hummed in the air. Ocean Vuong had been marked as a ...
Read Mina Tavakoli's full recommendation »
Night Sky With Exit Wounds
For Emma Donoghue, big stories thrive in small spaces. The type of setting Donoghue made her signature in 2010's Room is one she returns to in The Wonder. Set in 19th ...
Read Maureen Corrigan's full recommendation »
The Wonder
Though most Americans are familiar with Nazi Germany's horrific eugenics program, it's less well known that, in 1927, Oliver Wendell Holmes, a polymath and justice of ...
Read Deb Franklin's full recommendation »
Imbeciles: The Supreme Court, American Eugenics, And The Sterilization Of Carrie Buck
The title of this book is also the title of a 1920 drawing by Paul Klee that was later memorialized by philosopher Walter Benjamin, who said the angel was looking back ...
Read Kelly McEvers' full recommendation »
The Angel Of History: A Novel
"Batman is an inkblot; we see in him what we want to," writes Glen Weldon in The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture. It might as well be the book's ...
Read Jason Heller's full recommendation »
The Caped Crusade: Batman And The Rise Of Nerd Culture
The opening here is archetypal: An ex-con named Nick Mason walks out of prison and into a waiting limousine. Nick doesn't know why he has been released decades early ...
Read Maureen Corrigan's full recommendation »
The Second Life Of Nick Mason
If you share my anxiety about the imminence of self-driving cars (let's be honest; it freaks me out), Dexter Palmer has already got your number. Version Control is hard ...
Read Alison MacAdam's full recommendation »
Version Control: A Novel
The Irish Times has called Sara Baume a writer who "is touched by greatness." That is a lot to live up to in a country that's famous for its writers, so let's just say ...
Read Lynn Neary's full recommendation »
Spill Simmer Falter Wither
The third and final installment of Congressman John Lewis' retelling of the civil rights movement is genius. Even if ...
Read L.A. Johnson's full recommendation »
March: Book Three
Julia Greenfield is 26 years old, and she's trying to lose her virginity. (Got yer attention, eh?) I know this sounds like the plot of a teen comedy, but bear with me ...
Read Barrie Hardymon's full recommendation »
Losing It: A Novel
Veteran music journalist Simon Reynolds made his mark years ago with Rip It Up and Start Again, the definitive account of post-punk. He's outdone himself with Shock and ...
Read Jason Heller's full recommendation »
Shock And Awe: Glam Rock And Its Legacy, From The Seventies To The Twenty-first Century
The political cartoons of Javier Mallarino were so influential in his native Colombia that political fortunes rose and fell by the strokes of his pen. With that power ...
Read Robert Siegel's full recommendation »
Reputations
A companion novel to Samatar's A Stranger in Olondria, this is a faceted jewel of a book that looks at the land of Olondria from the perspective of four of its women ...
Read Amal El-Mohtar's full recommendation »
The Winged Histories
Gloria Norris' memoir Kookooland describes the violent projects of Manchester, N.H., with its race tracks and drive-ins, con men, rat hunts at the dump, and the ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
KooKooLand
This singular debut from Esmé Weijun Wang has all the trappings of a classic gothic novel: half-siblings trapped in a decaying and isolated house, forbidden affection ...
Read Carmen Maria Machado's full recommendation »
The Border Of Paradise: A Novel
Ben Katchor's comic strips, published in various alt-weeklies as Julius Knipl, Real ...
Read Glen Weldon's full recommendation »
Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures Of Urban Decay
This is not a book to read if you are a nervous flier. It begins with a plane crash off Martha's Vineyard (though in a small, private jet). From there, though, you'll ...
Read Ted Robbins' full recommendation »
Before The Fall
In the Kingdom of Morocco, the last storyteller sits in a Great Square by a clear fountain. A little boy comes ...
Read Rebecca Hersher's full recommendation »
The Storyteller
Long before "rigged" elections were a daily (albeit false) refrain, Charles and David Koch, along with their octopuslike political organizations, were wielding ...
Read Alison MacAdam's full recommendation »
Dark Money: The Hidden History Of The Billionaires Behind The Rise Of The Radical Right
Mike Carey (of the Lucifer and Unwritten graphic novels) writes the kind of novels that are best experienced with no advance information, even of the genre involved ...
Read Tasha Robinson's full recommendation »
Fellside
In 1930s Detroit, struggles brought by the Depression were partially offset by the championships won in that era by the Detroit Tigers, Lions and Red Wings. But the joy ...
Read Don Gonyea's full recommendation »
Terror In The City Of Champions: Murder, Baseball, And The Secret Society That Shocked Depression-era Detroit
Such a fun romp! A boy with big glasses is trying his best to find a quiet spot to read, but no ...
Read Justine Kenin's full recommendation »
Let Me Finish
In Sex Object, Jessica Valenti testifies about a flood of harassment starting when she was 12: subway gropers, catcalls, teachers trading hugs for grades, being ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
Sex Object: A Memoir
In cartoonist Lisa Hanawalt's bold, brilliant and bananas collection of comics — and comics essays — she infuses her disparate passions ...
Read Glen Weldon's full recommendation »
Hot Dog Taste Test
Judith Freeman's 2007 book, The Long Embrace, about Raymond Chandler's unusual marriage, is one I dip into often for its psychological smarts and haunting images of ...
Read Maureen Corrigan's full recommendation »
The Latter Days: A Memoir
If you think literature is at its best when it combines the political with the personal, this is the perfect book for you. Sunjeev Sahota humanizes ...
Read Ellen Silva's full recommendation »
The Year Of The Runaways: A Novel
Lore Tannenbaum has brought an elaborate birth plan to the hospital, several pages long, single-spaced and with lots of bullet points. Franckline, the nurse who will ...
Read Melissa Block's full recommendation »
Eleven Hours
In 1953, Luke Dittrich's grandfather performed a lobotomy on a man who was having seizures. Those "devastating and enlightening cuts" destroyed Patient H.M.'s ability ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
Patient H.M.: A Story Of Memory, Madness, And Family Secrets
In Belgian writer/artist Brecht Evens' previous works The Wrong Place and The Making Of, he ...
Read Glen Weldon's full recommendation »
Panther
I have long been a serious jazz fan and like to think of myself as a budding armchair cosmologist. So I'll forever be grateful to musician/physicist Stephon Alexander ...
Read Felix Contreras' full recommendation »
The Jazz Of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music And The Structure Of The Universe
Here we have the best — and maybe the only — book currently aiming to teach Indian cooking in a systematic way. (Author ...
Read T. Susan Chang's full recommendation »
The Indian Cooking Course
Nine stories of nine European men, in European countries not of their birth. Nine uncomfortable stories of men at their smallest, their weakest, their loneliest ...
Read Nishant Dahiya's full recommendation »
All That Man Is: A Novel
Amid the gruesome deaths, grisly twists of fate and countless names with clustering consonants, a single thread seems to string this fascinating history together: Few ...
Read Colin Dwyer's full recommendation »
The Romanovs: 1613-1918
Part memoir and part meditation on the natural world, this book is probably my favorite of the year — quite a statement from this fiction-obsessed reader. The ...
Read Shannon Rhoades' full recommendation »
Lab Girl
"Pickering's Harem" — the women hired as assistants at the Harvard Observatory — have existed on the fringes as fleeting mentions in contemporary scientific ...
Read Genevieve Valentine's full recommendation »
The Glass Universe: How The Ladies Of The Harvard Observatory Took The Measure Of The Stars
Glidden chronicles the two months she spent traveling with journalists through Turkey, Syria and Iraq with a keen eye, paying particular attention ...
Read Glen Weldon's full recommendation »
Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches From Turkey, Syria, And Iraq
When Francis Ford Coppola was preparing to shoot The Godfather, he took a razor blade to Mario Puzo's 1969 book, cut out every page and ...
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The Godfather Notebook
The title of this book might be off-putting — after all, the word "fat" makes people uncomfortable. We prefer euphemisms like "chubby" or "big." But novelist Mona Awad ...
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13 Ways Of Looking At A Fat Girl: Fiction
It begins: "I am a child of books. I come from a world of stories. And upon my Imagination I float." Avid ...
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A Child Of Books
Frances Hardinge's Gothic fantasy The Lie Tree starts in the middle of a dreary downpour and feels like it ought only to be read during one as well. It's the story of ...
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The Lie Tree
You might think you know Joe Buck — the sportscaster has been calling World Series and NFL games for Fox for years. But if you haven't read Lucky Bastard, you don't ...
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Lucky Bastard: My Life, My Dad, And The Things I'm Not Allowed To Say On TV
There's one word in the title that annoyed me, but don't be put off by it — focus rather on the second half: and their race to save the world's most precious ...
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The Bad-Ass Librarians Of Timbuktu: And Their Race To Save The World's Most Precious Manuscripts
I have spent entirely too much time gut-laughing at posts and comments on the blog AwesomelyLuvvie.com. It's a mix of humorous and often right on the nose commentary ...
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I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual
What if the Underground Railroad, rather than being a metaphor, had been a sooty, clanking reality running through a network of tunnels dug by enslaved people? That's ...
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The Underground Railroad: A Novel
I love stories about family dysfunctions as much as the next person, because who can't relate, right? There's plenty of that in Larry Watson's latest novel, about a man ...
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As Good As Gone: A Novel
Dorie Greenspan can bake anything. We've seen her do it in one home-cook-friendly book after another. But here ...
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Dorie's Cookies
If Millicent Roper only had to deal with being a bisexual woman living with two prosthetic legs and borderline personality disorder while trying to get her life back on ...
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Borderline
Fans of historical romance know that if there's one thing fictional England has in spades, it's dukes. But they might not be as accustomed ...
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Listen To The Moon
Like all good writers, Teddy Wayne has an uncanny ability to teleport to another location and inhabit the people who live there. In the case of Loner, his dark and ...
Read Meg Wolitzer's full recommendation »
Loner: A Novel
There was a lot of hype leading up to Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's debut novel — and it lived up! Four siblings are eyeing a sizable amount of family money, known as "the ...
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The Nest
The Lost Time Accidents is a manic, excessive and strange time-travel saga that samples wildly from various genres. One section is a flawless imitation of a Joan Didion ...
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The Lost Time Accidents: A Novel
Marcus Samuelsson's Red Rooster in Harlem aims to be more than a restaurant in the same way that Sylvia's was more than a restaurant: He ...
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The Red Rooster Cookbook: The Story Of Food And Hustle In Harlem
Ever wonder what would happen if you reconnected with your childhood bully? Writer Alex Abramovich finds out when he gets back in touch with Trevor Latham, his ...
Read Jessica Reedy's full recommendation »
Bullies: A Friendship
In Mexico, local drug-dealing vampire gangs that trace their lineage back to the Aztecs clash with European newcomers — everywhere but Mexico City, where human gangs ...
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Certain Dark Things
Tommy Sanderson, a 13-year-old living with his single mother and sister just outside Boston, doesn't come home after a sleepover with his buddies. The search for him ...
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Disappearance At Devil's Rock
Siddhartha Mukherjee is a first-rate science writer, who makes even the trickiest bits of biology easy to understand. But The Gene, his disarming study of what's known ...
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The Gene: An Intimate History
His Bloody Project is an ingenious, artful tale of a 19th century triple murder in the Scottish Highlands. Though a novel — and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize — ...
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His Bloody Project: Documents Relating To The Case Of Roderick Macrae
Written in 1963, James Baldwin's famed book of essays The Fire Next Time is actually a good fit for the social media age. In this similarly slim tribute The Fire This ...
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The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race
The titular Regional Office of this novel refers not to a boring workplace in a corporate complex, but to an organization of highly trained female assassins who work to ...
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The Regional Office Is Under Attack!: A Novel
Simultaneously thoughtful and playful, this gem follows a young boy, Yoshio, as he ...
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The Sound Of Silence
If you could go back in time and see any band play, whom would you choose? In Mo Daviau's Every Anxious Wave, that question faces Karl, a former indie-rock star turned ...
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Every Anxious Wave
Hong Gildong is an iconic figure in the Korean literary canon; he is so ubiquitous his name is used as an administrative placeholder, John Doe-style. It's noteworthy ...
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The Story Of Hong Gildong
Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi received a diagnosis of stage 4 lung cancer when he was just 36. He had less than two years to live, and in that time he had a baby ...
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When Breath Becomes Air
If I could make you read one book this year — 2016, year of sorrow and division and pain — it would be The Gustav Sonata. Stop reading fake news stories on Facebook and ...
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The Gustav Sonata: A Novel
This memoir of growing up in the orphanages of Francisco Franco's Spain bursts with insights into ...
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Paracuellos Volume 1
Musician and author Alina Simone set out to write a book about Madonna but abandoned the project when she realized her real interest lay with the Material Girl's ...
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Madonnaland: And Other Detours Into Fame And Fandom
Every time a favorite author comes out with a new book, I practically hold my breath as I read the first few pages: Will it measure up? I did exactly that ...
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Raymie Nightingale
Addlands is a novel with poetry and fistfights; sex and backbreaking work; horse-drawn plows and cellphones; and the occasional Welsh word to help situate you in ...
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Addlands: A Novel
Did you know the Tudors didn't actually smell that bad? Neither did I, and I've read an awful lot of history books. Historian Ruth Goodman spent three months wearing ...
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How To Be A Tudor: A Dawn-to-Dusk Guide To Tudor Life
Turns out, the details of Taraji Penda Henson's climb to fame could have been used as a script for one of her own movies. The Empire star was born in Washington, D.C. ...
Read Eric Deggans' full recommendation »
Around The Way Girl: A Memoir
There's something calming about 25 accomplished, well-versed, female writers inviting you in to share their confessions and regrets. More than a decade after The Bitch ...
Read Kenya Young's full recommendation »
The Bitch Is Back: Older, Wiser, And (Getting) Happier
Han Kang's slim and surreal book won the Man Booker International Prize for fiction this year. Yeong-hye has a bloody and frightening dream that causes her to become a ...
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The Vegetarian: A Novel
This worthy sequel to last year's magnificent The Fifth Season goes underground, as earth-magician Essun and her companions settle cautiously into life in a ...
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The Obelisk Gate
Even though Joe Hill launched his writing career as a fully formed, highly distinctive author, he still gets compared to his father, Stephen King. But those comparisons ...
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The Fireman
Alexander Weinstein's assured and astonishing debut fiction collection, which explores how technology is changing humanity in tiny, specific and irrevocable ...
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Children Of The New World: Stories
If you loved Where'd You Go, Bernadette, let's be friends! Also, look, a new Maria Semple novel! You'll enjoy this one in a single day, which is significant since the ...
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Today Will Be Different
What would happen if One Direction met the Heathers? In Kill the Boy Band, a group of teenage girls accidentally kidnaps Rupert P., the "worst" member of their favorite ...
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Kill The Boy Band
For anyone who's had the honor of being in the presence of a baby, this charming book captures the tiny tyrant nature that quickly becomes ...
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King Baby
Writer Jeff Lemire and artist Emi Lennox deliver a familiar-seeming setup: A group of awkward, misfit preteens from a suburban town stumble across a body in the woods ...
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Plutona
32 Yolks is as much a peek into the cutthroat restaurant world as it is a culinary tour of chef Eric Ripert's childhood and first years in the kitchen. He pays tribute ...
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32 Yolks: From My Mother's Table To Working The Line
Kill 'Em and Leave tells James Brown's story through quiet scenes and colorful, real-life characters who knew Brown in and outside the frenzy of his 1960s ...
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Kill 'Em And Leave: Searching For James Brown And The American Soul
Brexit happened as I read The Mandibles: A Family 2029-2047. The sky-is-falling narrative that accompanied the U.K.'s vote to exit the EU turned out to be the ideal ...
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The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047
Perhaps it's not as momentous as Henry Hudson sailing into New York Harbor in 1609, but Jane Jacobs' 1934 arrival in Greenwich Village (at age 18) also changed ...
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Eyes On The Street: The Life Of Jane Jacobs
Float is an uncontained delight. This collection of loose chapbooks — poems ...
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Float
Patsy Walker has been banging around the Marvel Universe since 1944. Introduced as a romance-comic ingénue, she became a superhero, married the son of Satan, died, got ...
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Patsy Walker, A.K.A. Hellcat! Volume 1: Hooked On A Feline
Pride and Prejudice has inspired endless adaptations, but rarely has anyone captured Austen's wry and antic spirit like Curtis Sittenfeld in Eligible. Sittenfeld ...
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Eligible: A Modern Retelling Of Pride And Prejudice
Small enough to fit in a handbag, Carolyn Phillips' beautifully illustrated guide really can help a nervous diner navigate the ...
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The Dim Sum Field Guide: A Taxonomy Of Dumplings, Buns, Meats, Sweets And Other Specialties Of The Chinese Teahouse
This new chapter of Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Ríos' supernatural epic jumps forward in time — from the sprawling Old West to the claustrophobic confines of a World ...
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Pretty Deadly Volume 2: The Bear
Great historical novels give us a god's omnipotence. They don't coddle but burden us with the sure knowledge that we can do nothing to alter the flow of time. And this ...
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Carry Me: A Novel
In Louise Penny's 12th Chief Inspector Gamache novel, Gamache has just stepped into his new post as chief superintendent of the police academy. He accepted the job in ...
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A Great Reckoning: A Novel
If you've binge-watched Happy Valley, The Fall or Prime Suspect, I've got a book for you: Former journalist Susie Steiner's Missing, Presumed shows a diverse crew of ...
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Missing, Presumed: A Novel
You would be forgiven for assuming that E.K. Johnston's Exit, Pursued By a Bear — about how head cheerleader Hermione Winters pieces her life back together after ...
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Exit, Pursued By A Bear
This book makes casual reference to eating veal broth and the honor killing of moose, as a prerequisite to marriage. OK, so Annie Proulx had me at veal broth, and I ...
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Barkskins: A Novel
A zoo closes down for a night, but not before a monkey sneaks out of his cage. He's off to discover opposites ...
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The Opposite Zoo
As I read You'll Grow Out of It, I kept saying to myself: "I've been there! This is my life!" In this smart, funny collection of essays, Jessi Klein describes ...
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You'll Grow Out Of It
Based on a popular course at Stanford University, this book is useful for teachers, parents and all who are interested in new ways to improve teaching and learning. The ...
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The ABCs Of How We Learn: 26 Scientifically Proven Approaches, How They Work, And When To Use Them
I sat down to read a chapter of What Belongs to You one afternoon and ended up reading the whole thing in one sitting, hunched over my kitchen table until dark. Garth ...
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What Belongs To You: A Novel
You might know her best as Matilda, or the youngest daughter in Mrs. Doubtfire, but Mara Wilson is all grown up now. In her new memoir, Where Am I Now? she thoughtfully ...
Read Samantha Balaban's full recommendation »
Where Am I Now?: True Stories Of Girlhood And Accidental Fame
According to pop psychology, narcissism is Our Modern Affliction. For every charismatic attention junkie that we come across — the ex, the politico, the lifestyle ...
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The Selfishness Of Others: An Essay On The Fear Of Narcissism
"It matters what you call a thing." So begins Look, the debut collection of poetry from Solmaz Sharif, with all the grace and ferocity of an unpinned grenade. Built ...
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Look: Poems
This Census-Taker is the book you read when you're looking for something that will haunt your dreams for weeks (or months) after you put it down. It is a ...
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This Census-Taker
Idra Novey's smart, beguilingly playful debut novel is a fast-paced noirish literary mystery that explores the way a writer's words can both hide and reveal deep ...
Read Heller McAlpin's full recommendation »
Ways To Disappear
You don't have to have lived in Los Angeles to appreciate how author Dana Johnson shadows in the sun-bleached settings of Southern California. The USC English professor ...
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In The Not Quite Dark: Stories
The irrepressible Beans Curry is at the heart of this rollicking whopper of a Depression-era story. Always scheming to make a few extra nickels, Beans is not above ...
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Full Of Beans
J.D. Vance walks you through the struggles of white working-class Americans making their way across a broken economic landscape. Ouch: The journey cuts. As he describes ...
Read Marilyn Geewax's full recommendation »
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir Of A Family And Culture In Crisis
Where It Hurts is the first in what promises to be a new, standout series by veteran mystery writer Reed Farrel Coleman. Coleman makes standard hard-boiled ...
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Where It Hurts
There's a moment in Dark Matter that made my blood run cold. That's a cliched thing to say about a thriller, granted. But that my horror stemmed from theoretical ...
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Dark Matter: A Novel
If you need a blood and whiskey soaked waterslide out of your life for approximately seven hours (or however long it takes you to read 224 pages), this is your ...
Read Lulu Miller's full recommendation »
Nitro Mountain: A Novel
This stunning novel from author Adam Haslett tells the story of decades in the life of a family living in the shadow of depression and suicide. Told from rotating ...
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Imagine Me Gone
Oh, to love anything as much as Laura Cumming loves Diego Velázquez. The Vanishing Velázquez follows a Victorian bookseller who acquires a painting that consumes him ...
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The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th Century Bookseller's Obsession With A Lost Masterpiece
Alan Moore (the groundbreaking, hairy, British genius behind V for Vendetta and Watchmen) spent 10 years pecking away at this Really Big Book — a nearly 1,300-page ...
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Jerusalem
Dana Spiotta's fearless, ambitious new novel explores our ongoing obsession with fame and technological change. Meadow Mori and Carrie Wexler are childhood friends ...
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Innocents And Others
For dedicated readers of young adult fiction, the extraordinary quality of Australian YA has long been an acknowledged fact. With the help of remarkable books like this ...
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Lucy And Linh
When a pair of introverted outsiders meet, their lives are about to change forever. For Lily, being herself is a battle she fears she is losing. For Dunkin, the new ...
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Lily And Dunkin
These days it's hard to toss a broomstick without hitting a book about teen witches, but in Labyrinth Lost, Zoraida Córdova gives us a twist on an old story by ...
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Labyrinth Lost
As a late 20-something, I remember Dave Holmes as the affable MTV VJ who hosted after-school staples like Total Request Live and Say What? Karaoke. Holmes is now a ...
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Party Of One: A Memoir In 21 Songs
Like the title itself, the stories in this collection are poetic and puzzling. Keys — what we use to open doors, start cars and, more metaphorically, open hearts and ...
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What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours
An ambitious high school junior decides to befriend a former classmate and "cure" him of his agoraphobia as a way to secure the scholarship she needs to the college of ...
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Highly Illogical Behavior
I have bought this book at least a dozen times, because every time I buy it, someone borrows it and it never returns home. It's the best oral history there is, an ...
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Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History Of Punk
Kaya Rubio is focused on her research in molecular biology and doesn't have time for anything else — until her overwhelming and loving ...
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Beginner's Guide: Love And Other Chemical Reactions
Kiersten White's And I Darken is an evocative imagining of the life of two noble children who are handed over to the Ottoman Empire to ensure that their father, the ...
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And I Darken
Martin Seay's debut book, part mystery novel and part philosophical meditation, comprises three separate but connected stories — one set in 16th century Venice, one in ...
Read Michael Schaub's full recommendation »
The Mirror Thief
Ida and Gus are true New Yorkers. They love the pulse of the city. These two best friends — did I ...
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Ida, Always
Swing Time is Zadie Smith's psychologically precise novel about two brown girls from North London who grow up dreaming of becoming dancers. Few things in life ever ...
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Swing Time
In the very near future, amid the worst winter in recorded history, civilization has begun to freeze solid. Stella is a 12-year-old transgender girl living in a ...
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The Sunlight Pilgrims
Lynda Barry, who with unflinching honesty chronicled the interior lives of the three Mullen children — Maybonne, Marlys and ...
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The Greatest Of Marlys
Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher is not just the greatest American food writer who's ever played the game — she's one of our greatest writers, period. And The Theoretical ...
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The Theoretical Foot
When I first read Originals, I couldn't help but take notes. What I jotted down was essentially a to-do list for how I could be more creative and how I could imagine ...
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Originals: How Non-Conformists Move The World
Thunder Boy Smith Jr. loves his dad but hates having the same name. Or, rather, he hates that since people call ...
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Thunder Boy Jr.
If you miss romantic comedies, the kind that were so funny, you would pay $15 to see them in the theater — plus the cost of popcorn and candy — this novel will make you ...
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The Hating Game
Beautifully drawn, this evocative book is deceptively simple. When a boy discovers that the tree outside his window has been magically transformed into an ...
Read Lisa Yee's full recommendation »
The Night Gardener
Antonio Garcia Martinez, author of Chaos Monkeys, reads like a despicable human being: a misogynistic Silicon Valley elitist who lives on a sailboat, neglects his kids ...
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Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune And Random Failure In Silicon Valley
If you, like many in this post-Serial age, have finally discovered the charms of a good true crime story, then this YA thriller will be a treat. It's set in 1977 New ...
Read Margaret H. Willison's full recommendation »
Burn Baby Burn
There is a moment in this thriller/mystery/work of literary fiction (enough with the labels — it's a good book, people!) when a mother discovers the diary of her ...
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You Will Know Me
One day, Maggie Nelson's mother gets a call: Her sister's murder, unsolved for 35 years, has been reopened. A retired nurse will be charged. What follows is Nelson's ...
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The Red Parts: Autobiography Of A Trial
What does a famous, world-traveling chef eat when he's back home? In his first cookbook in more than a decade, Anthony Bourdain — who ...
Read Jeanine Herbst's full recommendation »
Appetites: A Cookbook
In a political season full of grim portent, Rutger Bregman's rigorous optimism is as refreshing and exhilarating as a Dutch-brewed iced coffee. Could global ...
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Utopia For Realists: The Case For A Universal Basic Income, Open Borders, And A 15-hour Workweek
Salvador Dalí, the great surrealist painter, didn't just create fantastical visions on canvas. He also hosted many dreamlike dinner parties — at ...
Read Maria Godoy's full recommendation »
Dalí: Les Dîners De Gala
The dedication to Victor LaValle's book reads, "For H.P. Lovecraft, with all my conflicted feelings." As a kid, LaValle loved reading Lovecraft's horror stories, but ...
Read Sam Briger's full recommendation »
The Ballad Of Black Tom
The novel opens with a young trio tearing away from London with an ill-gotten suitcase of cash and violence on their heels. Think you know what's next? The novel that ...
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The Bricks That Built The Houses
For those of us ready to leave the "damsel in distress" trope in the rearview mirror, this visually ...
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Little Red
Charlotte Holmes is immeasurably observant, able to tease the truth out of a handful of clues, but unable to accept that as a woman, her options in society are limited ...
Read Sarah Wendell's full recommendation »
A Study In Scarlet Women
I've been reading the Easy Rawlins series for so long, the character is like an old friend now. In this latest installment, Walter Mosley manages once again to make you ...
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Charcoal Joe: An Easy Rawlins Mystery
Ben Macintyre is known for superbly entertaining histories that read like good novels, and Rogue Heroes keeps his streak going. It's the story of Britain's ...
Read Mary Louise Kelly's full recommendation »
Rogue Heroes: The History Of The SAS, Britain's Secret Special Forces Unit That Sabotaged The Nazis And Changed The Nature Of War
Umami is a debut novel that I am afraid has been criminally under-read, a slim book about community and loss that somehow doesn't feel as heavy as it could. Told from ...
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Umami
For the poet John Keats, joy was a grape bursting in the mouth: sudden, flooding and sweet. Food and feeling are natural partners; this debut, set in a Manhattan ...
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Sweetbitter: A Novel
Paul Goldberg's audacious first novel begins after midnight on Feb. 24, 1953, when a state security officer and two soldiers in a Black Maria — a car used to transport ...
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The Yid
Patrick Flanery's novel I Am No One asks whether it is more delusional to think you are being watched, or to think you are not being watched. In it, a mild history ...
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I Am No One: A Novel
The subhead of this graphic novel promises "A cosmic timewarp deathtrip to the primordial infinite of everlasting love." It's not wrong, and for a dedicated follower of ...
Read Nina Gregory's full recommendation »
Patience
The beauty of a collection this broad is the ease by which we can watch Paul Muldoon reckon with himself over the course of his life. As a poet who writes with a ...
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Selected Poems, 1968-2014
The idea of the "white lie" takes on a whole new meaning in Dan Vyleta's Smoke. His novel imagines an alternate 19th century London where, instead of industrial smog ...
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Smoke: A Novel
My friend walked into the coffee shop where I was reading and saw the stricken look on my face. He asked what the book was. I read the first sentence to him: Most ...
Read Ari Shapiro's full recommendation »
The Story Of A Brief Marriage: A Novel
Irish dancing, sibling rivalry, a talking fish and … heroin addiction? Kate Messner takes these seemingly disparate topics and weaves them into a captivating middle ...
Read Lisa Yee's full recommendation »
The Seventh Wish
This epic fantasy graphic novel tells the story of Maika, a teenage heroine who struggles with a hungry monster living inside her, set in a magical world torn apart by ...
Read Mallory Yu's full recommendation »
Monstress Volume 1: Awakening
Photographed like museum exhibits, Shaun Tan's little sculptures pack a multilayered symbolic punch. Taking the Grimm fairy tales as his ...
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The Singing Bones
The Reader by Traci Chee offers up a fantasy world where pirates sail the waves and a secret society seeks to hoard the written word. Sefia is a girl on the run from ...
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The Reader
On the centennial of Shirley Jackson's birth, Ruth Franklin's new biography examines one of the most underappreciated writers of the 20th century. With ...
Read Carmen Maria Machado's full recommendation »
Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life
Voluminous Olio, a "black vessel of spiritspeak," choruses with history in an enormously beautiful, half-imagined collection of songs yet unsung. As with ...
Read Mina Tavakoli's full recommendation »
Olio
Self-written rock star biographies often hit two potholes: They're not particularly insightful and they're not particularly well-written. Thankfully, rock 'n' roll wise ...
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Born To Run
A beautiful, thoroughly enchanting revision of H.P. Lovecraft's The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, this novella focuses on a brilliant older woman named Vellitt Boe, a ...
Read Amal El-Mohtar's full recommendation »
The Dream-Quest Of Vellitt Boe
This carefully detailed portrait of Louisa Adams, wife of sixth U.S. President John Quincy Adams, depicts a woman of strength, ambition and tenacity. Born in London in ...
Read Jeanine Herbst's full recommendation »
Louisa: The Extraordinary Life Of Mrs. Adams
In a tome the size of a hardcover Bible, Bob Mehr charts the births, deaths and small resurrections of Minneapolitan rock icons The Replacements. It is the sort of ...
Read Mina Tavakoli's full recommendation »
Trouble Boys: The True Story Of The Replacements
Ghosts is the latest comic from Raina Telgemeier, and darn it if her books don't just keep getting better. She's got a real connection with middle-graders who ...
Read Barrie Hardymon's full recommendation »
Ghosts
Connie Willis' books are intentionally and enjoyably exasperating, as characters struggle through screwball situations and endless obfuscations in search of the one bit ...
Read Tasha Robinson's full recommendation »
Crosstalk
Last year, Simon Stalenhag's beautiful art book, Tales from the Loop, gave us a peek into ...
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Things From The Flood
When chefs cook at home, they leave everything but their skills at the restaurant — and sometimes their skills leave even their "home ...
Read T. Susan Chang's full recommendation »
Mastering The Art Of Japanese Home Cooking
Writer Tom King has taken the Marvel Universe's resident robot-with-a-heart-of-gold and crafted a smart, funny, deeply emotional and slyly trenchant examination of the ...
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Vision Volume 1: Little Worse Than A Man
Noted naturalist writer Robert Macfarlane goes home again in Landmarks, an autumnal rumination on language, place and life. It's probably strange to say a book is ...
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Landmarks
The subject matter of Modern Lovers — love, friendship, the SATs and New York real estate — may sound lightweight, but this book is as clever as it is charming. Three ...
Read Maggie Penman's full recommendation »
Modern Lovers
Everyone who reads genre fiction is familiar with its habit of playing fast and loose with historical trappings: a romance set in the 19th century, but all that's ...
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The Dark Days Club
Take this as perhaps the most soothing manuscript of the past year. Daniel Nadler — Janus-headed tech firm CEO — debuts a collection made up of poems that feel less ...
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Lacunae: 100 Imagined Ancient Love Poems
Helen Simonson is back after Major Pettigrew's Last Stand with The Summer Before the War, a comedy of provincial manners that rivals her first in the charm department ...
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The Summer Before The War: A Novel
In Depression-era North Carolina, an unhappy wife struggles to get out from under her husband's shadow — and in doing so, triggers a series of devastating events. This ...
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Over The Plain Houses: A Novel
Indelible, searing images haunt Noonday, Pat Barker's ambitious historical novel. Depicting the lives of a group of young men and women struggling to survive in ...
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Noonday: A Novel
When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her 30s, she found herself, unexpectedly, very lonely: "You can be lonely anywhere, but there is a particular flavour to the ...
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The Lonely City: Adventures In The Art Of Being Alone
Deadpan humor doesn't get much deader than Tom Gauld's spare and slyly funny graphic novel about the last police officer on a ...
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Mooncop
Jennifer Haigh grew up in Pennsylvania coal country. In this novel, she explores what happens when fracking comes to a fictional version of her hometown. The story is ...
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Heat And Light: A Novel
For a music/technology/gearhead geek, this book pressed all my buttons. People may remember Thomas Dolby for the '80s hit "She Blinded Me With Science," but did you ...
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The Speed Of Sound: Breaking The Barriers Between Music And Technology: A Memoir
All the Single Ladies begins with a milestone statistic: For the first time in the U.S., single adult women now outnumber married adult women. From there, the book ...
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All The Single Ladies: Unmarried Women And The Rise Of An Independent Nation
Jason Goodwin writes the terrific Yashim detective series, about an intrepid sleuth chasing mysteries in 19th century Istanbul. To help him think — ...
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Yashim Cooks Istanbul
Native is a collection of the satirical columns that Sayed Kashua wrote for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz over the course of several years. They're funny — kinda. A ...
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Native: Dispatches From An Israeli-Palestinian Life
In your lifetime as a reader, you have probably heard many books likened to Harper Lee's classic, To Kill a Mockingbird, and you've probably been let down by ...
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Wolf Hollow
ODY-C is a stunning interplanetary adaptation of The Odyssey, both graphic and novel, which makes Homer new. In the world of ODY-C, most of the men are dead, and the ...
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ODY-C: Cycle One
Graham Swift's spare, incantatory tale zeroes in on a turning point in the life of a young woman, a foundling and a servant who against all odds becomes a famous ...
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Mothering Sunday: A Romance
Ben Winters' work of alternate history imagines the Civil War never happened. Instead, Abraham Lincoln was assassinated before he took office and, in an act o ...
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Underground Airlines
Joe Gould, an eccentric Greenwich Village fixture who claimed for decades to be writing a monumental "Oral History of Our Time," achieved immortality through Joseph ...
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Joe Gould's Teeth
In an age when self-promotion and celebrity are glorified to the hilt and "hero" gets overused, Ryan Holiday's book is a reminder that the biggest ...
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Ego Is The Enemy
The Three-Body Problem, the first installment of Chinese author Cixin Liu's Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy, won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2015. Death's End ...
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Death's End
Every author makes decisions while writing; every reader makes choices while interpreting. Usually you can ignore the rejected possibilities on ...
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Multiple Choice
Triggered by the sight of Rodin's Head of Sorrow — featured hugely on the front cover — the narrative epic coursing through Eleanor Chai's Standing Water gives us an ...
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Standing Water: Poems
When Shihab al-Din al-Nuwayri wrote The Ultimate Ambition in the Arts of Erudition in the 14th century — a work 15 years in the making — it comprised 33 volumes ...
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The Ultimate Ambition In The Arts Of Erudition: A Compendium Of Knowledge From The Classical Islamic World
Pretty much all you need to know about this book is the story that inspired it: A small-town police officer discovers a garage door opener in his wife's car. Convinced ...
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Everybody's Fool: A Novel
Eily is 18, Irish, just barely removed from the "dun school skirts" of early life. She arrives in London — alive with "traffic all gadding in the midday shine" and ...
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The Lesser Bohemians: A Novel
Everyone knows the story — or thinks they do — of Thomas Jefferson and his enslaved paramour, Sally Hemings. Stephen O'Connor gives us a vision of how that relationship ...
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Thomas Jefferson Dreams Of Sally Hemings: A Novel
Parents and older siblings alike will identify immediately with this folktale-esque story about the trials of a grandmother who just wants a ...
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Leave Me Alone!
Diana Athill is, by her own account, a very old woman. At 98, she lives in a home for the elderly in North London. This small and lovely book is a collection of ...
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Alive, Alive Oh!: And Other Things That Matter
In this moving, beautifully illustrated picture book, Ashley Bryan uses historical documents to evoke the lives of 11 ...
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Freedom Over Me: Eleven Slaves, Their Lives And Dreams Brought To Life
The names Katherine Johnson and Dorothy Vaughan were never taught in any of my history classes. Hidden Figures introduced me to these "human computers" — two of the ...
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Hidden Figures: The American Dream And The Untold Story Of The Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win The Space Race
Unhappy childhoods make for riveting memoirs. This second installment of Riad Sattouf's autobiographical graphic novels details the author's move at age 6 ...
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The Arab Of The Future 2: A Childhood In The Middle East, 1984-1985: A Graphic Memoir
At the start of Alexander Chee's shimmering new novel, The Queen of the Night, Lilliet Berne is already an accomplished soprano. But when she gets the role that ...
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The Queen Of The Night
Brian Evenson's unsettling collection plumbs the depths of the unknown and brings back 17 stories of terror. In A Collapse of Horses, nothing is reliable; love ...
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A Collapse Of Horses: A Collection Of Stories
Eric Fair is a goody-two-shoes. A Presbyterian church geek from a moribund Pennsylvania steel town, he believed a career in law enforcement would be an opportunity to ...
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Consequence: A Memoir
This essay collection from fiction and science writer Rivka Galchen is not your mother's motherhood lit. Brief, gemlike reflections on adjusting to ...
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Little Labors
Heather Havrilesky, New York magazine's self-proclaimed "existential advice" columnist, is both the first and last person you'd seek out for guidance. On one hand ...
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How To Be A Person In The World: Ask Polly's Guide Through The Paradoxes Of Modern Life
Deliciously creepy, The Haunting of Falcon House is a gothic page-turner set in a cold and cavernous 19th century Russian mansion. Whether the ...
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The Haunting Of Falcon House
When the Sea Turned to Silver reads like a modern-day classic. Quiet Pinmei rushes to find her kidnapped grandmother, known as the Storyteller, and her ...
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When The Sea Turned To Silver
Next time you're outside, look up. Trees are so ubiquitous that it's easy to take them for granted. But Urban Forests makes you stop and pay attention to the "living ...
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Urban Forests: A Natural History Of Trees And People In The American Cityscape
This delightfully zany book of short stories is Nora Ephron's I Feel Bad About My Neck with a Southern drawl and a dark sense of humor. Novelist Helen Ellis took a long ...
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American Housewife
The characters in this sometimes dark, sometimes hilarious short story collection include a young man who lets himself be talked into stealing a tiger and selling it ...
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Knockout: Stories
First, a word of warning: I'm biased. As a longtime evangelist for Don DeLillo's novels, I brought to Zero K some baked-in affection for its author — but also ...
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Zero K