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NPR’s Book Concierge

Our Guide To 2018’s Great Reads

Produced by Rose Friedman, Petra Mayer, Beth Novey and Meghan Sullivan | Executive Producer: Ellen Silva
Designed by Alice Goldfarb – Published Nov. 27, 2018


Showing all books (319)

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 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008

2016's Small Victories, by Julia Turshen, was one of those sleeper hits that somehow feel inevitable. Turshen's talent was palpable; I knew ...
Read T. Susan Chang's full recommendation »
Now & Again: Go-To Recipes, Inspired Menus + Endless Ideas For Reinventing Leftovers
It almost feels like cheating to recommend a Melissa Clark book. You know the recipes will be fast and flavorful, and they'll definitely ...
Read T. Susan Chang's full recommendation »
Comfort In An Instant: 75 Comfort Food Recipes For Your Pressure Cooker, Multicooker, And Instant Pot
If your heart sings for teen rom-coms, then stop reading right here – this book delivers every bit of the ...
Read Margaret Willison's full recommendation »
The Summer Of Jordi Perez (And The Best Burger In Los Angeles)
Ever wanted to read a book-length breakup poem? A few lines into Junk, your answer will be a resounding, "Yes!" Whiting Award-winner Tommy Pico follows his cult ...
Read Lily Meyer's full recommendation »
Junk
DC's Eternity Girl follows Caroline Sharp, a superspy with superpowers that make her both immortal and so depressed she's not really living, merely killing time ...
Read Mallory Yu's full recommendation »
Eternity Girl
In Severance, the apocalypse arrives in the shape of a loop. It's a disease that traps its victims in endless cycles of rote tasks: setting and resetting a table ...
Read Connor Donevan's full recommendation »
Severance
"Tuesdays are the new Saturdays," says the press release – referring, I think, to the quest for Saturday-level flavor on a ...
Read T. Susan Chang's full recommendation »
Milk Street: Tuesday Nights: More Than 200 Simple Weeknight Suppers That Deliver Bold Flavor, Fast
Olivia Laing's The Lonely City was one of my favorite books of the past few years – a sweeping, melancholy, perceptive study of loneliness. This is her first ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
Crudo: A Novel
Despite their homewrecking reputation, most termites are ingenious builders, constructing mounds that are strong, utilitarian and even air-conditioned. They're just ...
Read Richard Harris' full recommendation »
Underbug: An Obsessive Tale Of Termites And Technology
This is one of those books you hope the world can read together, since we all gather regularly in some form or another – from conferences to work meetings to one-on-one ...
Read Colin Marshall's full recommendation »
The Art Of Gathering: How We Meet And Why It Matters
Jen Wang's The Prince and the Dressmaker is a delight from start to finish. When Frances is hired to be a mysterious client's personal designer, she ...
Read Mallory Yu's full recommendation »
The Prince And The Dressmaker
Nicole Chung was born into a Korean immigrant family and adopted by a white couple when she was an ...
Read Samantha Balaban's full recommendation »
All You Can Ever Know: A Memoir
After reading Angela Garbes' thorough, scientific investigation into the biology and business of ...
Read LA Johnson's full recommendation »
Like A Mother: A Feminist Journey Through The Science And Culture Of Pregnancy
Based on Yang's own experiences as a new immigrant to the U.S. from China in the 1990s, Front Desk is a perfectly rendered child's-eye view of the perils and joys of ...
Read Margaret Willison's full recommendation »
Front Desk
The title of Marcelo Hernandez Castillo's collection comes from the Nahuatl centzontleh, or mockingbird ...
Read Tess Taylor's full recommendation »
Cenzontle
Coyote Doggirl is like Lisa Frank meets Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid – the graphic novel follows our titular "half dog, half coyote" heroine ...
Read Jessica Reedy's full recommendation »
Coyote Doggirl
"Text me when you get home." Those six words aren't just about getting home safely at the end of the night – they're really a story about how special and fierce ...
Read Wynne Davis' full recommendation »
Text Me When You Get Home: The Evolution And Triumph Of Modern Female Friendship
Lawyer/food blogger Cynthia Chen McTernan's primary food influences are Southern (from her childhood), Korean (from her ...
Read T. Susan Chang's full recommendation »
A Common Table: 80 Recipes And Stories From My Shared Cultures
You wouldn't think that a book about getting new shoes would be particularly noteworthy, but Chris ...
Read Minh Lê's full recommendation »
New Shoes
I hate novels. This is a strong statement, I know – but here's why I make it before telling you about Housegirl: I hate novels because too often, I know exactly ...
Read Melissa Gray's full recommendation »
Housegirl: A Novel
Come West and See by Maxim Loskutoff is a new kind of American Western. The interconnected short stories shirk the tropes of destinies made manifest in favor of dark ...
Read Jolie Myers' full recommendation »
Come West And See: Stories
DeRay Mckesson, one of the best-known leaders of the Ferguson protests and the Black Lives Matter movement, offers a theology of hope that can be understood and ...
Read Michel Martin's full recommendation »
On The Other Side Of Freedom: The Case For Hope
Transcription is a spy novel that at first seems pretty tame. At the start of WWII, Juliet Armstrong is recruited by MI5 to ...
Read Lynn Neary's full recommendation »
Transcription: A Novel
Given the dehumanizing rhetoric currently surrounding immigration, Dreamers, which radiates humanity on every page, could not be more ...
Read Minh Lê's full recommendation »
Dreamers
Seanan McGuire takes hoary old urban legends, midnight neon diners and weepy 1950s dead-teenager ballads and warps them into something magic, dark and ...
Read Petra Mayer's full recommendation »
The Girl In The Green Silk Gown
Even if you didn't love This Town, Mark Leibovich's takedown of Washington, D.C. (I didn't), then you might love this book (I did). Football is America's most-watched ...
Read Michel Martin's full recommendation »
Big Game: The NFL In Dangerous Times
Love in the Time of Zero Tolerance could have been an alternative title for prize-winning journalist Alfredo Corchado's latest book about Mexican immigration to the ...
Read Carrie Kahn's full recommendation »
Homelands: Four Friends, Two Countries, And The Fate Of The Great Mexican-American Migration
The idea of mapping the roles of a Dungeons & Dragons-style adventuring party onto the roles in a rock band is so intensely ...
Read Petra Mayer's full recommendation »
Bloody Rose
It's hard to believe that any biography of any American city could be more consistently interesting, entertaining and informative than this one. Boom Town chronicles ...
Read Nancy Pearl's full recommendation »
Boom Town: The Fantastical Saga Of Oklahoma City, Its Chaotic Founding, Its Apocalyptic Weather, Its Purloined Basketball Team, And The Dream Of Becoming A World-Class Metropolis
Who has given a second thought to the wife of Jefferson Davis, the first and only president of the ...
Read Lynn Neary's full recommendation »
Varina: A Novel
You have to move through grief. There's no other way. But how do you tell a kid that? Try ...
Read Justine Kenin's full recommendation »
The Rough Patch
In her graphic memoir Be Prepared, Vera Brosgol has demonstrated just how many ways it's possible for an awkward tween to feel excluded. Calling on her ...
Read Margaret Willison's full recommendation »
Be Prepared
Patience Ibrahim was kidnapped twice by Boko Haram in Nigeria – and this is her story, as told to journalist Andrea C. Hoffmann. The atrocities Ibrahim endured are ...
Read Sarah Handel's full recommendation »
A Gift From Darkness
New York Times reporter Amy Chozick's memoir is less an insider's account of presidential campaign drama ...
Read Tamara Keith's full recommendation »
Chasing Hillary: Ten Years, Two Presidential Campaigns, And One Intact Glass Ceiling
It is 1891. Yi Jin is the most accomplished dancer at the court of Korea's Joseon Dynasty, at a time when it is still largely sequestered from the rest of the world ...
Read Jean Zimmerman's full recommendation »
The Court Dancer: A Novel
If I had Dorie Greenspan's baking skills and track record, I reckon I'd be resting on my sweet golden-brown laurels at this ...
Read T. Susan Chang's full recommendation »
Everyday Dorie: The Way I Cook
Tommy Orange begins his debut novel There There with an essay. He takes the iconic image of the Indian head, well-known from coins and late-night TV, and transforms it ...
Read Lynn Neary's full recommendation »
There There: A Novel
In this finely crafted psychological thriller, the devilish novelist gives us a sunny, summery, open backdrop that nonetheless becomes a vise tightening around the ...
Read Jean Zimmerman's full recommendation »
Bitter Orange
The second and final volume of Tagame's hugely successful manga series finds single dad Yaichi coming to accept Mike, his late twin brother's husband. In ...
Read Glen Weldon's full recommendation »
My Brother's Husband, Volume 2
Haunted by the heartbreaking image of the 3-year-old Syrian boy whose body washed up on a Turkish beach in 2015 and the terrible fate of thousands more who have ...
Read Heller McAlpin's full recommendation »
Sea Prayer
This is the third in a series of noirishly existential mysteries featuring Claire DeWitt (introduced with panache in Claire DeWitt And The City Of The Dead, but it's ...
Read Nancy Pearl's full recommendation »
The Infinite Blacktop: A Novel
This coming-of-age story follows Ada, a young Nigerian woman, who moves to the United States for college ...
Read Jessica Reedy's full recommendation »
Freshwater
Clara Shin, 17, is a consummate prankster, an expert in mocking others' enthusiasms and in hiding all of her own – until a prank gone wrong nearly burns down her ...
Read Margaret Willison's full recommendation »
The Way You Make Me Feel
After a classic meet-cute – they get stuck in an elevator on the way to a wedding – pediatric surgeon Drew Nichols asks Alexa Monroe to be his fake girlfriend for the ...
Read Maya Rodale's full recommendation »
The Wedding Date
Elizabeth Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein's adopted sister/bride, tries to temper Victor's morbid impulses and protect him from himself as he delves deeper and deeper ...
Read Caitlyn Paxson's full recommendation »
The Dark Descent Of Elizabeth Frankenstein
Get ready for your imagination to explode! Read this book, and pass out the crayons — or set up a library fort! Everything You Need for a Treehouse ...
Read Justine Kenin's full recommendation »
Everything You Need For A Treehouse
Nora Krug, who was born more than three decades after WWII ended, doggedly investigates conflicted feelings about her German homeland and her family's ...
Read Heller McAlpin's full recommendation »
Belonging: A German Reckons With History And Home
Idra Novey's Those Who Knew is a timely and timeless novel about sex and power. The story begins in an unnamed country 10 years after the fall of a dictatorial regime ...
Read Laila Lalami's full recommendation »
Those Who Knew: A Novel
There are cookbooks that teach you how to cook, and there are others that just teach you, period. Feast ...
Read Rose Friedman's full recommendation »
Feast: Food Of The Islamic World
Claire Tomalin, an accomplished literary biographer, moves smoothly between "the trivial and the tragic" and deftly braids the personal, professional and historical in ...
Read Heller McAlpin's full recommendation »
A Life Of My Own: A Memoir
In Lithvas – a medieval country ruled by a czar and bordered by a magical winter realm belonging to gold-hungry people called the Staryk – three young women struggle ...
Read Amal El-Mohtar's full recommendation »
Spinning Silver
In The Merry Spinster, the stories might be a mix of classic fairy tales and Old ...
Read Samantha Balaban's full recommendation »
The Merry Spinster: Tales Of Everyday Horror
In Unsheltered, Barbara Kingsolver flits back and forth between two turbulent times in America, right ...
Read Lulu Garcia-Navarro's full recommendation »
Unsheltered: A Novel
The stories in You Think It, I'll Say It are self-interrogating and warm Midwestern social commentaries about the inner lives of women. "The Prairie Wife," for ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
You Think It, I'll Say It: Stories
The sprawling, angry debut novel from Stephen Markley follows four high school acquaintances who return to their Midwestern hometown of New Canaan on the same ...
Read Michael Schaub's full recommendation »
Ohio
Big, bearded, blowsy Donald Hall died in June, at age 89. In New Hampshire, the former U.S. poet laureate spent decades writing of the earth, his farm, his beloved poet ...
Read Susan Stamberg's full recommendation »
A Carnival Of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety
To Be Honest is not only a super sweet book, but it's also a refreshing take on the plus-size protagonist trope. Savannah "Savvy" Alverson is chubby, book smart and has ...
Read Alethea Kontis' full recommendation »
To Be Honest
Every few years since 2008, Yotam Ottolenghi has published a cookbook. Each time, the same question arises: Can he do it again? Last year's Sweet with ...
Read T. Susan Chang's full recommendation »
Ottolenghi Simple: A Cookbook
Death by steamroller. Death by healthy cereal. Death by falling manatee. Cartoonist ...
Read Glen Weldon's full recommendation »
The Many Deaths Of Scott Koblish
In Aminatta Forna's masterful Happiness, an American scientist and a Ghanaian psychiatrist meet by chance ...
Read Laila Lalami's full recommendation »
Happiness: A Novel
Daniel José Older's middle-grade debut follows Cuban-born Magdalys Roca and her friends from the Colored Orphan Asylum as they navigate Civil War-era New York City … on ...
Read Juan Vidal's full recommendation »
Dactyl Hill Squad
Michelle Obama's book is, first and foremost, a story about how she became who she is – a highly accomplished lawyer-turned-public-servant-turned-hospital ...
Read Danielle Kurtzleben's full recommendation »
Becoming
This is the collection to read if you're hungering for the stories of women who subvert, who flick at the misogyny that surrounds them. I found myself shouting in ...
Read Kat Chow's full recommendation »
Back Talk: Stories
The third book in Sherry Thomas' Charlotte Holmes series, The Hollow Of Fear delivers a thoughtful subversion of gender identity in Victorian England, housed within a ...
Read Sarah Wendell's full recommendation »
The Hollow Of Fear
There's a time and a place for unabashed sentimentality, and both are right in this sugar-sweet second-chance tale. In 1963, teenagers Mari and Hazel fall in love after ...
Read Etelka Lehoczky's full recommendation »
Bingo Love
It's 1956, and former Berlin police Detective Bernie Gunther is living in Greece under an alias and trying to leave his ...
Read Brian Naylor's full recommendation »
Greeks Bearing Gifts
A worthy heir to the classic Frog And Toad or Elephant & Piggie early readers, these playful vignettes have a subversive sense of ...
Read Minh Lê's full recommendation »
The Party: And Other Stories
The memoir industry runs increasingly on the unique, the superhuman and the grotesque. People climb mountains, escape ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
And Now We Have Everything: On Motherhood Before I Was Ready
In Sadie, Courtney Summers imitates a Serial-style true crime podcast with such pitch perfection that her publishers actually produced segments of it. The book — which ...
Read Margaret Willison's full recommendation »
Sadie
Cartoonist Michael Kupperman's father attained an odd and uniquely American kind of celebrity status in his youth: He was a precocious regular panelist on a televised ...
Read Glen Weldon's full recommendation »
All The Answers
A widower learns he doesn't have long to live. But he wants to show some of the world to his son, who has ...
Read Samantha Balaban's full recommendation »
Census
Sharp wit is softened by heavy narcotics in My Year Of Rest And Relaxation. A pretty-on-the-outside 20-something blonde living in New York City in the months before ...
Read Nina Gregory's full recommendation »
My Year Of Rest And Relaxation
Picking up on the same themes of bodies and objects as his Iremonger trilogy, Edward Carey's Little is a tenderly macabre fictional memoir written in the voice of Anne ...
Read Amal El-Mohtar's full recommendation »
Little: A Novel
I'm a junkie for retellings of Greek and Roman mythology, but the highest praise I can give Circe is that you do not have to ...
Read Barrie Hardymon's full recommendation »
Circe
In this novel set during WWI, a young medical student named Lucius joins the military and finds himself in a remote outpost ...
Read Lynn Neary's full recommendation »
The Winter Soldier
In this first collection of Native-focused poetry since 1988, editor Heid E. Erdrich's careful criterion for "nativeness" focuses less on the contributors' "blood ...
Read Mina Tavakoli's full recommendation »
New Poets Of Native Nations
Polish journalist Witold Szablowski chose an unusual form for this book: Two halves, each with the same chapter titles. The first half tells the true story of dancing ...
Read Ari Shapiro's full recommendation »
Dancing Bears: True Stories Of People Nostalgic For Life Under Tyranny
Rumaan Alam's first book, Rich and Pretty, wrote the intimacies of female friendship so well that I ...
Read Barrie Hardymon's full recommendation »
That Kind Of Mother: A Novel
Germs are everywhere, so why not move them around for fun? Meet Min. She's a microbe living on the page ...
Read Elizabeth Bird's full recommendation »
Do Not Lick This Book
If you loved Rachel Kushner's The Flame Throwers, you might think you're going for a similarly wild ride in her latest novel. You're not – but you are in for another ...
Read Ellen Silva's full recommendation »
The Mars Room: A Novel
Meticulously collaged paper art and candid writing combine in this close examination of white privilege ...
Read Elizabeth Bird's full recommendation »
Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness
Don't be fooled by its smallish size; this book is a journey. Cartoonist Eleanor Davis' tongue-in-cheek attempt to answer its titular ...
Read Glen Weldon's full recommendation »
Why Art?
Nisha is a 12-year-old girl growing up in India. But it's 1947, the year of Partition. India is being torn in two. And Nisha, who is half Hindu and half Muslim, is ...
Read Samantha Balaban's full recommendation »
The Night Diary
At first, this tale of a midway marvel reads like true crime; certainly Dr. Couney, who ran baby-incubator sideshows, is a mysterious figure. But author Dawn Raffel ...
Read Genevieve Valentine's full recommendation »
The Strange Case Of Dr. Couney: How A Mysterious European Showman Saved Thousands Of American Babies
This accomplished debut novel looks at poverty and domestic violence through the eyes of Zoey, who helps ...
Read Lisa Yee's full recommendation »
The Benefits Of Being An Octopus
A fast-paced and heartbreaking story about racial tension, depression and loss in a small town in the Pacific Northwest. Jessie is writing letters to her ...
Read Amal El-Mohtar's full recommendation »
This Is Not A Love Letter
In Odd One Out, Nic Stone shows generations of teen dramas all the fun they could have had if only they had been less heteronormative. She gives us Coop, an adorable ...
Read Margaret Willison's full recommendation »
Odd One Out
Helen DeWitt's The Last Samurai is one of my favorite books. Some Trick, her new short story collection, shares themes with that novel. Her characters are savants ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
Some Trick: Thirteen Stories
In any normal year, if you were looking for a book in which a has-been, gender-fluid Brit-pop glam-rock band called Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeroes has to compete ...
Read Jason Sheehan's full recommendation »
Space Opera
An apocalyptic flood has devastated most of North America – all but the Diné nation, which grew magical walls of abalone, turquoise, white shell and jet to protect ...
Read Amal El-Mohtar's full recommendation »
Trail Of Lightning
A novel-in-verse that is as devastating as it is beautiful. Whether it's standing up to her mother ...
Read Minh Lê's full recommendation »
The Poet X
Penny is an awkward college freshman, adrift in a sea of students who all seem to be better at navigating campus social life. Sam works at the local coffee shop and is ...
Read Lauren Migaki's full recommendation »
Emergency Contact
Stormy Daniels knows exactly why you are reading her book, and – a career entertainer – she gives the people what they want: to wit, "two to three minutes" and "smaller ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
Full Disclosure
This collection of tales by Kenji Miyazawa (a re-release of a 1993 edition, translated by John Bester) has an enchanting sense of wildness. Miyazawa (whose Night on the ...
Read Genevieve Valentine's full recommendation »
Once And Forever: The Tales Of Kenji Miyazawa
Three Pakistani-American teens road trip through the Deep South, looking for escape, answers, trouble ...
Read Caitlyn Paxson's full recommendation »
Mariam Sharma Hits The Road
Nafissa Thompson-Spires' debut story collection is uneven, but at its best, it has a sly and searching power. One story is written in passive-aggressive notes between ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
Heads Of The Colored People: Stories
How do you mend a fractured nation? Fund your local library. Eric Klinenberg's Palaces for the People makes the case that the fight for healthy communities and a ...
Read Eric McDaniel's full recommendation »
Palaces For The People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, And The Decline Of Civic Life
This is a true story pulled from the headlines: Two Somali sisters living in Oslo, Norway, run away to fight with the Islamic State in Syria, and their dad tries to ...
Read Natalie Winston's full recommendation »
Two Sisters: A Father, His Daughters, And Their Journey Into The Syrian Jihad
Ana Maria is determined to win a scholarship to an elite private school. But first she must impress the judges at a Lincoln Center ...
Read Lisa Yee's full recommendation »
Ana Maria Reyes Does Not Live In A Castle
I don't read a lot of nonfiction because, well, I'm a journalist who works in it full time and I like the escapism of fiction. But John Branch's portrait of a longtime ...
Read Kirk Siegler's full recommendation »
The Last Cowboys: A Pioneer Family In The New West
Megan Abbott's genius lies in showing how strong women can still be caught in the web of patriarchy. In her latest novel, Give ...
Read Bethanne Patrick's full recommendation »
Give Me Your Hand: A Novel
The brilliant conceit: You're a time-traveler, and you've been issued this hefty, exhaustive handbook to account for any contingency you may experience in your ...
Read Glen Weldon's full recommendation »
How To Invent Everything: A Survival Guide For The Stranded Time Traveler
The first graphic novel to be nominated for the Man Booker Prize, Sabrina is Nick Drnaso's follow-up to 2016's Beverly, a ...
Read Glen Weldon's full recommendation »
Sabrina
Elisabeth Åsbrink, a Swedish journalist, takes readers month by month through this epochal year and tells us what in the world was going on. The coverage isn't limited ...
Read Nancy Pearl's full recommendation »
1947: Where Now Begins
The always daring Lavie Tidhar wades into the waters of alternate history once more. Unholy Land takes ...
Read Silvia Moreno-Garcia's full recommendation »
Unholy Land
Minneapolis/New York rapper Dessa has a reputation for original, incisive and often heartbreaking music, and with her new memoir-in-essays, she proves that her writing ...
Read Michael Schaub's full recommendation »
My Own Devices: True Stories From The Road On Music, Science, And Senseless Love
A dystopian metropolis, two kids in love, an arranged marriage and … dragons. Those are the basic building blocks that ...
Read Jason Sheehan's full recommendation »
The Sky Is Yours: A Novel
The USS Indianapolis would have a place in history just for its role delivering components of the first atomic bomb to the Pacific near the end of World War II. Days ...
Read Edith Chapin's full recommendation »
Indianapolis: The True Story Of The Worst Sea Disaster In U.S. Naval History And The Fifty-Year Fight To Exonerate An Innocent Man
"With a good feeling, it was always: More. Again. Forever." Leslie Jamison's memoir The Recovering: Intoxication And Its ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
The Recovering: Intoxication And Its Aftermath
The Prison Letters of Nelson Mandela is a compelling, large volume. Dip in and out at your leisure and learn much from it. This often poignant ...
Read Ofeibea Quist-Arcton's full recommendation »
The Prison Letters Of Nelson Mandela
Small Fry might initally grab your attention because of the author's famous father. But Lisa Brennan-Jobs ...
Read Gabriela Saldivia's full recommendation »
Small Fry
These days, it seems some people see a conspiracy lurking around every corner, but sometimes there really is a conspiracy. Financier Peter Thiel was out for revenge ...
Read Edith Chapin's full recommendation »
Conspiracy: Peter Thiel, Hulk Hogan, Gawker, And The Anatomy Of Intrigue
This delightful continuation of the adventures of Shade, an alien who takes over the body of a teenage mean girl, serves as further evidence of the creativity of ...
Read Etelka Lehoczky's full recommendation »
Shade, The Changing Girl Vol. 2: Little Runaway
Of all the words written in Neel Patel's 11 surprising, funny short stories, these three, from the dedication page, struck me as particularly brave: "For my ...
Read Parth Shah's full recommendation »
If You See Me, Don't Say Hi: Stories
George Washington Black – Wash to one and all – is an enslaved 11-year-old who lives and toils on a Barbados sugar plantation. When the plantation master's ...
Read Karen Grigsby Bates' full recommendation »
Washington Black: A Novel
This is a big, ambitious book that sometimes trips over its own bigness but reads like a game of literary telephone played by Phillip K. Dick, Arthur Conan Doyle ...
Read Jason Sheehan's full recommendation »
Gnomon: A Novel
Frye Gaillard offers a sweeping analysis of a "decade of hope and tragedy and blood," detailing the ...
Read Debbie Elliott's full recommendation »
A Hard Rain: America In The 1960s, Our Decade Of Hope, Possibility, And Innocence Lost
Are you an INTJ? Or maybe an ESFP? If you know what I'm talking about, you're among the multitudes who have taken the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. (For the ...
Read Melissa Block's full recommendation »
The Personality Brokers: The Strange History Of Myers-Briggs And The Birth Of Personality Testing
C.J. Chivers is no ordinary war correspondent. Unlike most journalists covering combat, he's also a former Marine Corps infantry officer, and as you read The ...
Read Mary Louise Kelly's full recommendation »
The Fighters
This book is a total thriller and offers a visceral reminder: If it seems too good to be true, it probably is. Based on his Wall Street Journal investigative reporting ...
Read Elizabeth Baker's full recommendation »
Bad Blood: Secrets And Lies In A Silicon Valley Startup
Carole Maurel and Mariko Tamaki soften the time-travel story with their account of Luisa, whose ...
Read Etelka Lehoczky's full recommendation »
Luisa – Now And Then
In Fatima Farheen Mirza's debut novel, we first meet Amar at his sister's wedding and discover that he has long been estranged from his family and that for much of his ...
Read Kat Chow's full recommendation »
A Place For Us: A Novel
Tell The Machine Goodnight is sci-fi in its most perfect expression – no robots, no explosions, no car chases, just a future indelibly altered by the application of a ...
Read Jason Sheehan's full recommendation »
Tell The Machine Goodnight: A Novel
The Parker Inheritance weaves together a generations-old mystery, a modern-day treasure hunt and a tender story about family and friendship. When Candice discovers an ...
Read Lisa Yee's full recommendation »
The Parker Inheritance
What do I love about this book? For starters: Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy ...
Read Heller McAlpin's full recommendation »
Sharp
Elaine Castillo's blazing debut America Is Not The Heart springs alive from the first page. Her characters – Filipina ...
Read Lily Meyer's full recommendation »
America Is Not The Heart: A Novel
If you know Guy Branum through his work as a stand-up comic or his TV and podcast appearances, you already know how funny he can be, and this memoir is no exception ...
Read Margaret Willison's full recommendation »
My Life As A Goddess: A Memoir Through (Un)Popular Culture
Simon Stalenhag's previous books – combinations of wild, gorgeous, photo-realistic alt-history art ...
Read Jason Sheehan's full recommendation »
The Electric State
This sentence from Viv Albertine's memoir says it all: "Sometimes you mess with the wrong middle-aged woman." In 1976, Albertine, along with other musicians ...
Read Heidi Saman's full recommendation »
To Throw Away Unopened: A Memoir
Earnest and unpredictable, Nate Powell's graphic novel fits no particular genre. A touch of the mystical keeps its slow-building true-life narrative off-kilter ...
Read Etelka Lehoczky's full recommendation »
Come Again
Gratitude is a way of life for my Cherokee Nation cousins, each day and season of the year, as they honor their traditions and ...
Read Cynthia Leitich Smith's full recommendation »
We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga
This one goes out to all the nerds (like me) who swooned over the Remembrance of Earth's Past trilogy. Thanks to the quirks of translation, Chinese writer Cixin Liu ...
Read Colin Dwyer's full recommendation »
Ball Lightning
"Hate comes in many forms," Arjun Singh Sethi writes in American Hate, a collection of testimonials from ...
Read Martha Anne Toll's full recommendation »
American Hate: Survivors Speak Out
Imagine settling in for a cross-country flight. Earbuds in, podcasts queued up, crossword app open. Now imagine that Parker Freaking Posey sits down next to you. Did I ...
Read Glen Weldon's full recommendation »
You're On An Airplane: A Self-Mythologizing Memoir
Written in part while the author was living in a mental institution, Heart Berries is a fierce and poetic ...
Read Juan Vidal's full recommendation »
Heart Berries: A Memoir
For many years, shows about middle-aged white guy antiheroes created by middle-aged white guy producers (called "showrunners") took center stage in the discussion of ...
Read Eric Deggans' full recommendation »
Stealing The Show: How Women Are Revolutionizing Television
Jon Lee Anderson's critically acclaimed 1997 biography of Che Guevara comes to life in this graphical adaptation. Anderson's take on Che is subtle and ...
Read Etelka Lehoczky's full recommendation »
Che: A Revolutionary Life
A young Muslim-American girl goes into her mother's closet, where she is surrounded ...
Read Minh Lê's full recommendation »
Mommy's Khimar
The world is getting better. Really. This is the premise for Steven Pinker's sweeping book Enlightenment Now, which argues that we're making real progress on most every ...
Read Greg Myre's full recommendation »
Enlightenment Now: The Case For Reason, Science, Humanism, And Progress
The third novel from author and activist Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore follows 21-year-old Alexa and her ...
Read Michael Schaub's full recommendation »
Sketchtasy
Lydia Kiesling's gorgeously written, deeply engaging, character-driven debut novel outlines 10 days in the life of Daphne, mother to toddler Honey. Due to a ...
Read Nancy Pearl's full recommendation »
The Golden State: A Novel
Music critic Jessica Hopper plays all the right notes in this poetic memoir. Chronicling her years as a writer and DJ on Chicago's independent music scene in the ‘00s ...
Read Juan Vidal's full recommendation »
Night Moves
You would think The Great American Road Trip Novel might have run out of gas by now, but with Gary Shteyngart behind the wheel, this vintage vehicle still proves ...
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Lake Success: A Novel
This is a book that plays with the idea of time and how our perception of it is so elusive ...
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Forever Or A Day
In Ghosts in the Schoolyard, poet and sociologist Eve L. Ewing delves into the history and politics of the 2013 Chicago school closings. This superbly written and ...
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Ghosts In The Schoolyard: Racism And School Closings On Chicago's South Side
As I type this, I'm coming up on my sixth year living in Los Angeles, which is to say about four years longer than I ...
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The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, And The Invention Of Los Angeles
Beginning with a baby and a puppy snuggled side by side beneath the words "baby blue," Laura Vaccaro Seeger ...
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Blue
Sarah Weinman, a connoisseur of true crime stories, investigates the 1948 kidnapping and rape of 11-year-old Sally Horner by a convicted pedophile in order to build a ...
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The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping Of Sally Horner And The Novel That Scandalized The World
In this sly, intelligent novel, the author has fun with the idea that the mindset necessary as a closeted queer woman transfers seamlessly to high-stakes espionage work ...
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Who Is Vera Kelly?
This essay collection, aptly called Feel Free, is elastic and smart and joyous in all the right proportions. With her ...
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Feel Free: Essays
The "Wayfarers" series has always had a utopian heart – a series of novels that exist to put human beings in bad situations and then watch as they think, debate, sulk ...
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Record Of A Spaceborn Few
The thought that Donald Trump may have been totally unprepared to become president after the 2016 election is one that's familiar to anyone who has been following the ...
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The Fifth Risk
What happens next? When a book ends and leaves you wanting more, it has succeeded. And when an author gives you another book as a follow-up, it's the ...
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Louisiana's Way Home
Atlanta chef Eddie Hernandez is known for infusing the fresh flavors of his native Monterrey, Mexico, with traditions of his adopted South – ...
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Turnip Greens & Tortillas: A Mexican Chef Spices Up The Southern Kitchen
I'll admit it: Like millions of other Americans, I watch The Bachelor. Its mass appeal is both troubling and intriguing, which is why Amy Kaufman's unauthorized ...
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Bachelor Nation: Inside The World Of America's Favorite Guilty Pleasure
Set in Brooklyn's rapidly gentrifying Bushwick neighborhood, Pride breathes new life into Pride And ...
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Pride
Alyssa Cole's Reluctant Royals series is peak romance for 2018: multicultural, socially conscious ...
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A Duke By Default: Reluctant Royals
If you look at our nation's dysfunctional capital and wonder where things might be headed, noted historian Joanne Freeman chronicles the path once taken. Early regional ...
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The Field Of Blood: Violence In Congress And The Road To Civil War
Ada Limón's lush and vivid new collection of poetry tackles motherhood in all its forms – not being able ...
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The Carrying: Poems
How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is not so much a writing primer as a deeply considered memoir; half-European-American ...
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How To Write An Autobiographical Novel: Essays
This slim, timely novel about the perversities of power imbalances packs a punch. Kate Walbert's sympathetic, credible narrator reluctantly confronts painful memories ...
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His Favorites: A Novel
Jamie Bernstein's courageous and frank account of family life under the massive shadow of her father ...
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Famous Father Girl: A Memoir Of Growing Up Bernstein
Following an inquisitive young child as she playfully considers how to view the world around her, Jillian ...
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They Say Blue
Love – it's an abstract emotion, right? Not even close. These pictures and words describe a zillion ways to think of love ...
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Love
A novel told as a series of short vignettes, Éric Vuillard's book examines Hitler's rise to power in Germany through the people who enabled it through their greed ...
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The Order Of The Day
Sara Zaske is an American mom who spent several years raising her kids in Germany. She explains, with incredulity, that German kids walk to school alone in the first ...
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Achtung Baby: An American Mom On The German Art Of Raising Self-Reliant Children
When this striking historical mystery opens, a dust storm is bearing down on the small town of Jackson ...
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Death Of A Rainmaker: A Dust Bowl Mystery
Jacky is running; he has escaped the residential school where children of the Natives are taken to be ...
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Terra Nullius: A Novel
Being a woman in the world can be a surreal experience, and Amy Bonnaffons perfectly bottles that feeling in this collection ...
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The Wrong Heaven
To a drama lover like me, the world of Professional Sports Wives and Girlfriends is a scintillating one. Big hair, bedazzled jerseys, secret Botox and covert bitchery – ...
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Intercepted (Playbook, The)
Some reviews have called this novel "frustrating" or "incomplete." Michael Ondaatje probably would be pleased with either, or both. The term "warlight ...
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Warlight: A Novel
"Everybody's already dead" is Grandpa Joe's rationale for teaching his grandson, Jarrett, to drive in a cemetery, and it sets Hey Kiddo up perfectly. This ...
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Hey, Kiddo
Just your average Middle-Earth-Cold-War-buddy-comedy with an unreliable visual narrator. With their nations experiencing a tentative peace, an elf ...
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The Assassination Of Brangwain Spurge
JM Holmes' powerful short story collection follows four young friends in Pawtucket, R.I.: Gio, Rolls, Dub and Rye, who are ...
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How Are You Going To Save Yourself
Jamel Brinkley's debut, A Lucky Man, is a masterful exploration of love and masculinity. The nine stories in this collection are set in New York and focus on black men ...
Read Laila Lalami's full recommendation »
A Lucky Man: Stories
These Truths is a compelling, page-turning journey through U.S. history. From 1492 to the 2016 election, Lepore tells the nation's story — the ...
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These Truths: A History Of The United States
This is the mystery I've been raving about to everyone, but particularly to fans of Daphne du Maurier's masterpiece, Rebecca. The novel opens on a dark and stormy night ...
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The Death Of Mrs. Westaway
The utterly charming From Twinkle, With Love is packed with texts, notes, blog posts, emails and the diary entries of the inspirational Twinkle Mehra. Twinkle is a geek ...
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From Twinkle, With Love
Tana French's Witch Elm looks like a murder mystery – a brutal beating, a skull in a tree, etc. – but it is really a deeply subtle book about privilege: how ...
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The Witch Elm: A Novel
Children of Blood and Bone is a high fantasy set in a land called Orisha, ruled by a cruel and oppressive king. Maji, people who once had the ability to wield magic ...
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Children Of Blood And Bone
This quick caper of a novel — perfect for kids who've moved beyond "Easy Readers" but aren't quite ready for Harry Potter yet — tells the story of Jaxon, a little boy ...
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Dragons In A Bag
Acrobat Trix Lane and makeup artist Leo Magasiva have a long history of mutual loathing – and a definite knack for showing up at each other's lowest moments. In the vibrant ...
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Making Up
Read this book and you might not sleep for a week. Maybe longer. Its deceptively simple, psychologically ...
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The Cabin At The End Of The World: A Novel
Tony Kushner's masterpiece Angels In America is more than 6 hours of nonstop talk – about politics, drag queens, closeted lawyers, Mormons and the impact of AIDS – so ...
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The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent Of Angels In America
The 2016 election was characterized by a tidal wave of bad information, lies and conspiracy theories. In ...
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Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, And Radicalization In American Politics
You don't have to be a Texan to enjoy Lawrence Wright's witty, sharp look at the state he has called home for decades. Wright considers the Lone Star ...
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God Save Texas: A Journey Into The Soul Of The Lone Star State
The stories in Lauren Groff's Florida are visions of women at the ends of things, in trouble, at their breaking points. Her language is, as always, gorgeous and ...
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Florida
There is no keener observer of American strangeness than Deborah Eisenberg. The stories in Your Duck Is ...
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Your Duck Is My Duck: Stories
Talent agent Michael Ovitz sat at the pinnacle of Hollywood power for some two decades, representing many of the biggest names in entertainment. Ovitz instilled fear ...
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Who Is Michael Ovitz?
Julián is a dreamy, creative little soul with a passion for mermaids, sparked by an encounter with ...
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Julián Is A Mermaid
Fascism is a label casually slapped on many agendas these days. Here, Madeleine Albright, the former U.S ...
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Fascism: A Warning
The Overstory begins with the nine characters whose lives will intersect as the novel unfolds. Each has some kind of connection with a tree. These stories, so ...
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The Overstory: A Novel
Who, or what, is a Sparsholt? A student, a pilot, an engineer, a sex object, the focus of a seamy scandal? David ...
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The Sparsholt Affair: A Novel
Nobody ever wrote like Denis Johnson, the hardcore minimalist author who died last May at 67. His last book might be the best one he ever wrote – it's an unceasingly ...
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The Largesse Of The Sea Maiden: Stories
Transformational and inspirational political leadership is in short supply these days – especially the kind of leadership that builds broad coalitions across parties ...
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Leadership: In Turbulent Times
We live in hard and sometimes angry times. Generally speaking, I've always shrunk from anger -- men's anger can kill you, and women's anger – my anger – is the moment ...
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Good And Mad: The Revolutionary Power Of Women's Anger
Siva Vaidhyanathan, a media studies scholar at the University of Virginia, was casting a side-eye at ...
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Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us And Undermines Democracy
At a time of overheated rhetoric about the threat along the border, Francisco Cantú relates what it means to police it ...
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The Line Becomes A River: Dispatches From The Border
John Schoffstall's Half-Witch follows 14-year-old Lizbet Lenz and witch-girl Strix on a journey to retrieve a strange book and rescue Lizbet's feckless father from ...
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Half-Witch
The grimy, meticulously constructed and worrisomely believable dystopia Claire North has created for 84k is our world, just a ...
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84K
A man working for a pest control company is transferred to a dystopian nation ravaged by a mysterious ...
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City Of Ash And Red: A Novel
Being 12 years old is hard enough, but when a lightning strike has turned you into a super math genius with OCD, that's a formula for rejection. Lucy has been ...
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The Miscalculations Of Lightning Girl
The late Edward Gorey was many things – an artist, a writer, a set designer, an illustrator. Also: reclusive, idiosyncratic ...
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Born To Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life And Mysterious Genius Of Edward Gorey
Who knew that the comic book format would provide the perfect medium for classic folktales? Three stories ...
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The Dragon Slayer: Folktales From Latin America
If you're tired of political thrillers that feel ripped from the day's headlines, Jake Tapper has found the sweet spot to get ...
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The Hellfire Club
It is summer, 1982, and in a clearing in the woods outside a fictional small town, a 14-year-old boy shoots a 13-year-old girl over and over and over again with a BB ...
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Grist Mill Road: A Novel
Scribe is a lean, hard wolf of a book. Vicious, merciless and with blood in its teeth. It is the story of a woman who writes letters for people in a post-apocalyptic ...
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Scribe: A Novel
Susan Orlean's stirring love letter to libraries is not just for bibliophiles. In fact, one of its takeaways is that public libraries have become de facto ...
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The Library Book
This book, the first from Inuit musician Tanya Tagaq, defies easy categorization. (The Globe and Mail tried "mythobiography," which seems as good as anything. ...
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Split Tooth
Ah, The Perfect Nanny, I loved this book, I hated this book, this book changed me. Taking as its subject the murder of two children by their nanny, the novel starts ...
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The Perfect Nanny: A Novel
The magic of art. The magic of grandparents. The divide of not speaking the same language. It's all here in the art and the ...
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Drawn Together
A book combining literary sensibility with genre readability doesn't come along often. Lea Carpenter's Red, White, Blue is a sophomore novel without slump – a dark ...
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Red, White, Blue: A Novel
Moving at a pace that could be described as "the opposite of Twitter," Philip C. Stead's engaging book is quiet ...
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All The Animals Where I Live
My Sister The Serial Killer is exactly what it sounds like: a sharp, slim, pulpy little thriller with gory details and a pace that will leave you with enough time to ...
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My Sister, The Serial Killer: A Novel
This book moves breathtakingly quickly while it slowly breaks your heart. It is the story of newlyweds Roy and Celestial, whose marriage is forever altered by a random ...
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An American Marriage: A Novel
Asymmetry is a novel that requires the reader to fill in some blanks. Like, what exactly do its three sections have in common? The first is about a May-December romance ...
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Asymmetry: A Novel
The tornado that leaves Ivy's family homeless only compounds a whirlwind of emotions in Ivy Aberdeen's Letter to the World ...
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Ivy Aberdeen's Letter To The World
Urban spaces are an ecosystem all their own; life makes its way into the cracks between paving stones. In this fascinating book about urban evolution, biologist and ...
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Darwin Comes To Town: How The Urban Jungle Drives Evolution
I came across this book during a time when a new fear of heights had started to grip me in the middle of sessions at the climbing gym. Brandon Webb's advice comes from ...
Read Elizabeth Baker's full recommendation »
Mastering Fear: A Navy SEAL's Guide
Rachel Slade's book sucked me in. There's no other way to put it. I devoured it in three days, engrossed ...
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Into The Raging Sea: Thirty-Three Mariners, One Megastorm, And The Sinking Of El Faro
Anna Burns just won the Man Booker Prize for this novel, set in 1970s Northern Ireland, and it's easy to see why. Take the first sentence: "The day Somebody McSomebody ...
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Milkman: A Novel
In Deviation, Luce D'Eramo unravels a complicated life through a combination of autobiographical fiction and memoir, from her early life in a bourgeois Italian Fascist ...
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Deviation: A Novel
Making friends is never easy, particularly when they're just so darn tasty! Penelope ...
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We Don't Eat Our Classmates
Edited by Ellen Oh and Elsie Chapman, this anthology focuses on retellings of South and East Asian myths ...
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A Thousand Beginnings And Endings
It shouldn't be a surprise that women are angry these days: We're underpaid, overworked, harassed and impossibly judged. The modern woman may identify her feelings as ...
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Rage Becomes Her: The Power Of Women's Anger
In this searing debut collection, Emily Jungmin Yoon uses poetry to trace the history of Korean "comfort ...
Read Tess Taylor's full recommendation »
A Cruelty Special To Our Species: Poems
Will and Phoebe have secrets. But these two students at a well-to-do liberal arts college seem more content to keep their personal histories under wraps and build new ...
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The Incendiaries: A Novel
I've learned a lot about Mississippi from Malcolm White. When on assignment in Jackson, I'd stop by Hal & Mal's ...
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The Artful Evolution Of Hal & Mal's
From white sheets to spreadsheets, One Person, No Vote documents the history of U.S. policy that has denied Americans of color their right to vote. Carol Anderson's ...
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One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy
I bet in his dreams Alberto Manguel never leaves his beloved library; the disassembling and packing of which gives title to this brilliant book. The author describes ...
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Packing My Library: An Elegy And Ten Digressions
If you knew the exact date of your death, how would you live your life? In 1969, four siblings visit a psychic, and it's either a catalyst for everything that happens ...
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The Immortalists
Zora Neale Hurston wrote Barracoon in 1931, but the book generated little interest from publishers back ...
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Barracoon: The Story Of The Last
Last year, Brittney Cooper wrote an academic history of black women as public intellectuals who fought seemingly unattainable prerequisites for being taken seriously ...
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Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower
Mother Jones reporter Shane Bauer spent four months working as a corrections officer at a private prison in Louisiana, and his new book tells the shocking story of what ...
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American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey Into The Business Of Punishment
Before I picked up Joyce Goldstein's Jam Session, I had never attempted to make jam. Despite my inexperience, I wasn't worried; Goldstein ...
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Jam Session: A Fruit-Preserving Handbook
In Jean Guerrero's gorgeous memoir, the KPBS reporter investigates her father's life — and the stories he has spent his life telling — with a thoughtful eye. Guerrero's ...
Read Kat Chow's full recommendation »
Crux: A Cross-Border Memoir
There Will Be No Miracles Here, from MBAs Across America (MBAx) co-founder Casey Gerald, isn't your typical book by a CEO (inspirational, packed with motivational ...
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There Will Be No Miracles Here: A Memoir
Sofia and Del Samatar are siblings, and Monster Portraits is a collaboration between her writing and his art, resulting in a gorgeous collection of ...
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Monster Portraits
Many readers will find veteran investigator and author Bob Woodward's depiction of President Trump and his presidency so devastating that it can only be described as an ...
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Fear: Trump In The White House
As a kid, I was obsessed with books about lady pirates on grand adventures, so Seafire is right up my alley. It follows Caledonia Styx as she wages war against the ...
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Seafire
We have seen, over a very few years, the ways language and words can so bitterly divide us. The very fact that a poet laureate ...
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Monument: Poems New And Selected
"Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream." In this lyric, John Lennon nods to an experience with LSD, one of the central molecules in Michael Pollan's thoughtful ...
Read Colin Marshall's full recommendation »
How To Change Your Mind: What The New Science Of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, And Transcendence
Not a sequel so much as a sibling to Seraphina and Shadow Scale, this picaresque novel focuses on Tess, Seraphina's ...
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Tess Of The Road
Set in Prague, Melmoth is a lush, almost camp Gothic novel about a monster who witnesses people's worst ...
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Melmoth: A Novel
The storytellers of Unclaimed Baggage are a bunch of lost souls: Doris (the leader), Nell (the outsider), Grant (the beautiful, complicated wreck) and a purple ...
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Unclaimed Baggage
Lavinia is exceptionally wealthy. Louise is not. Lavinia has a glittering circle of friends and endless parties to attend. Louise is a failed writer working three jobs ...
Read Samantha Balaban's full recommendation »
Social Creature: A Novel
Confronted with the toxic masculinity that riddles sports practice and fandom, many women throw up their hands up and retreat. With Check, Please! ...
Read Margaret Willison's full recommendation »
Check, Please!: Book 1: # Hockey
When Aisha, a Muslim woman living with her white fiancé and his daughter, begins having strange dreams and seeing horrible visions, she's propelled into a classic ...
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Infidel
This elegant volume is like a slim lever with the power to pry open a brand-new window in your mind. It's an updated version of a book originally released by the ...
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A New Reality: Human Evolution For A Sustainable Future
American moms and dads may find Small Animals covers some all-too-familiar territory – the unhealthy fear that parents face every day. "There's now the expectation that ...
Read Marc Rivers' full recommendation »
Small Animals: Parenthood In The Age Of Fear
After reading the first few chapters of My Ex-Life, I texted a friend who is an independent college counselor and said, "Read this book!" Two days later, she replied ...
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My Ex-Life: A Novel
Bina runs away from home to live in a New York boarding house for girls, only to find that the tangled demons of her past have followed her. This is Gothic mystery with ...
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A Room Away From The Wolves
Amal's loving home life in Pakistan is irrevocably shaken when she defends herself against the son of her village's corrupt landlord. Forced into indentured servitude ...
Read Lisa Yee's full recommendation »
Amal Unbound
This deeply odd six-issue miniseries stars Snagglepuss (yep, that one) as a gay Southern playwright in the '50s – Tennessee Williams, basically – under investigation by ...
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Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles
John Kaag, a professor who believes that philosophy can offer applicable relevance to personal problems, chronicles his return — with his wife and their toddler ...
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Hiking With Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are
This book is every magical element of your favorite romantic comedy (don't pretend like you don't have one) enhanced with genuine contemporary complications and ...
Read Sarah Wendell's full recommendation »
The Kiss Quotient
Journalist Earl Swift spent more than a year living on Tangier Island, an isolated – and swiftly eroding ...
Read Petra Mayer's full recommendation »
Chesapeake Requiem: A Year With The Watermen Of Vanishing Tangier Island
How are you supposed to live in a world where so many people hate women? When Greer Kadetsky is groped at a frat party ...
Read Annalisa Quinn's full recommendation »
The Female Persuasion: A Novel
This graphic biography places pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer's faith squarely at its center. A good man in a world gone mad, he wrestles with ...
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The Faithful Spy: Dietrich Bonhoeffer And The Plot To Kill Hitler
Susan Volland describes this book as a "wheel-screeching U-turn" from her über-meticulous work as a recipe editor for Nathan Myhrvold's ...
Read T. Susan Chang's full recommendation »
Searing Inspiration: Fast, Adaptable Entrées And Fresh Pan Sauces
The past years have seen some outstanding books on how philanthropists and their dollars have shaped public policy. On the heels of last year's The Givers by David ...
Read Jessica Smith's full recommendation »
Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World
Lillian Li's Number One Chinese Restaurant draws the reader to suburban Maryland, where the Beijing Duck House, owned and operated by one family, has been a fixture of ...
Read Kat Chow's full recommendation »
Number One Chinese Restaurant: A Novel
So much truth! About Native blessings, burdens, beadwork and rock 'n' roll. With wit and wonder, Eric Gansworth's novel successfully tackles the complexities of ...
Read Cynthia Leitich Smith's full recommendation »
Give Me Some Truth
There's nothing ordinary about a high-spirited 11-year-old orphan named Donut who adores taxidermied mice. However, her inconsolable grief over the recent loss of her ...
Read Lisa Yee's full recommendation »
A Stitch In Time
A River of Stars is the best of all worlds: part buddy cop adventure, part coming-of-age story and part ode to female friendship. Scarlett Chen is pregnant with Boss ...
Read Samantha Balaban's full recommendation »
A River Of Stars: A Novel
Michael Solomonov had a hit in 2015 with Zahav, a cookbook named after his Philadelphia restaurant. The recipes from that book ...
Read Rose Friedman's full recommendation »
Israeli Soul: Easy, Essential, Delicious
In this series of essays (originally written between 2012 and 2014 while she was writing for Al-Jazeera), Sarah Kendzior looks at a variety of issues – from student ...
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The View From Flyover Country: Dispatches From The Forgotten America
"Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles. ... How the epithets pile up," begins The Silence Of The Girls, Pat Barker's tart retelling of ...
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The Silence Of The Girls: A Novel
Robin DiAngelo wants white people to understand why it's so hard for them to talk about racism – and to understand why it's so vital to overcome that discomfort. In ...
Read Maureen Pao's full recommendation »
White Fragility: Why It's So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism
Let's say you've read everything N.K. Jemisin ever wrote (ME) and you can't face the wait for her next series (ALSO ME) ...
Read Petra Mayer's full recommendation »
How Long 'Til Black Future Month?: Stories
Katie is on her own after her fiancé, John Michael, dumps her, but she is crushing it at work negotiating a big contract – which is where she meets opposing counsel ...
Read Maya Rodale's full recommendation »
When Katie Met Cassidy: A Novel
It's cramped in the room she shares with her mother in her grandmother's house, yet that hasn't squelched Lou Bulosan-Nelson's big dream: She longs to have a tiny house ...
Read Lisa Yee's full recommendation »
The House That Lou Built
Passmore's short 2016 comic "Your Black Friend" was a sensation, and this collection of his work keeps the energy high. Writing about "how to laugh in the face of a ...
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Your Black Friend And Other Strangers
If you love your mysteries chock-full of atmosphere, C.J. Tudor will be your new favorite author. In 1986, young Eddie and friends leave chalk drawings of a stick ...
Read Bethanne Patrick's full recommendation »
The Chalk Man: A Novel
Art has a way of making us see things more clearly. In a time when the demonization of immigrants — and ...
Read Juan Vidal's full recommendation »
Citizen Illegal
The nations of Aeland and Laneer have just concluded a brutal war, and Dr. Miles Singer is an Aelander surgeon treating soldiers returning from the front line – while ...
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Witchmark
Near the beginning of this gorgeous book, the celebrated photographer Graciela Iturbide says: "I photograph and exist in the in-between ...
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Photographic: The Life Of Graciela Iturbide
Chang and Eng were brought to America in 1829 at the age of 17 and were forced to perform in a freak show. They eventually negotiated their ...
Read Seth Kelley's full recommendation »
Inseparable: The Original Siamese Twins And Their Rendezvous With American History
The stories in this collection read like fairy tales – Brothers Grimm, not Disney. Anjali Sachdeva spins wondrous universes, governed by unknowable, capricious forces ...
Read Connor Donevan's full recommendation »
All The Names They Used For God
I've long been fascinated by people who succeed against all odds. What enables them to overcome adversity, to conquer all the obstacles in their path? For Tara Westover ...
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Educated: A Memoir
If there's a 2018 book that I believe everyone in America should read, it's Kiese Laymon's memoir, Heavy. It's a gorgeously written howl of truth, directly addressed to ...
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Heavy: An American Memoir
She was the Princess who would not be Queen. Margaret was glamorous where her older sister, Elizabeth, was sensible; acid-tongued and downright rude, where ...
Read Melissa Block's full recommendation »
Ninety-Nine Glimpses Of Princess Margaret
In December 1957, an arctic freeze descends upon the groves of Okahumpka, Fla., and the town's human hearts prove just ...
Read Jean Zimmerman's full recommendation »
Beneath A Ruthless Sun: A True Story Of Violence, Race, And Justice Lost And Found
Even before the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings, I've had a growing suspicion that the United ...
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The Red And The Blue: The 1990s And The Birth Of Political Tribalism
Shobha Rao's first novel, Girls Burn Brighter, details poverty in an Indian village to such an extreme that if you read only those details, you might blanch and move on ...
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Girls Burn Brighter: A Novel
Midden, by Julia Bouwsma, investigates a site of historic violence: Malaga Island, Maine, a mixed-race ...
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Midden
I always love to visit David Sedaris' world. Some of the stories in Calypso are wonderfully absurd, like the one in which he ...
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Calypso
The narrator of Sheila Heti's profound and provocative novel wrestles with the question of whether to have a baby. "You can't create a person dishonestly," she says as ...
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Motherhood: A Novel
Grief, it turns out, is more domain than emotion: A new manner of thinking that subsumes you after trauma. Sadness – zoom out – thinking about sadness – zoom out – ...
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The Friend: A Novel
Questlove is king of the multi-hyphenates as an artist; he's co-founder/producer/drummer for rap band The ...
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Creative Quest
By Y2K, people the world over were dreaming of either collapse or revolution. London, a city fairly recently besieged by Tory politics, pimpled by postindustrial ...
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Inner City Pressure: The Story Of Grime
Sadly, too many women who read this book will be nodding to themselves the whole way through. If your ...
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Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine And Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, And Sick
Oh, how Maira Kalman loves pink. She also finds solace from life's difficulties in fancy hats and cakes. While ...
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Cake: A Cookbook
When Caleb and Bobby Gene trade their baby sister for a sack of fireworks, you would think that was enough trouble for one summer — but it's just the beginning. The ...
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The Season Of Styx Malone
What does it mean to be a local writer? Just read this book. Journalist, filmmaker, record producer and Memphis native Robert Gordon has spent his life closely ...
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Memphis Rent Party: The Blues, Rock & Soul In Music's Hometown
In this delightful, informative adventure, the granddaughter of wildlife artist Charles R. Knight narrates the life story of her "Grandpa Toppy" through ...
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Tigers & Tea With Toppy
The spirit of Ferdinand the Bull is a alive and well in How to Be a Lion. Leonard loves so much of life, from reading poems to befriending ducks ...
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How To Be A Lion
Raymond Arsenault spent almost a decade researching and writing his biography of Arthur Ashe. The result, Arthur Ashe: A Life, takes in the entirety of that life, from ...
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Arthur Ashe: A Life
Timothy Leary, the so-called High Priest of LSD, was an unlikely candidate for Public Enemy No. 1. Yet President Richard Nixon ...
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The Most Dangerous Man In America: Timothy Leary, Richard Nixon And The Hunt For The Fugitive King Of LSD
Can a marriage survive affairs and distrust? What is left to even try to salvage? That's what husband and wife Steve and Gretchen are facing in their therapist's office ...
Read Justine Kenin's full recommendation »
Listen To The Marriage: A Novel
Whether you've loved or hated her newspaper columns filled with diatribes about what she says "liberal elites" get wrong about the white working class, this book is ...
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Heartland: A Memoir Of Working Hard And Being Broke In The Richest Country On Earth
How do you deal with a parent who's depressed? When Mr. Neely tells his class they must enter a science contest, Natalie is annoyed — until she realizes the prize money ...
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The Science Of Breakable Things
The story is simple the way all gumshoe novels ought to be: Rich white guy dies, leaves his wife millions in an insurance policy, Philip Marlowe is called to ...
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Only To Sleep: A Philip Marlowe Novel
If the vitriol of today's political rhetoric has you thinking the United States is at its lowest point, Jon Meacham is here to remind you that the nation has weathered ...
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The Soul Of America: The Battle For Our Better Angels
Award-winning actress Sally Field could have written a typically dishy Hollywood memoir. But her book, In Pieces, is an ...
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In Pieces
In Pierce Brown's Red Rising universe, the rebellion begun by slaves three books ago has nearly been won. But rather than simply rolling on into more pew-pew laser gun ...
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Iron Gold
Cultural critic Joan Morgan's career ran in parallel to Lauryn Hill's in the 1990s; Morgan's work helped define hip-hop feminist discourse ...
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She Begat This: 20 Years Of The Miseducation Of Lauryn Hill
Writer Vikki Tobak delivers a coffee table book for the ages, a feast of words and iconic hip-hop portraits spanning four decades ...
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Contact High: A Visual History Of Hip-Hop
Make no mistake: cover model and TV personality Chrissy Teigen has serious chops in the kitchen. Crisp textures, sweet and sour ...
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Cravings: Hungry For More
Kevin Young told me that he wanted to explore brownness in a number of ways, "both in sort of a literal name, like ...
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Brown: Poems
New Jersey high school student Winnie Mehta sees everything in her life through the lens of her beloved Bollywood films, especially her romantic ups and downs. Winnie ...
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My So-Called Bollywood Life
The House of Broken Angels is a party in book form. The novel opens with Big Angel de la Cruz, the patriarch of a sprawling ...
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The House Of Broken Angels
Those of us who've put a fantasy novel back on the shelf once we realize that its author hasn't done the basic frickin' work of providing us with a detailed map ...
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The Writer's Map: An Atlas Of Imaginary Lands
One of my coworkers refers to books she knows she should read (but doesn't want to) as "nutritious," which makes Anthony Horowitz's detective novels roughly equivalent ...
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The Word Is Murder: A Novel
Bijan Majidi is a pretty typical high school kid – he gets good grades, plays basketball and reads comics. He has friends but isn't super popular. That changes after ...
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Here To Stay
This cookbook explains the concept behind Foreign Cinema, the quintessential San Francisco food-and-film restaurant, and offers a loving ...
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The Foreign Cinema Cookbook: Recipes And Stories Under The Stars
TV writer extraordinaire Nell Scovell delivers three books in one. It's a hilariously self-deprecating ...
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Just The Funny Parts: ...And A Few Hard Truths About Sneaking Into The Hollywood Boys' Club
Jazz music: It's as interesting now as ever! Who knew? If you have any opinion about that assessment, you may have read writing by Nate Chinen, perhaps in ...
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Playing Changes: Jazz For The New Century
I've long been a fan of Rebecca Makkai's work (don't miss The Hundred-Year House), but nothing prepared me for her moving new novel. Set in two distinct time periods ...
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The Great Believers