Atticus Lish's book opens a disturbing window into a teenager's battle to save his mother, our broken healthcare system — and the power that humans have to inflict harm on one another.
(Image credit: Knopf)
Beautiful World, Where Are You is a cerebral novel that traces the relationships between four characters, and shifts between themes of sex, friendship and life's dark uncertainty.
On 9/11, it was impossible to connect the dots for adults, nevermind children. Here are some books that can help kids try to understand that fateful date 20 years later.
(Image credit: Catie Dull/NPR)
Laurent Binet seems to genuinely want to know to what extent conquest and the cruelty it inevitably produces are reducible, redeemable, or escapable. He also plainly wants to play around.
(Image credit: Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
In On Freedom's allusive, blunt, funny essays, the author of The Argonauts and The Art of Cruelty tries to imagine freedom as it exists in the contemporary contexts of art, sex, drugs, and climate.
(Image credit: Graywolf Press)
These books provide a detailed accounting of events that have defined the U.S. role in the world in the first part of the 21st century. None makes for cheery reading, but all offer sobering lessons.
(Image credit: Emily Bogle/NPR)
Shruti Swamy has won awards for her short fiction; The Archer, her debut novel, is a coming-of-age tale inspired by the graceful, precise storytelling of India's ancient Kathak dance form.
(Image credit: NPR)
More than an autobiography following a strict chronological path and detailing all major events, this book focuses on the role of art in the U.S. poet laureate's life and her development as an artist.
(Image credit: W.W.Norton & Co. )
While the story of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising is well-documented, pockets of Jewish resistance surfaced in smaller ghettos across Nazi-occupied central-eastern Europe too. Zhetel is one such place.
(Image credit: St. Martin's Press)
Ye Chun's new story collection Hao takes its name from a Chinese word meaning "good," or "everything's OK" — but the characters in these stories are sick, afraid, out of time, and anything but OK.
(Image credit: Catapult )
Lauren Groff digs deep into the past with Matrix, based on the real-life writer Marie de France. Little is known about the real Marie, but Groff gives us an ambitious, complex, striving woman.
(Image credit: NPR)
What appears to be a simple, awful police killing turns out to be much worse in Cadwell Turnbull's new No Gods, No Monsters, set in a world where monsters and magic are real, and none of it is pretty.
(Image credit: Blackstone Publishing)
Author Hilma Wolitzer, mother of Meg Wolitzer, tackles the ups and downs of a long, not always happy marriage in her excellently named new story collection, Today a Woman Went Mad in the Supermarket.
(Image credit: Bloomsbury)
Geo Maher's book is an indicator of the growing popularity of the radical abolitionist framework. His vision may not get all to see a way to a world without police — but it's as convincing as any.
(Image credit: Verso)
Beautiful World, Where Are You? follows two women, college friends now on the cusp of 30, as they struggle to live and find meaning in a world that's become increasingly unlivable on many levels.
(Image credit: NPR)
In Rachel Howzell Hall's new These Toxic Things, a "digital archaeologist" working with a client's collection of memorabilia finds herself caught up in a dangerous web when her client turns up dead.
(Image credit: Thomas & Mercer)
Fans of Hoang's work will be happy to see Quan — a side character in previous novels — come back for his own Happy Ever After with Anna, a violinist grappling with burnout and family issues.
(Image credit: NPR)
If your kids aren't quite old enough for classic teen love stories, Just Be Cool, Jenna Sakai is a just-right read with a heroine who still spends Saturday nights playing board games with her family.
(Image credit: Scholastic)
In order to track Patrick Nathan's ideas, one must to get on board with his habit of invoking fascism broadly, emphasizing its aesthetic and imaginative tendencies over its concrete manifestations.
(Image credit: Counterpoint)
Laura Sibson's Edie in Between follows our heroine as she learns her own magic and unravels a family mystery. If only we didn't have to keep yelling at her to stay out of the metaphorical basement.
(Image credit: Viking Books for Young Readers)
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
