Books

It’s September! September feels like one of those weird in-between months, not quite summer, but not quite fall either. At least, not here in Tennessee. While October is full of pumpkins and Halloween prep, and August is full of pools and playgrounds right before school starts, September is just sort of there. But while the

Indie film writer and director North probes family bonds and rifts in “a novel-in-stories” set in America’s bleak backwaters and in less affluent parts of New York City. North grew up in part on a pig farm in upstate New York, and the 11 linked tales in this collection reflect a keen understanding of the

I always get excited for September — even though I’m long past back-to-school days, September feels like a new start, and it’s the time when I’m ready to learn a ton of new things. I’ve got my shiny new school supplies ready, and now I’m looking forward to diving into books that will teach me

Ever since the publication of her first novel, Jack (1989), and continuing through her 2018 story collection, Days of Awe, A.M. Homes has focused with laserlike precision on some of the darkest corners of contemporary American life. It makes sense, then, that in her provocative novel The Unfolding, she would turn to a bitingly satirical

As someone with chronic depression and anxiety, wild mood swings are just a normal part of my life. Sometimes, I’m bursting with frenetic energy, barely hanging on for dear life as I do All The Things. Other times, I’m flattened by chronic fatigue, barely able to function. But a new emotion has been building up

When Orthodox Jewish teen Hoodie Rosen sees a girl dancing on the sidewalk outside the window of his yeshiva classroom, he has no idea that the connection they’ll form will lead them to question everything they believe and change both of their lives forever. Debut novelist Isaac Blum’s The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen

by Jennette McCurdy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2022 The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood. In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable

With a backlist of over a dozen novels and novellas, Colleen Hoover isn’t a new author. Since publishing her first novel in 2012, the romance writer has earned the loving nickname of CoHo and has worked to cultivate a huge following of devoted fans. She started a Facebook group in 2016 called Colleen Hoover’s CoHorts

Fifteen-year-old Yehuda “Hoodie” Rosen and his Orthodox Jewish family, along with many members of their community, have recently moved to Tregaron, Pennsylvania, because the cost of living in their previous town became too expensive. When Hoodie meets Anna-Marie Diaz-O’Leary, the daughter of Tregaron’s mayor, he’s instantly smitten. Yet after he and Anna-Marie are spotted cleaning

I’ve written about my book club for Book Riot before. It’s been one of my favorite things for almost ten years. How our book clubs works, generally, is that each member takes a turn choosing a book. Everyone reads it, and then we meet once a month to discuss that pick. When you choose the

Fox Creek Author William Kent Krueger’s Cork O’Connor is an unusual sort of protagonist, a fast-food restaurateur who doubles as a private investigator. One might not necessarily think that a man with those qualifications would find a lot of sleuthing work in rural Tamarack County, Minnesota, but one would be mistaken. In Fox Creek, the

by Jennette McCurdy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 9, 2022 The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood. In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable

Curious what it looks like to run for school board? Wondering if now is your time to step up and help provide governance for your local education system? Let’s dive in. It’s no secret that school board elections right now are crucial. It’s also no secret that some school board candidates — even in nonpartisan

For 25 years, beginning with her National Book Award-winning story collection, Ship Fever, Andrea Barrett has devoted vast amounts of her creative energy to vividly imagining several generations of a family and their friends living in central New York. In Natural History, the publisher tells us, Barrett “completes and connects the lives of the family

The America Library Association reported 729 book challenges in 2021 that impacted nearly 1,600 titles, the highest number of challenges the organization has recorded in 20 years. Despite this increase in challenges, only 43% of the librarians who took the School Library Journal’s (SLJ) 2022 Controversial Books Survey reported facing a formal book challenge— which

Rachel Aviv’s first book explores questions of self-knowledge and mental health, subjects she’s previously examined in her award-winning journalism for The New Yorker. Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us is a stunning book, offering sensitive case histories of people whose experiences of mental illness exceed the limits of psychiatric terminology,

A CARTOON COLLECTION by Steve Martin illustrated by Harry Bliss ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 17, 2020 The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities. Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the

Last week, I put together a quiz about identifying sci-fi books based on pixelated versions of their covers. That was entertaining for me to do, and it looks like a lot of people liked taking the quiz, so I decided to do the same thing for famous fantasy books. But this time, to shake things

In his third novel, Brooklyn-based Cuban translator and author Ernesto Mestre-Reed delves into Fidel Castro-era Cuba in a beguiling, meandering story that unfolds in dense and dizzying prose. Though challenging at times, Sacrificio is an invitation to slow down and pay attention. The rewards are plentiful for readers willing to give themselves over to a