Books

From childhood, death neither repulsed nor frightened Hayley Campbell but instead spurred her curiosity. So it was only natural that Campbell, a freelance journalist based in London, would interview people who make a living from death: not just a funeral director and an embalmer but also a crematorium operator, a crime scene cleaner, an executioner

Kevin Conroy, best known as the voice of Batman in Batman: The Animated Series and numerous other projects, passed away on November 10th after a short battle with cancer. He would have been 67 later this month. Conroy was born in Westbury, New York in 1955. He studied acting at Julliard alongside fellow iconic DC

Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah The engrossing 10th novel from Nobel laureate Gurnah is filled with compassion and historical insight. Bitingly funny and sweetly earnest, Mathews’ debut is one of those rare novels that feels just like life. Not since Elena Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend has a novel so deftly probed the magical and sometimes destructive

STORIES by Brandon Stanton photographed by Brandon Stanton ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 13, 2015 Photographer and author Stanton returns with a companion volume to Humans of New York (2013), this one with similarly affecting photographs of New Yorkers but also with some tales from his subjects’ mouths. Readers of the first volume—and followers of the

It’s a great day and age to be a booklover. Social media has made it a lot easier to find bookish communities. We see it all the time with BookTok, Bookstagram, and BookTwit. All of these popular sites host accounts that share recommendations and reviews, and spreads the love of books. One such similar place

With this story of two teens desperate to leave their small town, Tahir proves she’s just as skilled at contemporary fiction as she is at epic fantasy. This epic tale of queer validation is an essential read for anyone searching for a blueprint of their soul. Introspective and profoundly engaged, Caletti’s new novel embraces imperfection

I can pinpoint the exact day I became a dragon book kid. It all began in a Waldenbooks in the mall. Remember those weekend days as a kid when taking a trip to the mall was the highlight of your week? I’d be counting down the days until I could spend my quarters on Mike

“Get in. Get out, No drama. Focus forward.” That’s the motto guiding Avery Anderson at the beginning of her senior year of high school, when she and her parents move from Washington, D.C., to Bardell, Georgia, in order to care for Avery’s estranged, dying grandmother. Yet Avery soon finds herself surrounded by drama in Jas

by Paul Gorman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 2021 In this memoir, an American man recounts heading to Europe to see his German girlfriend and ending up on the wrong side of the law in Franco’s Spain. Gorman was 19 years old in 1969 and dreading the thought of the Vietnam War draft. He had

As the days get shorter in the northern hemisphere, we all start settling into our homes and looking at the list of crafty projects we want to do during winter that we held over from last winter. I know it’s not just me who pokes her head outside in spring and simultaneously thinks “oh thank

How important are individuals in the shaping of history? Twentieth-century Europeans knew leaders whose decisions, good or ill, transformed their countries, the continent and, in some cases, the world. Ian Kershaw, one of our leading historians of the period, focuses on 12 of them in his enlightening and stimulating Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers

In the 2022 school year, I decided to run a comic book club in the school library that I manage. I’ve run a manga club for 9 years there and decided to start a comic book club to focus on the massive popularity of the comics and graphic novels that we have on the shelves.

In her debut essay collection, comedian and actor Natasha Leggero muses, often hilariously, about what it’s like to have a baby at 42 and find your way as a mom. “It’s hard raising a child with a man,” she writes in the opening essay of The World Deserves My Children. “One day I asked my

by Clint Hill & Lisa McCubbin Hill ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 11, 2022 A follow-up to the bestselling Mrs. Kennedy and Me. Teaming up again with his co-author (now wife) on previous books, Hill, a distinguished former Secret Service agent, remembers his days traveling the world as Jacqueline Kennedy’s trusted bodyguard. After John F. Kennedy

Library workers are trained professionals. Most librarians spend thousands (or tens of thousands) of dollars to earn a master’s degree which helps teach them not only how to serve their communities, but how to access, assess, and make available accurate information for their patrons. It is an art and a science of balancing community needs

In Portable Magic: A History of Books and Their Readers, Oxford University Shakespeare studies professor Emma Smith offers a lively and engaging survey of the history of the book, focusing on the “material combination of form and content” she calls “bookhood.” It’s a “book about books, rather than words,” that describes with both insight and

In October, Barnes & Noble posted their list of the top 11 books of the year, as selected by their booksellers. The list included bestselling novels, a picture book, a New Orleans cookbook, a history of hip-hop jewelry, and more. Some of these books overlap with the previous editorially-selected Barnes and Noble Best Books of

Two of the weepiest BookPage editors share a few of their favorite 2022 audiobooks, read masterfully by the authors, that deliver all the emotion. ★ Inciting Joy For readers invested in learning more about communities of care—informal collectives centered on the praxis of love—Ross Gay’s sixth book, Inciting Joy (Hachette Audio, 8.5 hours), is essential. The

by Kazuo Ishiguro ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 2, 2021 Nobelist Ishiguro returns to familiar dystopian ground with this provocative look at a disturbing near future. Klara is an AF, or “Artificial Friend,” of a slightly older model than the current production run; she can’t do the perfect acrobatics of the newer B3 line, and she

The 2022 Ursula K. Le Guin Prize for Fiction has been awarded to Khadija Abdalla Bajaber for her debut YA novel The House of Rust. The novel is a coming-of-age story steeped in Swahili and Hadrami culture in which Aisha, a young girl in Mombasa, Kenya, embarks on a sea journey in an enchanted boat