Literature

Isabelle Popp has written all sorts of things, ranging from astrophysics research articles and math tests to crossword puzzles and poetry. These days she’s writing romance. When she’s not reading or writing, she’s probably knitting or scouring used book stores for vintage gothic romance paperbacks. Originally from New York, she’s as surprised as anyone that

Early in the shattering true crime memoir Rabbit Heart: A Mother’s Murder, A Daughter’s Story, Kristine S. Ervin pauses mid-sentence to tackle a question of grammar. Which tense does one use when discussing a relationship in which one person has died? It is a question that seems to form the crux of this stunning debut:

Katie Moench is a librarian, runner, and lover of baked goods. A school librarian in the Upper Midwest, Katie lives with her husband and dog and spends her free time drinking coffee, trying new recipes, and adding to her TBR. View All posts by Katie Moench In the 1980s, science fiction writing was entering what

Jennifer Thorne’s Diavola is an exercise in delicious twists and masterful suspense, told in the smart, snarky voice of Anna Pace, a jaded Manhattanite on a vacation quite literally from hell. Anna’s swanky upcoming family trip certainly doesn’t seem monstrous on the outside. A marketing artist by trade and a painter by passion, she’s thrilled

Rachel Rosenberg has been writing since she was a child—at 13, she was published alongside celebs and fellow teens in Chicken Soup For the Teenage Soul 2. Rachel has a degree in Creative Writing from Montreal’s Concordia University; she’s been published in a few different anthologies and publications, including Best Lesbian Love Stories 2008, Little

The National Book Critics Circle honors excellence in literature and focuses its work on elevating the conversation about books, reading, and criticism nationwide. The group formed in 1974 at New York’s legendary Algonquin Hotel. There are currently 600 members who are editors or literary critics. Every year, the group honors the best of the prior

What happens in Vegas . . . never stays in Vegas. It’s no secret that the bright lights of Sin City just barely disguise a dark legacy of bad deals, gangsters and buried bodies. What happens when post-COVID craziness and cryptocurrency fads come on the scene, fatalities pile up and two estranged sisters are caught

Welcome to Today in Books, where we report on literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. It’s Friday. The sun is out. Baseball is back. March Madness has begun. And I’ve got a case of the wiggles. Let’s keep it lighter today. Worth a Thousand Words T, the New York Times’s style

With bylines in publications that include the London Review of Books, Harper’s and The New Yorker, Lauren Oyler has established herself as a cultural critic whose fresh, and often contrarian, assessments are well worth reading. Her first nonfiction book, No Judgment, comprises eight previously unpublished essays that will please Oyler’s admirers and serve as an

Kendra Winchester is a Contributing Editor for Book Riot where she writes about audiobooks and disability literature. She is also the Founder of Read Appalachia, which celebrates Appalachian literature and writing. Previously, Kendra co-founded and served as Executive Director for Reading Women, a podcast that gained an international following over its six-season run. In her

A little black box appears on health care and employment forms, census surveys and other official documents, requiring respondents to confine their racial identity to a single space that allows no fine distinctions. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out in his eloquent and powerful The Black Box: Writing the Race, such boxes are metaphors

The new documentary Are You a Librarian: The Untold Story of Black Librarians aims to show a new, pioneering perspective on Black librarians, and the great influence they’ve wielded, which reached outside of libraries and into moments like the Civil Rights Movement. Rodney E. Freeman Jr. is the executive producer of the documentary, and a

Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoirs Persepolis and Persepolis II—and the Oscar-nominated film adapted from the books—tell the story of the author-illustrator’s coming of age in 1980s Iran. Her new work is concerned with the life of another young Iranian woman, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody after being arrested, detained and severely beaten because

Most of Tirzah Price’s life decisions have been motivated by a desire to read as many books as humanly possible. Tirzah holds an MFA in Writing for Children & Young Adults from Vermont College of Fine Arts, and has worked as an independent bookseller and librarian. She’s also the author of the Jane Austen Murder

When Sarah McCammon was growing up in the Midwest in the ’80s and ’90s, every aspect of her life was governed by her family’s evangelical faith, a faith underscored at her sprawling nondenominational church and her Christian school with expectations of an obedient childhood and “pure” young adulthood that forbid sex and, essentially, dating until

Welcome to Today in Books, where we report on literary headlines at the intersection of politics, culture, media, and more. Let’s Get Critical In advance of the National Book Critics Circle Awards coming up this Thursday, members of the NBCC board have been sharing short reviews of the 30 finalists, and the good folks at LitHub

Kao Kalia Yang’s mother grew up in a Hmong village near the juncture of two rivers that run through the forests and highlands of Laos, a land that Yang writes evocatively about in the opening chapters of Where Rivers Part: A Story of My Mother’s Life. The Hmong, an ethnic minority in southwest China, Laos

Kendra Winchester is a Contributing Editor for Book Riot where she writes about audiobooks and disability literature. She is also the Founder of Read Appalachia, which celebrates Appalachian literature and writing. Previously, Kendra co-founded and served as Executive Director for Reading Women, a podcast that gained an international following over its six-season run. In her

In Root Fractures, Diana Khoi Nguyen’s second collection of poems, the speaker is haunted by echoes of the past that reverberate into the present, and by generational, individual and collective traumas. In deft and surprising ways, the forms of the poems interact with their content, both shaping and breaking it. The poems center on the

As more state legislative sessions come to a close for the season, let’s catch up on where the host of anti-book ban bills across the country currently stand. This is not a comprehensive list, as sometimes good legislation — like its not-good counterparts — gets buried in other bills. Those bills proposed to encourage book