Literature

Last week, Jeff O’Neal rounded up the books being named the best of the year so far by tallying up all the titles on ten of the biggest lists out at the time of writing: The New York Times, Time, Harper’s Bazaar, The BBC, The New Yorker, Vogue, Vulture, Esquire, Goodreads, and Barnes & Noble.

10 Nebula Award Winners You Should Put on Your TBR Early June marks the latest round of Nebula Award winners. I’m writing this post before the awards, so by the time this goes live, the winners will have been announced. Congratulations to them all! As both an admiring reader and aspiring writer in the science

Libro.fm, the independently owned audiobook service that lets you choose which indie bookstores receive a portion of your audiobook sales, has released a list of top 10 bestselling audiobooks of all time to commemorate their 10th anniversary. The list is based on sales reported to Libro.fm from over 3,000 indie bookstores and includes thought-provoking nonfiction,

Trains are, for whatever reason, surprisingly common in contemporary genre fiction. Perhaps it is their predictability, with their reliance on firmly laid tracks and regular timetables representing an imposition of order on a chaotic world. But rarely is this made so explicit as in Sarah Brooks’ The Cautious Traveller’s Guide to the Wastelands, where a

Has the DEI Backlash Come for Publishing? Dan Sinykin and Richard Jean So have some fascinating data in The Atlantic. In looking at the racial breakdown of more than 1700 novels published by major publishers in the last five years (2019 – 2023), Sinykin and So found that the percentage by nonwhite writers doubled, from

There is an immediate richness to the historical fiction of Tracy Chevalier (Girl With a Pearl Earring, Remarkable Creatures), one that goes beyond carefully researched details and evocative prose, and into deep emotion. In her 12th book, The Glassmaker, Chevalier weaves a tapestry of character and conflict, change and stability, to create a story that

The lead story today turned out to be so interesting that I am making it a one story day. Barnes & Noble Buys Tattered Cover In a surprise (to me at least) move, Barnes & Noble has bought Tattered Cover, a local indie chain of bookstores in the Denver, Colorado area. Tattered Cover had been

When little Afia can’t sleep, her mind as active as a summer night, she and her papa travel in their imaginations to find love. And find it they do—in the sun-warmed sand, on a snowy mountain top, in the ocean’s friendly waves and even in the darkest night sky. Before she finally drifts off to

Kelly is a former librarian and a long-time blogger at STACKED. She’s the editor/author of (DON’T) CALL ME CRAZY: 33 VOICES START THE CONVERSATION ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH and the editor/author of HERE WE ARE: FEMINISM FOR THE REAL WORLD. Her next book, BODY TALK, will publish in Fall 2020. Follow her on Instagram @heykellyjensen. View

Both Same as It Ever Was and your debut, The Most Fun We Ever Had, are lengthy novels that examine family dynamics over the course of decades. What draws you to this type of story? I’ve always been drawn as a reader to big, meaty novels that stick with a cast of characters over a

Here we go, the most-clicked news stories from this week of Today in Books. And here are a bunch of interesting stories that didn’t make the cut for the full Today in Books analysis but are still worth your time. The comments section is moderated according to our community guidelines. Please check them out so

🙌 The Best New Book Releases of the Week 🏆 The Most Popular Books of the Year So Far, According to Goodreads 🤖 New AI App Turns Famous Authors Into Reading Guides The Best of Book Riot Newsletter Sign up to The Best of Book Riot to receive a round-up of the day’s new content. Thank

The list of Amazon’s best books of the year so far has just been released. The list was compiled by Amazon’s editors, who collectively read thousands of books a year in order to curate best-of and other kinds of lists. This year, they chose 20 books as the best overall books, and provided lists of

This week, a list of the most popular Netflix shows was released. The rankings of each of the English-language shows — which include 335,200,000 hours of views for spot #10, and 1,718,800,000 hours of views for #1 — were determined based on the views each show got within its first 91 days on the streaming

Bestselling author Ellery Lloyd has become deliciously adept at drawing readers into the world of the wealthy: redolent of privilege and glamour, and tainted by darkness and deceit. In their third thriller, The Final Act of Juliette Willoughby, Lloyd (a pseudonym for married British authors Collette Lyons and Paul Vlitos) builds upon the contemporary social

Erica Ezeifedi, Associate Editor, is a transplant from Nashville, TN that has settled in the North East. In addition to being a writer, she has worked as a victim advocate and in public libraries, where she has focused on creating safe spaces for queer teens, mentorship, and providing test prep instruction free to students. Outside

In White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy, MacArthur fellow and activist-pastor William J. Barber II makes the logical but nonetheless surprising point that, even though poverty has a disproportionately high impact on Black Americans, there is a vastly greater number of white people living in poverty, leading lives

With about half of the year in the rear-view mirror, it’s time we did some reflection. And Goodreads, with its millions of members, is always a great place to get a pulse check on what’s popular among the people. The most popular books of the year so far were determined by looking at which new

With its near 500-page count and robust endnotes, The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the C.I.A., and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq might at first glance scare off readers who haven’t sniffed a textbook in years. But thanks to Steve Coll’s crisp and dynamic prose, what’s between the covers feels little like an academic

On Thursday, three parents filed a federal lawsuit that opposes Florida law SB 1069, a law that essentially made banning books easier to do in the state. The parents allege that by making books easier to ban — and thereby upholding and enforcing “the state’s favored viewpoint” — the state is discriminating against parents who