Books

Meddy Chan and her meddlesome family are back in The Good, the Bad, and the Aunties, Jesse Q. Sutanto’s delightful final entry in her bestselling Dial A for Aunties trilogy. Meddy and her new husband, Nathan, are ending their extended honeymoon with a stop in Jakarta, Indonesia, where they’ll spend the Lunar New Year with
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Historical fiction has remained a pretty popular genre and one excellent for book clubs and their discussions. The genre has a special place in my heart since reading it as a kid made me more interested in history as a subject than classes did, and I owe it for my knowledge of certain times in
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“The idea of America that we celebrate today—the one against which we constantly test an imperfect reality—dates not from 1776 or 1787 but from 1865,” writes historian and philosopher Matthew Stewart. With a combination of in-depth scholarship and beautiful writing, An Emancipation of the Mind: Radical Philosophy, the War Over Slavery, and the Refounding of
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For a collection titled Modern Poetry, the latest offering from Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Diane Seuss spends a fair amount of time communing with the past. In the title poem, named after a textbook she studied in college, she reminisces about how she and her roommate referred to William Carlos Williams as “Billy C. Billygoat,” and
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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
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This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. 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
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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
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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
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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
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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
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This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Last year, I wrote about the first Trans Rights Readathon, a decentralized fundraiser that went on to raise over $234,000 for transgender aid organizations. Since then, unfortunately, anti-trans legislation has continued to sweep across the country, and the
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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
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In her first novel since her National Book Award-longlisted debut, The Leavers, Lisa Ko explores memory, art, technology and consumption through the eyes of three childhood best friends. Jackie, Ellen and Giselle meet at Chinese school in suburban New Jersey in the 1980s. Though they come from different backgrounds and have divergent interests, they’re drawn
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An astonishing 30-40% of food goes to waste in the U.S. “As well as being financially foolish, wasting food damages the planet because it accelerates climate change,” notes food writer and cookbook author Sue Quinn in her latest cookbook, Second Helpings: Delicious Dishes to Transform Your Leftovers, which aims to keep food from our own
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This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Hello again, Read Harder readers! Hmm, there has to be a better collective name for us. Any suggestions? Today, I wanted to give you a heads up for a couple of upcoming online author events, if you’re looking
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After fleeing Cambodia during the brutal regime of Pol Pot, Chantha Nguon spent decades in increasingly desperate poverty, first in urban Vietnam, then the squalor of Thailand refugee camps and finally in the malarial jungles of Cambodia. Through it all, Nguon relied on the delicious food of her childhood for comfort. In her heartbreaking, exquisitely
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