Jenny Allen's new essay collection is sarcastic, funny and astute, finding humor in everything from her battle with cancer to the indignities of aging to her many, many linguistic pet peeves.
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David Sedaris is great company in this new collected volume of his diaries. He buries emotions deep, but describes the world around him (and his love for IHOP) in chaotic and delightful fashion.
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Jardine Libaire's novel — more a series of vignettes — follows two kids from very opposite sides of the tracks who fall hard in love in 1980s New York, and what happens when reality intrudes.
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Brittney C. Cooper's history of black women thinkers traces decades of struggle against racism and misogyny. It's a crucial cultural study and a dense, serious read that rewards close attention.
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John Scalzi's new novel — originally an audio book — imagines the implications of a world where 999 out of 1,000 murder victims pop back into existence, naked, confused and safe in their own beds.
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J.R.R. Tolkien's son Christopher proves an able guide through Beren and Lúthien, his father's haunting tale of a mortal man who falls in love with the daughter of a disapproving Elven King.
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Cartoonist Jillian Tamaki's new book is packed with of-the-moment topics — a pyramid skin-care scheme, a porn sitcom, a bedbug battle — but her existential wistfulness raises them to archetype.
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English author and artist Grayson Perry realized at age 12 that he wanted to wear women's clothes. That fascination is part of his new book, a funny, engaging look at what it means to be a man today.
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Sally Mott Freeman's book, The Jersey Brothers, recounts the story of three men swept up by Word War II. The youngest brother gets captured in the Philippines, and the two others struggle to bring him home. NPR explores why stories of World War II remain so compelling to us today.
Yes, he was the captain of the Enterprise, but William Shatner is also a dedicated horseman and founder of the Hollywood Charity Horse Show. His love of horses is on display in his charming new book.
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Sarah Gailey's alternate-history romp takes place in a United States that went ahead with a wild plan to farm hippos for meat. It's a delightful read that suffers only from being too short.
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Susan Rieger's new book follows an upper-crust, Upper West Side family whose certainties are thrown into doubt after their father dies and an unknown Other Woman sues his estate for child support.
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Édouard Louis' autobiographical novel is the story of a young man coming of age in a downtrodden French village. Critic John Powers calls it a "bulletin from the enraged heart of Le Pen country."
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The great American dancer Isadora Duncan led a tragic life, and her worst year — just after the deaths of her first two children in an accident, forms the core of Amelia Gray's powerful new novel.
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Journeys, near and far, into the past and even into near space, are the subject of the novels, memoirs and narrative histories that make up book critic Maureen Corrigan's early summer reading list.
Detroit garage-rocker Josh Malerman's second novel follows a fictional 1950s rock bad recruited by the government to find the source of a mysterious, ominous sound emanating from the Namib Desert.
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