Books

A woman is standing beside me at the swings. I can see the exact expression on her face; I can hear her voice as she chats with her son. Her name is Tessa, and she isn’t real. Like all readers, I’m familiar with the way reality and fiction can blur together. I remember visiting Edinburgh,

Book Deals This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Today’s Featured Book Deals In Case You Missed Yesterday’s Most Popular Book Deals Previous Daily Deals View original source here.

Hair can instill empowerment and confidence. It can also cause stress and anxiety, especially when it doesn’t fit Eurocentric perceptions of beauty. Tomesha Faxio, a self-taught documentary photographer, sets out to debunk myths about Black women’s natural hair and celebrate the rituals surrounding its care in her loving photo-essay book Wash Day: Passing on the

Arundati Roy has been awarded the PEN Pinter Prize, which celebrates writers whose work display an “unflinching, unswerving” look at the world. Roy, who was the first Indian writer to win the Booker Prize in 1997, said she was “delighted” to win the award, saying “I wish Harold Pinter were with us today to write

The year’s biggest trends so far appear to be water, the perils of bureaucracy and Villains Who Are Good, Actually. View original source here.

We all love a good hero(ine) story, and today is all about celebrating them! We’re paying homage to the most iconic heroes, looking at the ordinary everyday heroes, celebrating our queeros, and questioning the hero’s journey. Are you feeling valiant? Gallant? Courageous? Grab your sword, summon up that secret dormant magical power you’ve probably got

Armed with well-honed combat skills and a magical connection to nature, Princess Eve wants nothing more than to defeat the Knight, a mysterious figure who’s been preying on the people of her kingdom. But just as Eve is about to turn 17, her mother, the Queen, secludes herself in her room, mumbling to a mysterious

There’s nothing better than a beautifully written, well-narrated audiobook. Whether I’m trying to learn about a moment in history or simply relax, audiobooks have become one of my go-to methods of reading. And when it comes to Black historical audiobooks, there is a wide and wonderful world to choose from. I’m looking for two things

The year’s biggest trends so far appear to be water, the perils of bureaucracy and Villains Who Are Good, Actually. View original source here.

This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. 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

Spurred by illustrator and “accidental astrologer” Heather Buchanan’s popular Instagram account @Horror.Scoops, Blame the Stars: A Very Good, Totally Accurate Collection of Astrological Advice is a hilarious journey through astrology, a subject that is, Buchanan writes, “stuffed to the glittering gills with practical, utilitarian functions.” But that doesn’t mean we can’t have some fun with

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

Soil sensors prevent trees from dying in a college town in the Netherlands. A Boston arborist digitally tracks the city’s urban forest, helping efforts to maintain and preserve the canopy. A Silicon Valley entrepreneur develops an app to alert residents of wildfires. In The Nature of Our Cities: Harnessing the Power of the Natural World

Baggett was also behind a scheme that accused public school librarians of engaging in felony behavior. Baggett and Moms for Liberty member Tom Gurski took a copy of Storm and Fury to the Santa Rosa County Sheriff’s Office, alleging that the librarian was distributing pornography. When asked how they got their hands on the book,

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

Rebecca Joines Schinsky Chief of Staff Rebecca Joines Schinsky is the executive director of product and ecommerce at Riot New Media Group. She co-hosts All the Books! and the Book Riot Podcast. Follow her on Twitter: @rebeccaschinsky. View All posts by Rebecca Joines Schinsky Book Riot covers a ton of news every week in addition

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

This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. 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

The Last Murder at the End of the World In Stuart Turton’s post-apocalyptic thriller, The Last Murder at the End of the World, the world as we know it came to a cataclysmic end some 90 years back, when a malevolent insect-infested fog engulfed the globe, killing everything in its amorphous path. Only a handful

I’m back from vacation and feeling mighty fine! Turns out napping at all hours of the day for a week was just what I needed. That, and books, of course. While I was out, I loved reading our Managing Editor Vanessa Diaz’s In Reading Color send (as always, I love it when she gets spicy),

In her eerie and engrossing debut, The Wilderness of Girls, author Madeline Claire Franklin invites readers to ponder the sometimes blurry line between belief and delusion, and to consider what it means to be free. Sixteen-year-old Rhiannon Chase is barely hanging on. Her financier father is neglectful and angry, and her stepmother’s cruelty has led

Today in Books rounds up news links from places from other than Book Riot, but we also cover news on the site, so here are the news stories we wrote about last week. Plus: a grab-bag of links that didn’t make into the regular daily sends, but still are worth a click. How Alabama Library

As long as there are bedtimes and children who’d like to avoid them, there will be picture books there to help: Moon Bear, written by Clare Helen Welsh and illustrated by Carolina T. Godina, is an excellent addition to the fold. Godina’s gouache and colored pencil illustrations introduce young Ettie as she cleans up, bathes,

Here is our daily round-up of what’s going on in the world of books: Publishers Sue Google over Pirate Sites  I was just having a conversation about a recent survey about audiobook consumption that had a pretty startling statistic: 47% of respondents report getting an audiobook through a file-sharing service or YouTube. And that reminded

★ Birding With Benefits Birding with Benefits by Sarah T. Dubb is a refreshing love story about growing, changing and the natural resistance to both. Fortysomethings Celeste and John are a bit tattered by life. They’re prepared to walk their paths alone until a mutual friend asks Celeste to partner with John at a bird-watching

This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. It’s mid-year check-in season. This and more in today’s collection of book links. Barnes & Noble Picks the Best Books of the Year…So Far Barnes & Noble continues its recent format for best books list: grouping titles not

Magdalena Herrera has a lot of responsibilities. On top of trying to finish high school, she works a part-time job and is the sole caregiver for her grandmother. Mags has a lot of secrets as well. She’s hooking up with a girl who has a boyfriend. And every night she disappears down a trapdoor in

I was there. It was wild. Just one story today, because for once I have a first-hand account of something interesting. A Mile-Long Line of Book Lovers Queue for a Rare Event at The Largest Independent Bookstore in the U.S. This weekend, Powell’s Books, the venerable, city-block size bookstore here in Portland, Oregon did something

In Malas, the legend of La Llorona (the Weeping Woman) ties together the stories of two women from different generations in a Texas border town. When the two meet in the ‘90s, their connection—including a shared love of Selena—threatens to surface buried town secrets. Malas is your first novel. Can you tell us a bit

This content contains affiliate links. When you buy through these links, we may earn an affiliate commission. Every month, I round up the links that you all clicked on the most from last month’s Our Queerest Shelves newsletters. I love seeing which titles caught your eye — was it because you wanted to buy it