Books

When you gaze at the quilted cover of A Flag for Juneteenth, you will want to reach out and touch it. The artwork depicts a girl wearing a fuchsia dress and kerchief standing proudly in front of a flag, the bright colors of her outfit vibrant against the flag’s soft yellows and greens. The girl’s
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For their entire lives, Penny and Tate have orbited each other reluctantly. Since before Penny and Tate were born, their moms, Lottie and Anna, have been attached at the hip, and this permanent package deal means constant, unwanted proximity for the two daughters. See, Penny and Tate are not friends. They’re also not not friends.
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In Waypoints: My Scottish Journey (8 hours), Scottish actor Sam Heughan, best known for playing Jamie Fraser in the TV series “Outlander,” describes the experience of hiking the West Highland Way, from his journey’s impulsive beginning to its funniest and most painful moments, all the way to its successful end. With disarming asides and humorous
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The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World (12 hours) begins with a perilous escape attempt from Auschwitz and expands into a larger story about Rudolf Vrba, one of the first Jewish people to escape from the notorious concentration camp.  British author Jonathan Freedland (known for both his thrillers
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For My First Popsicle: An Anthology of Food and Feelings (7 hours), actor Zosia Mamet (“Girls,” “The Flight Attendant”) has gathered a who’s-who of creative folks, including fellow actors like Busy Philipps, musicians like Patti Smith, writers like David Sedaris and chefs like Kwame Onwuachi. Each contributed an essay about food or a food-related memory,
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There’s wit, honesty and insight in Madly, Deeply (19.5 hours), a collection of Alan Rickman’s succinct yet keenly observant diary entries spanning 1993 to 2015. The late actor’s journals reveal a palpable lack of pretentiousness and a go-with-the-flow attitude (even after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer), as well as a compelling contrast between his two
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The Washington Post released their analysis of book challenges they had obtained from PEN America researcher Tasslyn Magnusson. These 1,065 challenges, which were filed during the 2021-2022 school year, extended over 153 school districts and 37 states, and totaled 2,506 pages. They also tended to target books with similar content, specifically LGBTQ+ topics. While a
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The Color Purple by Alice Walker was published in 1982, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction for that year. In 1985, it was adapted into a movie starring Whoopi Goldberg directed by Steven Spielberg. In 2005, it was also adapted into a musical. The 2015-2017 revival won a
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Martin Amis died Friday in his Lake Worth Florida home from esophageal cancer. Amis was born to a novelist father, Kingsley Amis, in 1949 Oxford, England, and won the 1974 Somerset Maugham Award for his first novel, The Rachel Papers. He became a big part of the literary scene in London in the ’80s and
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In Archives of Joy: Reflections on Animals and the Nature of Being, French Canadian author Jean-François Beauchemin looks back, around and into the mystic, to great effect. His brief and often breathtaking reflections on creatures he has encountered throughout his life meld into a salve for the troubled, weary or distracted mind and will appeal
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T.C. Boyle has never been afraid to torment his characters or draw from real life, and he does both in Blue Skies, putting his cast through just about every climate-related calamity to make the contours of the crisis so prominent that no one could miss them. He begins this bicoastal adventure—the action toggles between Florida
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Researching and reading books for this piece has been an unexpectedly needed experience for me. I may be speaking for myself, but when I think of “Asian horror” my first thoughts are of works in translation and their movie adaptations that make me want to pour bleach on my eyeballs. And I say that as
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The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki did not immediately bring World War II to an end. Bestselling author Evan Thomas (Ike’s Bluff) explains why in his superbly crafted military and diplomatic history Road to Surrender: Three Men and the Countdown to the End of World War II. “This book is a narrative of how the
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Geniuses seem to inhabit a world apart from mere mortals like us. But they don’t, as the irreverent and entertaining Edison’s Ghosts makes clear. Debut author and science writer Katie Spalding has mined history, biography and psychology to turn the cult of genius on its head, shining a sassy light on the idiosyncrasies of some
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On Saturday, Twitter user bigolas dickolas wolfwood (@maskofbun) tweeted: read this. DO NOT look up anything about it. just read it. it’s only like 200 pages u can download it on audible it’s only like four hours. do it right now i’m very extremely serious. pic.twitter.com/Pzb2FWvFlg — bigolas dickolas woIfwood (@maskofbun) May 7, 2023 The
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In 1881, Jacci Reed is only five years old when a man attempts to kidnap her from the steamboat her mother, Irena, works on. Badly wounded during the confrontation, Irena takes Jacci aboard the Kingston Floating Palace, a showboat tied up beside them. There, Jacci’s actor grandfather tends to her mother and Jacci gets a
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Since its founding in 1917, the Pulitzer Prize has recognized excellence in journalism, arts, and literature. You can see the winners in all categories, including 15 Journalism categories, at the Pulitzer website. You can also watch the ceremony in full on YouTube below. [embedded content][embedded content] Here are the 2023 Pulitzer Prize winners in the
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“When I love a song, there is almost always a moment that sounds like how I imagine truth to sound,” writes poet Amy Key in Arrangements in Blue: Notes on Loving and Living Alone. “It’s the moment in the song that touches the bruise you didn’t know you had, the aching, denied part of you.
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In her first memoir, Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir From an Atomic Town, Kelly McMasters chronicled her happy childhood in a small blue-collar seaside community—and her horrified realization that nearby nuclear reactor leaks were causing cancer in numerous residents. McMasters again explores the notion of something dark and poisonous lurking beneath a bright, beautiful surface
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The Illinois Senate has passed HB 2789, a bill whose terms dictate that state funding from public or school libraries that remove books from circulation will be withheld. As per the bill, the $62 million of funding that goes to the state’s libraries will only be eligible for said funding if they “adopt the American Library
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