Books

Killing people is just like any other job, really. You wake up in the morning, you put on a pair of boots and get on with it (“it” being a whole host of things ordinary people would find terribly unsavory). Also like any other job, some people are better at assassination than others. And some

Corporate life might feel like hell, but it’s nothing compared with the real thing. Brie spends her days at Curated Care fixing broken fax machines, haranguing her colleague Debra to send the weekly sales report on time, and trying to ignore how distractingly handsome her new boss, Luke, is. All simple, until Brie walks in

In these fantasy romances, couples fall in love during that most enduring of tropes: the quest. Originally published here.

Andrea L. Rogers, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and author of the Caldecott Award-winning picture book Cooch Helped, illuminates the injustices perpetrated upon her Native people through the goings-on of 12-year-old Cynthia, the daughter of an interracial couple, in her historical middle grade novel. In the summer of 1968, Cynthia and her family move

Language takes flight with the help of talented translators in The Butterfly Season, Tarantula and White Elephant. Originally published here.

Looking to dive into the past? Check out the fifteen 2026 releases you shouldn’t miss. Originally published here.

In Chloe Benjamin’s exquisitely imagined and emotionally rich Under Story, a woman moves to Antarctica in search of a fresh start and finds far more than she expected. It’s an extreme choice. The icebound landmass where McMurdo Station is situated sees “less rain than the Sahara” and is so remote that airplane travel is restricted

Ah, the park on a sunny day, where one encounters an embarrassment of riches: fresh air, beautiful trees, colorful flowers, chirpy birds and wild animals. Also enjoying the scenery are other people, sometimes too many, who might speak too loudly, speed-skate on the walking paths or have barking dogs that scare away birds. How can

In her thoughtful and deeply unsettling The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State, Pulitzer Prize-winning Harvard historian and New Yorker staff writer Jill Lepore (We the People) examines our headlong race toward a technology-driven form of governance that she argues is rapidly supplanting liberal democracy, and that may, in its full flowering, deprive us

K.S. Shay’s Portrait of a Witch Undone is an unforgettable fantasy set in the marshes of the North Shore of Massachusetts, following the adventures of coven outcast Maeve Ryan. Ever since a spell went wildly wrong for Maeve and her best friend and ritual partner, Ash, their coven has been plagued by visits from the

Young scholar Edmund is done with his life in service to the Many-Armed God. While he loves his studies and the time he’s allowed to research and write, he can no longer ignore his temple’s darker side, especially its discrimination against women. Tasked with transporting an ancient sword and some books to the city of

Readers looking for a whimsical love story will be delighted by Sylvie Cathrall’s The Art of Charming a Changeling, which is full of both bashful yearning and nerdy fairy art history. It’s a gauzy, moss-covered romantic fantasy for anyone who ever had a Kinuko Y. Craft poster on their wall as a kid. IYKYK. Perhaps

A blend of memoir, history and biography, Wilbert L. Cooper’s The Black Shield: An American Memoir of Family and Power is an exploration of paradox. Cooper’s parents were Black police officers who used their guns and power “as symbols of our freedom in a country that will not stop killing or incarcerating Black folks.” As

[S] Don’t Upstage the Body The fourth novel from Naomi Stephens, Don’t Upstage the Body is a witty Christian mystery that follows the Halfpennys, a family of actors who make their living as professional mourners. Their gig at reclusive Lord Basil Montfort’s service takes an especially dramatic turn when Hippolyta Halfpenny discovers another body than

Tjitske Kamphuis’ Go, Crow is an immersive, dreamy book that’s sparse in text but rich in visual splendor—and the subtle power of a story about a day in the life of an enigmatic, beautiful crow. After finishing this rhyming, rhythmic tale, readers will find new meaning in the idiom “as the crow flies.” They will

Part memoir, part trail guide and part true crime tale, Earl Swift’s enthralling Up on Cove Mountain: Adventure, Tragedy, and a Quest for Meaning on the Appalachian Trail conveys the unquenchable lure of the titular North American trek’s beauties and dangers. It’s a tale of two hikes. In 1990, Swift first sets out to walk

It was the worst of times. Full stop; no romantic Dickensian opening here. After a disastrous El Nino laid waste to Indian agriculture in 1876, the British colonial government doubled down on the misery, instituting a laissez-faire policy on the price of grain. People who couldn’t afford to buy the crops that they’d grown watched

David Baron examines humanity’s enduring preoccupation with the red planet in The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze That Captured Turn-of-the-Century America. In this engrossing narrative, Baron looks back at Percival Lowell (1855-1916), an astronomer who believed some form of intelligent life had constructed canals on Mars. Lowell’s theories became widespread and helped

Mark Kurlansky’s excellent cultural history Salt has gone viral 25 years after its publication. We recommend seven more books that track the history of civilization through a single subject. Originally published here.

Civil Rights activist, calypso singer and actor Harry Belafonte said that in her time, Mahalia Jackson was the “single most powerful black woman in America,’’ by which he meant there was not a Black American “who did not respond to her civil rights message.” Best known as the finest gospel singer of her era—and, arguably,

As a foreign correspondent, Sally Hayden spoke with many people whose lives had been overturned by disaster. In This Is Also a Love Story (9.5 hours) she presents stories of relationships—romantic, familial and platonic—that demonstrate the profound indomitability of humanity, even and especially in times of catastrophe. By juxtaposing world-shattering events with everyday experiences, the

If you’re prone to nightmares and paranoid habits, you’ll want to read Isabel Crowley’s debut dark romance, Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me, with the lights on. It’s preternaturally scary . . . and that’s a good thing.  Hazel Lewis is no stranger to things that go bump in the night, and she

In 1999, 13-year-old Domingo José Sepulveda’s beloved Papi died. “I knew that there was an invisible line splitting everything between the moment he lived and the moment he died. This was the beginning of the other side,” he muses in the opening pages of Ayendy Bonifacio’s Bless Me, Papi.  Domingo is offered solace in his

When Ana Dolabra and Dinios “Din” Kol are called to the heart of the empire’s cattle- and farmlands to investigate a murder, Ana anticipates that the hardest part of their job will be preventing further conflict between the two noble houses at the center of the case. After all, the case is presumably open and

Once upon a time, a couple met, fell in love and settled down with zero complications . . . said no rom-com ever. A relationship with only smooth sailing will always fall a little flat. A good story needs tension, complexity, conflict. The characters need to work through serious issues so they earn their happy

★ The Magic We Made Meg Cabot offers delightful entertainment in The Magic We Made. Therapist Frankie Giovanni considers herself a rational realist and has a very rational, very real dislike for Ash Merit, the owner of the vacation rental property next door, due to his too-loud renters and his too-handsome face. Then, to her

Thanks to the casual sensibility of social media, we seem to be living in a punctuation-optional age. But in On the Mark: From Periods to Interrobangs, How Punctuation Remade the World, scholar Florence Hazrat offers a lively defense of the squiggles, slashes and dots that have helped define human language since civilization’s early days. Though

In Laila Lalami’s chilling novel The Dream Hotel, Sara Hussein is detained by representatives from the Risk Assessment Administration, an organization that uses data from dreams to scrutinize the habits of private individuals. The agents—convinced that Sara is going to carry out a deadly crime—take her to an internment facility for women. Innocent of any

Matt Baker takes readers to scenic Capri in his cozy culinary mystery, A Taste for Murder. Still reeling from the unexpected loss of his wife, Sofia, Detective Chief Inspector Joe Mottrom takes his teenage daughter, Angelica, to Capri to spend the summer with Sofia’s parents. Maybe in Italy, the pair can begin healing and find

“How did I manage to change from a regular girl into an immigrant with an accent?” writes Yevgenia Nayberg in the author’s note of her playful new picture book, Another Tongue. “Life is full of surprises!” she adds, noting how incomprehensible English was when she first came to the United States at age 19. Born