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Books people are talking about. |
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Book Club: Audacious (Roxane Gay)
Turn skeptics into fans and fans into scholars with this smart, entertaining guide to 20 influential reality shows, from The Real World to The Traitors. Find out everything you need to know to pass as a reality TV superfan--from fun factoids to insightful analysis--without watching a single show Stop scrolling past references to rose ceremonies and confessionals, and take a guilt-free tour through the wacky and wonderful world of reality television. Reality TV for Snobs will turn even the most skeptical viewer into a confident critic, maybe even a fan. Emmy Award-winning writer and author Ali Barthwell goes beyond recapping and breaks down twenty groundbreaking shows from the past twenty-five years, and in the process reveals why they matter. From The Real World to The Traitors, each entry includes: Episode breakdowns and season highlightsInsightful analysis of what makes each show culturally significant (yes, really)Iconic moments, catchphrases, and memes you need to knowTalking points and conversation starters for holding your ownReality TV for Snobs is the second book in the Outsider's Guide series, which offers highly readable crash courses in major cultural phenomena, so you can catch the references and understand the big deal. Never get left out of a conversation again |
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Everybody's Fool by Richard RussoBook Club: Good HousekeepingA New York Times 2016 Notable Book An immediate national best seller and instant classic from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls. Richard Russo returns to North Bath--a town where dishonesty abounds, everyone misapprehends everyone else and half the citizens are half-crazy (The New York Times)--and the characters who made Nobody's Fool a beloved choice of book clubs everywhere. Everybody's Fool is classic Russo, filled with humor, heart, hard times, and people you can't help but love, possibly because their various faults make them so human. Everybody's Fool picks up roughly a decade since we were last with Miss Beryl and Sully on New Year's Eve 1984. The irresistible Sully, who in the intervening years has come by some unexpected good fortune, is staring down a VA cardiologist's estimate that he has only a year or two left, and it's hard work trying to keep this news from the most important people in his life: Ruth, the married woman he carried on with for years . . . the ultra-hapless Rub Squeers, who worries that he and Sully aren't still best friends . . . Sully's son and grandson, for whom he was mostly an absentee figure (and now a regretful one). We also enjoy the company of Doug Raymer, the chief of police who's obsessing primarily over the identity of the man his wife might've been about to run off with, before dying in a freak accident . . . Bath's mayor, the former academic Gus Moynihan, whose wife problems are, if anything, even more pressing . . . and then there's Carl Roebuck, whose lifelong run of failing upward might now come to ruin. And finally, there's Charice Bond--a light at the end of the tunnel that is Chief Raymer's office--as well as her brother, Jerome, who might well be the train barreling into the station. A crowning achievement--like hopping on the last empty barstool surrounded by old friends (Entertainment Weekly)--from one of the greatest storytellers of our time.
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Sparks fly in this Gilded Age novel of mystery, magic, and romance by the author of the New York Times-bestselling Beasts of Prey.
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Book Club: Good Morning America GOOD MORNING AMERICA BOOK CLUB PICK The New York Times bestselling author of The Immortalists returns with an intimate yet epic love story--and a sweeping odyssey of scientific discovery. Under Story invites us to consider the promise of this life, what might lie beyond it, and how far we would go for more time with the people we love, cementing Chloe Benjamin's place among our best, and most lasting, storytellers. We wake up to tomorrow, never yesterday. At the edge of the world, biologist Laurel Salter is hiding from everything she's ever known. For ten hours a day, six days per week, she works as a dishwasher at McMurdo Station, an isolated research base in Antarctica. She tells no one that before she arrived, she was a renowned young scientist with a promising career and a family. But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can't escape her past. When a strange light appears across the ice--and draws a group of physicists to McMurdo--her former husband, Eli, won't be far behind. Laurel is captivated by the Arc: its surreal glow; the way it seems almost alive. And though Eli is reluctant to test her wildest theory, Laurel is convinced that the Arc leads down a rabbit hole and into a world they can barely imagine. Can she persuade him to risk everything to fix the burden that hangs between them--to turn back the clock and live their story a second time? A breathless page-turner and a love letter to our planet, Under Story grapples with the great questions of our time: human hubris, the precarity of the natural world, and the mysterious webs of consciousness that bind us. A modern epic of science and soul, of bravery and redemption, it offers a vision of the future that demands we reckon with what we owe to one another, and to the earth itself. |
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From the beloved, award-winning author of the modern classics Lost Children Archive and Tell Me How It Ends comes her most powerful and page-turning novel yet: the tale of a mother and a daughter starting over, searching for a new story. A beautiful, maybe perfect, novel. --Tommy Orange, author of Wandering Stars This story begins when a mother and her daughter take off on a trip. It is a summer of rapidly changing winds, volcanic rumbles, and sudden tempests. They've landed in Sicily, near the ancient ruins where the mother's grandmother worked long ago on an archaeological dig. The narrator's marriage has collapsed, her mother is losing her memory, and her daughter is on the threshold of adolescence, starting to ask difficult questions and form complex memories. How do you begin again? the narrator wonders, pondering her family line. How do you begin again if you got the beginning wrong? While the mother tries to figure out how to reconstruct their lives as a duo--cooking meals side by side, reading out loud to each other, playing chess, bickering and making up--her daughter takes the reins of the story, and their journey soon becomes a quest for origins, not just to the familial past across continents, languages, and generations, but also farther back, to a mythical and even geological past. Beginning Middle End evolves into a road novel of exquisite tenderness, spanning four generations of women. In their travels through Sicily, mother and daughter cross paths with the island's migrants, storekeepers, and elders, and also its volcanoes, its winds, and its waters. Weaving myths, ancient philosophy, and natural history with fleeting moments of contemporary life, the unforgettable characters in this novel take us on a journey across time, and confront some of life's primary questions: How do stories shape our children's memories and imagination? How do we situate ourselves deeply in the world while accepting our transience in it? How are a family's memories made and what happens when they disappear? Warm, funny, and poetic, this novel is an ode to imagination and possibility in dark times.
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A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK The brand-new series from the bestselling author of Practical Magic, following two brilliant young women in 1950s Cambridge, Massachusetts, as they become immersed in a mysterious secret group of witches at Radcliffe known as the Lilith Society. Once upon a time, women were drowned in the river and the only witnesses were the crows in the trees. The Puritans blamed Eve for the sins of the world. That was when we began to meet in the name of Lilith, Adam's first wife--banished for refusing to do as she was told. We Fly Together... By the 1950s, Cambridge, Massachusetts feels far removed from the legendary witch trials that marked its early days as a colony. Ava, a bright young woman from a small town in Maine, arrives for her first year at Radcliffe College. There, she meets Lauren, her opposite in every way--the wild and brazen daughter of a wealthy and well-established Cambridge family. But the two have more in common than they think. Both are recruited by the Lilith Society, a secret organization of witches at Radcliffe dating back to colonial times. As they learn more about their legacy, Ava and Lauren form a close bond that is put to the test as they learn to navigate their new power, friendship, and love. While Radcliffe seems like a safe haven, the shadow of McCarthyism looms large, an ever-present threat to the flourishing creative and intellectual life in Cambridge. And as girls from the Lilith Society begin to go missing, Ava and Lauren realize the witch trials of the past may not be as deeply buried as they once believed.
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INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK - FROM THE AUTHOR OF BIG LITTLE LIES, THE RUNAWAY PHENOMENON THAT INSPIRED THE MEGAHIT HBO SERIES In this highly anticipated sequel, Liane Moriarty examines the complexities of modern women's lives, shining light on family dynamics and long-hidden truths with wit and compassion. Whether you've read Big Little Lies or not, this is the perfect novel for longtime fans and new readers alike. Equal parts juicy, gripping, and impossible to put down . . . I loved diving back into the lives of these unforgettable characters.--Freida McFadden, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Housemaid The last time we saw the women of Big Little Lies--Madeline, Celeste, Jane, Renata, and Bonnie--their children were five years old. If someone wasn't invited to a birthday party, feelings were hurt. But ten years have passed and the kids are in high school, navigating all of the drama that accompanies teendom (goodbye playdates, hello drugs, sex, and alcohol). When the high school principal receives a threatening package in the mail, word quickly spreads throughout the community and parents are in an uproar. But Madeline, Celeste, Jane, Renata, and Bonnie have other things to worry about. Celeste's mother-in-law, Mary Louise, is behaving oddly--is it old-age forgetfulness and bluntness or something more sinister? Madeline is facing perhaps the biggest challenge of her life, Jane is at a dangerous fork in her marriage, Bonnie has realized there's only so much solace in yoga. And Renata? Renata is living her best life--revenge is sweet. When a stranger begins lurking around the school asking supposedly innocent questions, this tightly connected group of women must finally face the full repercussions of the big little truths they have and haven't shared with their kids. Because the stakes are now much higher than not being invited to an ice-skating party--and the ice has never been thinner for any of them.
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ABC: Good Morning America (Sep 2026)
You are someone who will look the impossible in the face and tell it to sit down and shut up. The world needs that. The world needs you.A thousand strangers receive the invitation. One hundred make the cut. An unprecedented competition from MrBeast, the world's #1 creator with more than a billion followers, and James Patterson, the world's #1 bestselling author, where the stakes couldn't be higher.The Games begin in Antarctica, where one wrong step on the ice kills you, and they never let up: Shark water off a remote Chilean island, desert heat that cooks you where you stand, storm-battered peaks, and caves so black you cannot find your own hand. No rescue. No second chances. A billion dollars to whoever is still standing.Then the terrain stops being the thing that can kill you, and the other players start. Alliances turn into ambushes. Trust becomes the sharpest weapon. And somewhere above it all, a hidden voice is watching every move, testing, deciding who deserves to survive.From MrBeast and James Patterson: an unputdownable survival thriller about what people will do to become The One who can save the world. |
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Media mentions:NBC: Today Show (Sep 2026)
This is not just a book about having better arguments, it's a manual for building stronger relationships.--Adam Grant Priya Parker offers a generous, radically helpful guide through our divides--without flattening what makes us different. -- Suleika Jaouad A paradigm-shifting examination of how we can get along better by understanding the role of conflict in our lives more deeply. --Jefferson Fisher A paradigm-shattering exploration of how we fight and how we build healthy conflict, from the bestselling author of The Art of Gathering We say we want community. Successful teams. High-performing colleagues and workplaces. Dynamic friend groups. Yet many of us don't understand the crucial element we need to forge long-lasting communities in our lives: healthy conflict. In The Art of Fighting, Priya Parker explains that we can't form and grow effective relationships without a fight. She rejects the idea that conflict is abnormal or that good groups don't fight. All groups change and evolve; indeed, it's because people disagree that good groups flourish. As she did in the now-classic The Art of Gathering, Parker draws on her far-reaching experience as a conflict facilitator, her own detailed research, and real-world examples to lay out the ways that people can identify disputes, determine how to address them, and what to do if they are insurmountable. Whether people disagree in the boardroom or the locker room, on a playground or in church, online or in person, conflict is a part of life, and understanding healthy conflict and how to harness its power is more important than ever. The Art of Fighting is a vital primer to help all of us understand how to do that. |
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The extraordinary account of The New York Times's effort to save hundreds of lives during the 2021 Afghanistan evacuation, highlighting four exceptional young women who, having escaped the fate of their fellow countrywomen back home, now face the challenges of forging a new life in a new land, a new language, and a new culture. Kabul; August 15, 2021. It was supposed to be Marwa's first day back at medical school. After more than a year of the pandemic's isolation, here, at last, was a cause for celebration. She set out her books and ironed the dress specially chosen for the occasion. But when she awoke that morning, giddy anticipation quickly gave way to panic and fear. The streets were thronged with desperate crowds, everyone pressing in the same direction. The Taliban were coming. They had only hours to get out. On the radio, an announcer intoned the names of the provinces that had already fallen. Marwa had gone to bed the night before with a vision of a whole future ahead of her. Now she had only minutes to pack, wondering how she could condense everything she'd ever known into a single backpack. Efforts to evacuate the group were taking place as Rebecca Blumenstein was driving her son cross-country to college. As a top editor of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, she had been deeply involved in managing the foreign correspondents the paper sent to war zones. Now, as the lives of their Afghan Bureau employees and their families were imperiled by the Taliban's swift resurgence, she played a pivotal role in coordinating their evacuation, in the end securing the relocation from Afghanistan of more than 200 people, 124 to the US--the largest privately sponsored group of refugees in modern American history. She then led their resettlement into their new life in the U.S. Though each is navigating different circumstances and dreams, these four brave, remarkable women--Marwa, Mursal, Maryam, Samira-- are united in their desire to make the most of the opportunity they have been given. Stories of hope and resilience, setback and struggle, ambition and joy, The Last Free Women grapples with what America owes those who seek freedom on our shores, and how they, like generations of immigrants before them, will remake what it is to be American.
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LONGLISTED FOR THE 2026 BOOKER PRIZE Harrowing, hilarious, magnificent ...this novel will be read decades from now, pored over in seminars and bookmarked on subway commutes ... James'] defiant queer epic belongs to us all. -The Boston Globe Among Marlon James's most ambitious and history-making works... James is a singular literary talent. -Booker Prize judge's citation From Marlon James, author of the Booker Prize-winning A Brief History of Seven Killings the electrifying story of the murder of a gay man in 1980s Jamaica and its far-reaching consequences In 1988, eight men in Kingston, Jamaica, begin rehearsals for a play. Though strangers to one another, they share an inescapable truth: All of them are gay. And they live in a world that refuses to accept them. One night the men are savagely beaten and one of them is killed. As their bodies heal, the survivors begin to face the hatred and contempt that the violence laid bare. Some try to ignore what happened. Others double down on retribution. Some disappear completely. In this spellbinding novel, Marlon James has written a propulsive crime story that is also a deeply human account of connection and acceptance. Full of fascinating characters, biting humor, and unapologetic sex, The Disappearers is both a thrilling page-turner and a finely etched portrait of queer life.
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The inside story of how Big Tech catalyzed, co-opted, and ultimately came to capture computer science and AI education in America.
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Marble Hall Murders by Anthony HorowitzEditor Susan Ryeland has left her Greek island, her hotel, and her Greek boyfriend Andreas in search of a new life back in England. Freelancing for a London publisher, she's given the last job she wants: working on an Atticus Pèund continuation novel called Pèund's Last Case. Worse still, she knows the new writer. Eliot Crace is the troubled grandson of legendary children's author Miriam Crace, who died twenty years ago. Eliot is convinced she was murdered by poison. To her surprise, Susan enjoys reading the manuscript which is set in the South of France and revolves around the mysterious death of Lady Margaret Chalfont, days before she was about to change her will. But when it is revealed that Lady Margaret was also poisoned, alarm bells begin to ring-- Where to watch: Sundays at 9pm ET/PT on PBS "Masterpiece"; Series Premiere on September 6th. |
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The Magic Faraway Tree: The Enchanted Wood
by Enid Blyton
Andrew Garfield and Claire Foy star in The Magic Faraway Tree, the film adaptation of Enid Blyton's classic children's fantasy series The Faraway Tree, about a British family who discovers a magical world in their backyard.
Where to watch: Catch The Magic Faraway Tree in theaters.
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Kitchen Confidential
by Anthony Bourdain
Dominic Sessa stars as young chef Anthony Bourdain in Tony, a new biopic based on Bourdain's bestselling memoir Kitchen Confidential.
Where to watch: Tony is now playing in theaters.
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The Shards
by Bret Easton Ellis
Ryan Murphy helmed the thriller series adaptation of The Shards, Bret Easton Ellis' fictionalized memoir of his final year at a California prep school in 1981.
Where to watch: Catch new episodes of The Shards weekly on FX and FX on Hulu.
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The Dog Stars (Movie Tie-In Edition)
by Peter Heller
SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE - NATIONAL BESTSELLER - From the author of The River In this end-of-the-world novel more like a rapturous beginning (San Francisco Chronicle), Hig somehow survived the flu pandemic that killed everyone he knows. His gripping story is an ode to friendship between two men...the strong bond between a human and a dog, and a reminder of what is worth living for (Minneapolis Star-Tribune). Hig's wife is gone, his friends are dead, and he lives in the hangar of a small abandoned airport with his dog, Jasper, and a mercurial, gun-toting misanthrope named Bangley. But when a random transmission beams through the radio of his 1956 Cessna, the voice ignites a hope deep inside him that a better life exists outside their tightly controlled perimeter. Risking everything, he flies past his point of no return and follows its static-broken trail, only to find something that is both better and worse than anything he could ever hope for.
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The Whisper Man
by Alex North
Robert DeNiro, Michelle Monaghan, and Adam Scott costar in the film adaptation of Alex North's crime novel about a man who discovers his young son's abduction may be connected to a serial killer known as "The Whisper Man."
Where to watch: Stream The Whisper Man on Netflix.
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The Day You Begin
by Jacqueline Woodson; illustrated by Rafael López
Jacqueline Woodson co-wrote and executive produced an animated special of her award-winning picture book about kids learning to embrace their differences from their classmates.
Where to watch: The Day You Begin is now streaming on Apple TV and PBS Kids.
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The Dispatcher
by Ryan David Jahn
Patrick Brammall stars in the series Last Seen, which adapts Ryan David Jahn's thriller The Dispatcher, about a police dispatcher who receives a call from his kidnapped (and presumed dead) daughter.
Where to watch: Last Seen premieres September 9th on Apple TV.
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The Book of Magic
by Alice Hoffman
Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock reprise their roles as the witchy Owens sisters in Practical Magic 2, which adapts Alice Hoffman's The Book of Magic.
Where to watch: Practical Magic 2 hits theaters on September 11th.
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The Love Hypothesis
by Ali Hazelwood
Lili Reinhart and Tom Bateman costar in the film adaptation of Ali Hazelwood's romantic comedy about a biology PhD student and a professor who fake a relationship.
Where to watch: The Love Hypothesis premieres September 23rd on Amazon Prime Video.
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