Let’s ask Samantha Irby to introduce herself, with a passage from her new book, Wow, No Thank You: “I occasionally write jokes on the Internet for free because I’m the last person on Earth who still has a blog,” she reads. Sometimes I have freelance projects, but there’s nothing right now. No one is going to pay me to write another book about nothing, for at […]
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Alicia Keys performs during the filming of the Graham Norton Show at BBC Studioworks in London. Isabel Infantes/PA Images/Getty Images Music artist Alicia Keys, a 15-time Grammy winner, has a new self-titled album coming out — her seventh. She also has written a forthcoming book, More Myself, that she prefers to call a “journey” rather than a memoir. Keys spoke to NPR in February — an […]
A reporter wearing a latex glove raises his hand to ask President Trump a question during a coronavirus briefing at the White House on March 16, 2020. Win McNamee/Getty Images Apocalyptic novelist Max Brooks is something of an expert on planning for pandemics and other disasters. The author, whose books include World War Z, Germ Warfare and the forthcoming Devolution, has toured the CDC and reviewed […]
I just constantly felt as if there was nothing I could do to get ahead, or to have anyone take me seriously. Victoria James Victoria James discovered the book Wine for Dummies during her bartending days in New York, and she was hooked. “I found myself purchasing another wine book, and another wine book — and I eventually came across this word ‘sommelier,’ and I Googled […]
People of Japanese descent wait in line for their assigned homes at an internment camp reception center in Manzanar, Calif., the same camp in which John Tateishi was detained as a child. Associated Press The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941 marked the United States’ official entrance into World War II. It also pushed the U.S. government’s legacy of anti-Asian sentiment to its […]
Author and blogger Glennon Doyle has something to tell all the women out there trying to put a brave face on a terrible situation, juggling home life with all the other expectations placed on them as the world seems like it’s falling apart: “I think every woman on earth needs to lower her expectations for herself, exponentially. At this point, we’re not trying to be amazing. […]
Emily St. John Mandel’s last novel was set in a world devastated by a worldwide flu epidemic. Station Eleven has sold more than a million and a half copies — though Mandel recommends you not read it right this minute. Instead, try her latest: The Glass Hotel takes us through tunnels of carelessness, corruption, moral compromise, and a global financial crisis to pose the question: How […]
Gene Luen Yang is known as a cartoonist — the author of American Born Chinese and the New Super-Man comics, he’s received a MacArthur genius grant for his work, and the Library of Congress named him as its Ambassador for Young People’s Literature in 2016. But for years, Yang was a computer science teacher at Bishop O’Dowd High School in Oakland, Calif., and his new book […]
William Gibson writes visionary stories — in his early work, he imagined an information superhighway long before the Web existed. But in a dozen novels over the last 35 years, Gibson has stalked closer and closer to the present. His latest, Agency, has a complicated plot that jumps between the far future and the immediate present; Gibson says his favorite type of science fiction requires time […]
Protestors demonstrate against President-elect Donald Trump in Philadelphia in 2016. Trump won the presidential election despite losing the popular election by more than two million votes. Mark Makela/Getty Images The U.S. has had two recent presidential elections in which the winner of the popular vote — Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016 — ultimately lost to the challenger for the seat. That’s because […]
When Daniel tags along with his parents to work — they are janitors in a big office building — he’s surprised to find a fantasy world full of kings, queens, a throne room and dragons. Author Helena Ku Rhee drew on her own childhood as she wrote The Paper Kingdom. Her parents were night janitors for a law office in Los Angeles. They couldn’t afford a […]
Authors Jason Reynolds, left, and Ibram X. Kendi spoke to students at a high school in Washington D.C. about their new book, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism and You. Elissa Nadworny/NPR After his award-winning book came out in 2016, Ibram X. Kendi heard from people everywhere, telling him it opened their eyes to a new way of looking at history. “They were coming up to me and saying, […]
“Your brain doesn’t distinguish between the work that you do at your job and paging through Facebook while you’re in bed,” says author Celeste Headlee. “To your brain, you’re still working.” Yiu Yu Hoi/Getty Images When you collapse on the couch after a long workday and start scrolling through social media, you’re not doing your tired brain any favors, says author Celeste Headlee. “Your brain sees […]
Is a friendship with someone you’ve never met more authentic or less? On the one hand, you can’t look them in the eyes, read their nonverbal cues. On the other hand, you don’t jump to conclusions based on stereotypes about their race, their size, their age. In journalist Kevin Nguyen’s first novel, the characters build relationships with each other online that translate to the real world […]
When illustrator Rashin Kheiriyeh first read the manuscript of Story Boat, she recognized the children in it immediately. Kheiriyeh’s family fled Iran after war broke out in 1980 — she remembers what it was like to leave everything behind, to escape to a safer place. So Kyo Maclear’s story, about a little girl and her family who are forced to leave home, felt very familiar. “I […]
Judy Vogel’s life is falling apart. Or really, it HAS fallen apart: Once, she was a successful children’s book author whose work was adapted for TV. Now, a couple of flops and a nasty case of writers’ block have reduced her to grinding out content for a wellness website; her estranged husband Gary, whose anxiety has stunted his music career, lives in the basement because they […]
Roman Dial and his son Roman regularly took adventure trips together. “I kind of hoped that he would be an outdoors partner for me for life,” Dial says of his son. Courtesy of Harper Collins In 2014, wilderness explorer Roman Dial experienced every parent’s nightmare when he learned that his son, then 27, was missing in a remote Central American rainforest, thousands of miles away. Dial, […]
Four and a half million Americans are on probation or parole — more than twice the nation’s jail population. Parolees and probationers are required to check in regularly with officials, who are charged with helping them rebuild their lives. But being a parole officer is tough work. “The pay is poor. The benefits are expensive. The hours are long,” says former New Orleans parole officer Jason […]
James McBride is also the author of The Color of Water and won the National Book Award for Fiction for The Good Lord Bird. He’s shown above in Paris on Sept. 23, 2015. Joel Saget/AFP via Getty Images “In the real world, villains too often succeed and heroes, too often die,” says writer James McBride — and that’s one of the great things about being novelist. […]
I asked Louise Erdrich to introduce the main character of her new novel, The Night Watchman. His name is Thomas Wazhashk. She reads: Thomas was named for the muskrat, wazhashk, the lowly, hardworking, water loving rodent. Muskrats were everywhere on the slough-dotted reservation. Their small supple forms slipped busily through water at dusk, continually perfecting their burrows, and eating (how they loved to eat). Although the […]
Conestoga Indians walking into the woods. Weshoyot Alvitre/Library Company of Philadelphia Ghost River: The Fall and Rise of the Conestoga, a new graphic novel and art exhibit, depicts a gruesome, footnoted incident in American history — the Conestoga Massacre. The massacre was an act of brutality that killed an entire community of Native people and almost erased their voices from history. Ghost River hopes to give […]
Jessica Simpson is back in the news, this time in her own words. Her in her new memoir, Open Book, Simpson writes honestly about her career as a pop singer, her marriage to and divorce from Nick Lachey, her stint on reality TV, and her time with John Mayer. And she reflects on becoming a fashion mogul with a billion-dollar company. But she also opens up […]
A growing field of science shows that friendship is vital to our health. Muaz Bin Saat/EyeEm/Getty Images Lydia Denworth wants you to make more time for your friends. We don’t fully appreciate our friendships, says the science writer and author of the new book Friendship: The Evolution, Biology, and Extraordinary Power of Life’s Fundamental Bond. If we did, we’d take cultivating those intimate bonds as seriously […]
The darkness is always there. It can be very beautiful. I don’t necessarily want to shine a light that dispels it. I want to live with it. Jeff Sharlet This Brilliant Darkness is a book born of insomnia. It’s a collection of snapshots and written profiles by author Jeff Sharlet that take us deep into other people’s lives. And by doing that, Sharlet says, he’s really […]