When his daughter and son-in-law visited Ken Rohlf on his birthday in September 2023 to tell him they were expecting a child, two words came to mind for the soon-to-be-grandfather: “joyful” and “tough.”

The first adjective is obvious, and proved to be true when Oliver was born this summer. The other, though, is because Rohlf knew ...Read more

When I was a teenager in Tennessee during the 1980s, Christmas officially launched the day after Thanksgiving: holly wreaths hung on front doors, shoppers thronging local malls. My father busied himself in the kitchen, assembling tins of Chex mix and pecan-freckled cheeseballs, gifts for friends in our Baptist congregation. On Christmas Eve, we ...Read more

MINNEAPOLIS -- Look, we get it. Ann Patchett is reliably great. Her books are always best sellers. We know she’s busy running a book store and campaigning against censorship and also that finished novels don’t just appear out of thin air. We’re not asking for her to be as prolific as, say, Mr. Nine-Books-a-Year James Patterson. But it sure...Read more

Ella Baxter’s novel “Woo Woo” wasn’t supposed to be published.

It wasn’t even meant to be a novel, Baxter says. She’d sat down to feverishly pen a letter to the stalker who’d been driving her mad for a year and a half. Twenty-thousand words later, the catharsis was too potent, the energy that kept the words flowing was too ...Read more

Daniel Aleman and the protagonist of his new novel share the same profession, the same initials, and the same plot points in their third novel. But there’s one key difference, Aleman insists.

“I promise you, I have not woken up next to a dead body.”

The protagonist in “I Might Be In Trouble,” David, wrote a debut book that was a ...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Dec. 7, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2024 Circana.

(Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2024, PWxyz LLC.)

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "Wind and Truth...Read more

My big takeaway from “Heartbreak Is the National Anthem” was: Is it even possible for the most famous person in the world to get famouser?

Rock critic Rob Sheffield’s essays about Taylor Swift’s music mostly argue how thoroughly, and deservedly, the singer (who turns 35 this month) has conquered pop music over the course of the past 16 ...Read more

WASHINGTON -- The Yuletide used to be a lot scarier. In some Germanic regions, while Saint Nicholas delivered gifts for nice boys and girls, the demonic Krampus whipped the naughty. It was a time to recall spooky tales; that’s why Andy Williams croons about “scary ghost stories” in “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year.”

Of ...Read more

Edwin Frank, the editorial director of the iconic New York Review Books and founder of its NYRB Classics series, is the author of a new book, “Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel.”

Here, Frank answers questions for the Book Pages Q&A.

Q. Please tell readers about your new book, “Stranger Than Fiction.”

My ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — My home office looks like a Jenga game of nonfiction books I read about Southern California Latino life this past year — and almost none were duds.

They ranged from a history of gangs in East L.A. to a gorgeous coffee table tome about the cult classic "Blood In Blood Out" to a delightful children's tale on the late Los Angeles...Read more

It takes only a few pages for red flags to mount in Christopher Bollen’s latest thriller, “Havoc.”

When we meet Maggie Burkhardt, the pandemic is raging and, for the previous three months, the 81-year-old has lived at the Royal Karnak Palace Hotel in Luxor, Egypt.

The Wisconsinite has been traveling ever since her husband died six years ...Read more

This fall’s book-to-movie adaptations cover a wide spectrum, from rarities that are just as good as, maybe even better than, the books that inspired them (”The Wild Robot,” “Conclave”) to let’s-pretend-that-movie-never-happened (”Here”).

Although “Here” — which reunites writer/director Robert Zemeckis with “Forrest Gump�...Read more

While real-world catastrophes have arrived with distressing regularity this century, fictional stories set after the seemingly inevitable apocalypse have grown more popular than ever.

There’s surely an element of privilege to this trend, but you can’t fault anyone seeking a bit of escape in post-apocalyptic TV shows, video games or novels. ...Read more

When Emergence magazine asked “Braiding Sweetgrass” author Robin Wall Kimmererto write a story about economics, she was not an obvious choice.

“I think I said, ‘I don’t know anything about economics. I’m a botanist,” said Kimmerer. “But, in conversation, I realized I know a great deal about the economies of nature. And to think ...Read more

In the afterword to his latest novel, “The City and Its Uncertain Walls,” Haruki Murakami writes that authors spend their careers rearranging a “limited pallet of motifs” to tell a “limited number of stories.”

It’s a provocative claim for a prolific author, but particularly apt for this new work that revisits — and improves upon...Read more

PHILADELPHIA — Nikki Giovanni, the legendary poet and leader of the Black Arts Movement, died at 81 on Monday, Dec. 9, in Blacksburg, Virginia, after receiving a third diagnosis of cancer, according to news reports. Her longtime partner, Virginia Fowler, was by her side.

The revolutionary writer who penned verses about Black life, feminism, ...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Nov. 30, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2024 Circana.

(Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2024, PWxyz LLC.)

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "The House of ...Read more