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The Thread® - Books and Literary News

The Thread® is your source for book recommendations and other literary news.

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Sign up for The Thread newsletter to get reading recommendations from Kerri Miller and other bookworms around the MPR newsroom. Sam Stroozas rounds up local events and Minnesota book news you may have missed.

Ask a Bookseller

Ask a Bookseller is a weekly series where host Emily Bright checks in with booksellers around the country about their favorite books of the moment. Listen to Ask a Bookseller to find your next favorite book.

Big Books and Bold Ideas

Big Books and Bold Ideas is a weekly series hosted by Kerri Miller and produced by Kelly Gordon every Friday at 11 a.m., featuring conversations about books and other literary ideas. Listen to Big Books and Bold Ideas here.

Talking Volumes

Talking Volumes is an annual event series featuring notable authors in conversation about their new books. Presented by MPR News and The Minnesota Star Tribune.

'Winter' balances dark days with flashes of joy and light

'Winter' balances dark days with flashes of joy and light

he second volume in Ali Smith's seasonal quartet takes place over a tense family Christmas in Cornwall that reunites two sisters whose lives have taken vastly diverging paths.
by Heller McAlpin

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For 'The Immortalists,' knowledge of death changes lives

For 'The Immortalists,' knowledge of death changes lives

In Chloe Benjamin's new book, four siblings growing up on the Lower East Side amid the upheavals of the 1960s gain forbidden, life-changing knowledge: The exact year and date of their deaths.
by Jean Zimmerman

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Posthumously published 'Sea Maiden' affirms Denis Johnson's eternal voice

Posthumously published 'Sea Maiden' affirms Denis Johnson's eternal voice

A new collection features five stand-alone stories by Johnson, who died in 2017. Critic Maureen Corrigan says "The Largesse of the Sea Maiden" is "the kind of work every writer would like to go out on."
by Maureen Corrigan

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Want a new you for the New Year? These books might actually help

Want a new you for the New Year? These books might actually help

Jolenta Greenberg and Kristen Meinzer live by a new self-help book for each episode of their podcast By the Book, so they're experts on which ones might really help us keep our New Year's resolutions.
by Ari Shapiro

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What history and fiction teach us about women and power

What history and fiction teach us about women and power

Psychologist Tania Lombrozo considers two books: In one, we learn what ancient Greece can tell us about Twitter trolls and, in the other, we're shown a world in which women have power over men.
by Tania Lombrozo

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In 'Red Sky at Noon,' a Western on the Eastern front

In 'Red Sky at Noon,' a Western on the Eastern front

Simon Sebag Montefiore's new novel, set during World War II, follows a Jewish political prisoner who's pressed into a battalion of convicts and Cossacks and sent to fight the Nazis on horseback.

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Nixon's manhunt for the high priest of LSD

Nixon's manhunt for the high priest of LSD

Author Bill Minutaglio's new book chronicles Timothy Leary's international escape from a California prison and the president's campaign to make him the poster child for his war on drugs.
by Ari Shapiro

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'Women & Power' links today's trolls with ancient ancestors

'Women & Power' links today's trolls with ancient ancestors

Classicist Mary Beard's new book -- a compilation of two of her lectures -- traces current strains of misogyny back to the ancient world (one 7th century B.C. poet compared women to yapping dogs).
by Annalisa Quinn

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'I'm not a hit man,' Michael Wolff tells NPR about his controversial Trump book

'I'm not a hit man,' Michael Wolff tells NPR about his controversial Trump book

President Trump's lawyer sent a cease-and-desist letter to the publisher, but the book went on sale days ahead of schedule. The White House has pushed back on the criticism in the book.

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