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The Thread® - Books and Literary News

The Thread from MPR News

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

Ask a Bookseller

Ask a Bookseller is a weekly series where The Thread 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 every Friday at 11 a.m., featuring conversations about books and other literary ideas. Listen to Big Books and Bold Ideas here.

Sign Up for The Thread® Newsletter

Sign up for The Thread newsletter to get reading recommendations from Kerri Miller and other bookworms around the MPR newsroom. Find reviews for new releases, as well as hidden gems you may have missed.

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. 

Tickets are now available for our 26th season. Join award-winning journalist and MPR News host Kerri Miller (and special guest host Catharine Richart) as they talk with authors including Stacey Abrams, Patricia Lockwood, Misty Copeland, John Grisham, and Kate Baer. 

What if Willy Wonka was your dad? Roald Dahl's magical parenting with food

What if Willy Wonka was your dad? Roald Dahl's magical parenting with food

Food played a big role in 'Charlie and the Chocolate Factory' and Dahl's other books. His daughter remembers fanciful 'midnight feasts' and says her father used mealtime to test out new characters.
by Dan Pashman

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Thread Book Hour: Sheryl Sandberg on post-traumatic growth

Thread Book Hour: Sheryl Sandberg on post-traumatic growth

Kerri Miller's interview with Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg. Sandberg's husband, Minneapolis native Dave Goldberg, died unexpectedly two years ago. To cope with her grief, Sandberg reached out to her friend, psychologist Adam Grant. Together, they wrote "Option B," a new book about surviving tragedy and building resiliency.
by MPR News Staff

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Confronting the possibility of monsters in 'The Essex Serpent'

Confronting the possibility of monsters in 'The Essex Serpent'

The clash between science and religious belief lies at the heart of Sarah Perry's new novel, set in a marshy, windswept English town menaced by a serpentine monster that may or may not truly exist.
by Ari Shapiro

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'So Much Blue' is Percival Everett's best yet

'So Much Blue' is Percival Everett's best yet

By turns funny, shocking and heartbreaking, Everett's new novel follows a painter who's deeply ambivalent about his apparently idyllic life and digs into the moments in his past that shaped him.
by Michael Schaub

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After years of restraint, a linguist says 'yes!' to the exclamation point

After years of restraint, a linguist says 'yes!' to the exclamation point

F. Scott Fitzgerald once declared that using an exclamation point was like laughing at your own joke, but linguist Geoff Nunberg begs to differ. He has begun embracing the mark in his own writing.
by Geoff Nunberg

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Tracy K. Smith named new U.S. poet laureate

Tracy K. Smith named new U.S. poet laureate

The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet says she plans to use her new role to meet people who don't read poetry ... yet, anyway. She believes poetry can be a resource for people in fraught or isolating times.

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Southern cooking: 'People of color didn't get the respect they earned'

Southern cooking: 'People of color didn't get the respect they earned'

In his new book, John T. Edge writes that food plays a central role in Southern identity, but African-American and immigrant cooks have often been left out of the stories the South tells about itself.
by Maria Godoy

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