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.

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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.

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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. 

"I wanted my characters to be respectable," LJ Alonge writes. "I wanted them to somehow escape the judgement they'd get for just being, the same kind of judgement I've gotten for just being..."
Sanity is slowly lost in 'Spaceman of Bohemia'
It's 2018 and a mysterious cloud has appeared between Earth and Venus. A Czech astrophysicist is sent to investigate. The only problem? Hanging on to his sense of reality while alone in space.
A Purple Heart warrior takes aim at military inequality in 'Shoot Like a Girl'
Maj. Mary Jennings Hegar is part of a lawsuit that argues excluding women from combat is unconstitutional. She says the lawsuit isn't about women's rights -- it's about military effectiveness.
How do you raise a feminist daughter? Chimamanda Adichie has 15 suggestions
Chimamanda Adichie's new book began as a letter to a childhood friend (and new mother) who had asked for some advice. It's called "Dear Ijeawele, or A Feminist Manifesto in Fifteen Suggestions."
Unemployed, living in a caravan - and now, winner of a $165,000 literary prize
Ali Cobby Eckermann, an Australian indigenous poet forcibly taken from her family as a child, discovered without warning last week she had just won one of the richest literary prizes in the world.