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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. 

Foreign Wife Elegy

Her husband's daily view of life and death as a nurse inspired a poet's precise observations of how those experiences look and feel.

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Shannon Olson on Talking Volumes

A recorded broadcast of a Talking Volumes conversation. Greta Cunningham interviews Shannon Olson, author of Children of God Go Bowling.

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The odd allure of Dr. Seuss

Dr. Seuss' first book was published in 1958. What was fresh and different back then remains so for the children of those first children to read books like The Cat in the Hat.

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The Birth of Venus

British writer Sarah Dunant's new novel opens with a scandalous discovery in 15th-century Italy. Two nuns preparing the body of Sister Lucretzia for burial, find a beautifully ornate tattoo of a snake slithering down her torso. The book tells how that tattoo got there. It's the story of nun as a young woman growing up in Florence at the birth of the Renaissance, experiencing the excitement and the terrors of the time.

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Playing the Black Piano

The café in town, the disorientation of travel and the power of music are all part of Minnesota poet Bill Holm's newest collected work.

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Reading Lolita in Tehran

Women in a repressive society find connection to each other and the world by reading fiction. Iranian scholar Azar Nafisi recounts the work of an unusual book group.

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Books to accompany any mood

Have you been asked for a book recommendation and struggled to come up with one? Librarian Nancy Pearl is so passionate about recommending non-bestsellers she's collected her picks in a handy guide.

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The Year That Rocked the World

A tumultuous era is crystallized in one terrible year for many who remember the 60s. The author of Salt explores the assassinations, the riots and political turmoil that framed the year 1968.

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Flim-Flam Man

A journalist writes of her father's life in crime, and what that did to her family. In doing so, she explores the roots of her own struggle to find a better life.

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The Epicure's Lament

Evocative writing of food and a main character who's hard to love mix together in a new novel.

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