When Tara Menon describes the underwater world that surrounds an island off the coast of Thailand, her language is both restrained and lush.

“The reef is busy with color,” she writes, “Fiery scorpion fish, yellow frog-fish, red snappers, white-and-orange clown fish, a shoal of electric-blue angelfish, fat black sea cucumbers, powder-blue surgeonfish. Sand suspended between the dimpled surface glitters in the sunlight.”

Her prose, like the story, exemplifies the contrast between the simple joy of true friendship and the aching loss left behind when that gift is stripped away.

Menon’s novel, “Under Water,” unfolds before and after the devastating Boxing Day tsunami in 2004, that surged across the Indian Ocean and killed more than 225,000 people. But the heartbeat of the story is the friendship between two girls who each have to navigate a stinging loss.

Menon joins Kerri Miller for a conversation about writing, the elegance of restraint and how to avoid sentimentality when building a story around childhood friendship and exuberant nature, on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas.

Guest:

• Tara Menon is an assistant professor of English at Harvard University. Her debut novel is “Under Water.”

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On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

Saturday is Independent Bookstore Day, a national event celebrating reading and the booksellers at small businesses who put those books into readers’ hands.

Across Minnesota, more than 70 independent bookstores are participating. Many are offering readings, special offers and opportunities to win prizes.

In the greater Twin Cities metro, book lovers can pick up a free independent bookstore passport and get it stamped at any of the 38 participating businesses. Stamped pages serve as coupons for future visits, with bonus coupons and prize drawings for those with 10 or more stamps.

Seven stores are participating in the Twin Ports and along the North Shore.

In New Ulm, owner Brie Taralson of Lykke Books paused in her preparations for Saturday to talk about a book she’s currently enjoying.

A self-professed nonfiction book nerd, she recommends reading “Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment" by Daniel Coyle.

Having written two books about high-performing individuals and successful groups, respectively, Coyle turns his attention to what helps people not perform well — but thrive.

The key takeaway, Taralson says, is that we flourish because of connection with others.

She appreciated that this book makes space for the beautiful mess of life, where the outcome isn’t preordained. She liked its talk of flow state, that “I could do this for hours” zone we enter when we do something we love.

That state has value, the book argues, and so it’s worthwhile to take part in hobbies that take us there, even if they don’t seem productive otherwise. The book contains case studies as well as practical recommendations that could work on an individual, family or group level.

“Here’s what I love about this whole field of positive psychology,” Taralson says. “It's not about fixing something that's broken. We can all benefit from these things. It's not really directed at a particular type of person. It's just, if you want to be more joyful and really flourish and be happy with your life, these are all tools that I think would be helpful to learn.”

On the day the Sharafs bury their 18-year-old daughter, the girl’s mother is so bereaved, she can barely stand. The father is so anguished, he nearly climbs into the grave himself.

But as Patmeena Sabit’s debut novel unspools, it’s up to the reader to parse the truth about the girl’s death — and who may have been accomplices to it. The narrative is told through a kaleidoscope of viewpoints. Fellow Afghan immigrants, journalists and law enforcement each relate what they saw, through their own lens. But eye witnesses can be wrong. Neighbors have an agenda. One person’s truth is another person’s lie.

For Sabit, that’s the whole point.

“When I was creating the story, I was thinking … about the nature of perception and how reliable that is, and objective truth and if there is an objective truth to any one situation,” she tells Kerri Miller.

“Good People” is both a cultural study of a community’s judgement and an interrogation of what it means to be an American — all with a crime at the center of it. Sabit and Miller talk about it on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas.

Guest:

• Patmeena Sabit was born in Kabul and fled to Pakistan and then to the United States with her family after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. “Good People” is her debut novel.

Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

Seeing a new work on the shelf written by an author you love can feel like winning the lottery. Shirley Fergenson of The Ivy Bookshop in Baltimore, Md., remembers being absolutely captivated by Daniyal Mueenuddin’s 2009 short story collection “In Other Rooms, Other Wonders,” which was a finalist for the National Book Award.

This year — 17 years later — he’s published a new work of fiction, entitled “This Is Where the Serpent Lives.”

Fergenson says when she saw it, she “practically jumped up and down. I took it home, I read it, and I fell in love with it. It's the same voice. I loved it then, and I love it still.”

“This Is Where the Serpent Lives” is a sprawling work set in Pakistan over several decades, starting in the 1950s. It’s being marketed as a novel, but Fergenson says it’s actually three short stories and a novella with interlinking characters.

“It sort of feels like ‘Upstairs, Downstairs’ with a little bit of ‘The Godfather’ thrown in,” she says.

“There are rich landowners, there are servants, forbidden Love, ambition, corruption. There is moral compromise and fluid loyalty. It is a class-and-cast panorama of amazingly rich characters. Each one could have a whole story written about them. They're so full of life.”

“The main reason to read this book is the exquisite writing, but if you need a story that is one story arc that takes you from the beginning to the end, this is not your story.

There are linkages, but they're literary, and they are so beautifully told that even in the bleakest, darkest setting, every detail feels like a photograph through an artist's filter. And the final novella is so powerful that it feels like its own full novel.”

Listen to an NPR interview with the author: Daniyal Mueenuddin discusses his debut novel, 'This Is Where the Serpent Lives' : NPR

Abby Jimenez is a powerhouse.

Originally known for starting Nadia Cakes out of her home kitchen, these days she’s known more for her books than her bakery.

Her latest rom-com, “The Night We Met,” hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list one week after it was released.

It’s no surprise to her vast fan base. Jimenez writes witty, meet-cute romance books that also tackle real life issues like alcoholism, family trauma and caring for a loved one with dementia. And all her stories are set in or tinged by Minnesota, Jimenez’ adopted home state. What’s not to love?

Jimenez joins Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold Ideas this week, for the first time ever, to talk about the oft-maligned romance genre, how changing views of sex and marriage and masculinity are reflected in her books, why Jimenez always include a content warning before the story and why getting people to read anything these days feels like a win.

She also deftly handles a lightning round with Miller, including the romance novel she thinks should be added to the curriculum for all Minnesota college and the cupcake from Nadia Cakes she would bring to a roundtable of famous authors.

Guest:

• Abby Jimenez is a prolific romance writer. Her latest book is “The Night We Met.”

Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.

It was ten years ago that Gaelynn Lea rose to fame by winning the NPR Music Tiny Desk contest. Her memory of getting the call is the first chapter of her new book “It Wasn’t Meant to Be Perfect.” Lea was born with the rare genetic disease Osteogenesis imperfecta, also known as brittle bones disease. Her memoir traces her upbringing in Duluth and how she’s navigated her disability in all different facets of life.

Lea spoke to MPR News host Kelly Gordon about her memoir.

The following was edited for length and clarity. Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

What was the moment where you decided you needed to tell your full story?

After a show, one of the people in the audience came up and was like, “I really think you should write a memoir.” And that just planted the seed. And then the more I thought about it, you know, I do a lot of public speaking about disability in addition to doing concerts. And I'm always surprised by how much people say they learn, because I just don't think we learn enough about disability in traditional schools.

What can people with and without disabilities takeaway from this book?

I hope that people with disabilities will see parts of their own story in the book. Pretty much everything that I decided to keep in the final draft are things that I think you will have experienced yourself if you’re disabled, on some level, maybe a different version of the same idea, because they're pretty universal concepts.

If you’re not disabled, my goal is twofold. First, I want people to realize that having a disability does not mean that your life is automatically going to be not fulfilling or not satisfying or creative, but that it does require support of the community, of the government, of health care — like it does require those things, because it's such a big barrier if you don't have support in if in this society.

My goal is, once you’re done reading it, you have a better understanding of people with disabilities are just regular people who do really need that support. And what can you do to be a part of the solution and move it forward. I really hope that it inspires people to think about their own lives in the way that maybe they can help move things forward.

The title alludes to the concept of perfectionism. And talk about your introduction to fiddle music that allowed you to let go of the perfectionism you internalized playing classical orchestral music. Do you have to actively work to keep that joy and not let perfection get in the way?

I must say, I think it's a continual struggle. I think of playing music is sort of like a form of meditation. You never just get to say, “oh, I've mastered that, and I never have to think about it again.”

And so for me, music on a good day, music is something that it connects you to this higher energy. I think it feels like a divine energy personally. And so when you get caught up in the perfection mind set, that is sort of like you getting too self focused. And so I really try to zoom out when I see myself doing that. Music is just so much bigger than I think we give it credit for.

How did the creative process of writing a book differ or stay the same, from writing music or playing music?

Well, I must say, it took a lot of discipline, more than I was used to. And so it was a pretty intense journey. It's always super hard to sit down and write. I don't know what that is. I'd rather like pay my taxes. But then once I was doing it, I did start to feel a lot of the same creative buzz that I feel when I write music or when I perform.

The ending of the book came to me really suddenly, as like a download kind of thing, and that's exactly how songwriting feels. So it was really interesting to see that writing a book did have these moments that paralleled songwriting.

Dozens of Tuskegee Airmen went missing in action during World War II. Most of them have not been found. Who were these men and what happened to them? In her book, “Forgotten Souls,” NPR investigative correspondent Cheryl W. Thompson tells their stories.

This episode was produced by Rennie Svirnovskiy and edited by Justine Yan. The original interview was produced by Ryan Benk and Ed McNulty. Mastering by Jimmy Keeley.

We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at TheSundayStory@npr.org.

Listen to Up First on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Copyright 2026, NPR

Agatha Smithson is that rare person who lacks the gene for self-doubt. Brash and brutally dismissive of anyone who disagrees with her, Agatha is the main character and unreliable narrator of Nancy Foley's deviously plotted debut novel, “I Am Agatha.”

If you're one of those readers who prizes likeability above all else in your fictional characters, you may be inclined to give “I Am Agatha” a pass. But that would be a mistake. This is a strange, fresh story about artistic ambition and personal autonomy willingly abridged for love. And, all too unusually, the love affair here is between two women in their 60s.

Agatha's character is inspired by the real-life minimalist painter Agnes Martin, known for her canvases covered in graphs and stripes. Martin lived for years in New Mexico near Georgia O'Keeffe.

Diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, Martin was a solitary person, although she had significant relationships with women. Foley, who grew up in New Mexico, says that her novel was inspired by rumors of such a relationship between a friend of her grandmother's and Martin.

“I Am Agatha” takes place mostly in the 1970s, with flashbacks to Agatha's rough youth in Canada and allusions to a hard time in New York, including a stint at Bellevue. New Mexico offers Agatha a new start and an austere landscape that jibes with her art and own personality. Here's Agatha, in her typical brusque, pared-down manner of speaking, describing the view from the adobe house she built herself high upon a mesa:

My house looks west out over a canyon that although far from any ocean whatsoever yet resembles one in scope and light. This ocean canyon heaves waves of shale and basalt, quartz and silt. Cloud shadows flit across its rock floor like ghost boats.

There is no other place on Earth like Mesa Portales. I have traveled to many places, so mine is not an uninformed opinion. The truth is that there is a hierarchy. Some places are objectively better, just as some people are objectively better than others.

The "objectively better" person Agatha wants to bring to live with her on Mesa Portales is her longtime secret love, a woman named Alice who's now declining into dementia. But, there are two obstacles to Agatha's caretaking plan: The first is Alice's adult son, Frank Jr., who plans to move his mother into a care facility in Taos.

At one point, Agatha and Frank argue over this plan and Frank Jr. drops some bombshell news. Agatha tells us: "I'm startled but won't let him take my own breath away from me and puff himself up with it." It's hard not to root for a character who knows how to sling words around like that.

The other obstacle seems more immovable: It's Alice's daughter, Lorna, who's buried in the backyard of Alice's house. Years ago, Lorna was murdered by her abusive husband, and Alice likes to sit every day by her daughter's grave, which is planted with violets and lilacs.

I'm not giving much away when I point out that Agatha's practical, if grotesque, solution to this dilemma is revealed in the cover art of “I Am Agatha;” metaphorically, that book jacket hits readers over the head with a shovel.

This novel becomes even more deliciously weird as a pattern emerges: That is, whenever Agatha talks with Frank Jr. or other characters about Alice's welfare, Alice is never present. She's always taking a walk or a nap or just unavailable.

It becomes impossible to ignore that Agatha is estranged from a lot of people. She makes brief enigmatic references to a falling out with O'Keefe, and an academic colleague, and a parasitic graduate student who's writing her thesis on Agatha's art. As a narrator, Agatha turns out to be no more forthcoming to us readers than she's been to any of these characters — former friends she now regards as antagonists.

In its ingeniously duplicitous narrative structure, “I Am Agatha” is reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith's magnificent Ripley novels. Not that Agatha is an amoral con artist like Tom Ripley, but she will do anything to safeguard Alice, her fading love. "We are all of us hunted animals from the moment we are born," says Agatha, contemplating old age and death. None of us will outrun Mortality, but watching brilliant and wily Agatha try is captivating.

Copyright 2026, NPR, Fresh Air

Musician Melvin Gibbs has built a career over decades nimbly crossing genres. As a young man, he considered becoming a DJ but picked up the bass instead.

“I like the physicality of the instrument,” he said. “The fact that it moves in you and makes you move.”

He broke onto the scene in 1980s Brooklyn, N.Y., as a member of the band Defunkt. He played experimental rock with Rollins Band in the 1990s. And for decades, he’s toured with his jazz trio, Harriet Tubman.

That’s just a sample of the dozens of projects Gibbs has been involved in over the years. These days, he splits his time between Minneapolis and Brooklyn.

And he has a new book out April 14, “How Black Music Took Over the World” — part memoir, part history, part scientific look at how rhythmic building blocks developed within the African diaspora have spread across the world.

“The melodic information that people are interested in changes over time, but the rhythmic information has not changed since the beginning,” Gibbs said.

He spoke with MPR News host Clay Masters about the book.

Press play above to listen to their conversation, or read a transcript below, edited for time and clarity.

You wrote early on… if you use the definition of Black that’s traditionally been used in the United States, a standard that's based on the idea that ‘one drop of Black blood makes you Black,’ you'd have to say that the majority of music popular on our planet today is Black music.

All the music that we hear is rooted in the music that Black Americans make, from the simplest thing to the rhythms you hear on the radio, like if you listen in ‘K-Pop Demon Hunters’…. the rhythm came from Black Americans.

What we think of as American music, at the root, what makes it unique … is the fact that, you know, Africans in America had to come up with a new way of making music.

Can you talk a little bit about what you get into in this book?

I mean, it's kind of my life story, which has a purpose of framing the other two buckets, which is this thing that I call the geometry of rhythm, the very particular rhythms that Black Americans developed. And the other bucket is Black music and Black culture, and culture in general as an evolutionary process, and how that evolution forms us as people and forms the things that we do.

So you, at one point, are writing about when you were a young man and looking through different records in a collection. And you said that the music was, ‘like nothing I had heard before, but also like everything I had heard before.’

I guess I was 14, 15, and I hadn't really had any serious exposure to traditional African music. You know, you have African dance class music, but it's not the deep traditional stuff.

So my mentor played some music for me, and the rhythms were just kind of like James Brown, but not because everything kind of leaned differently, but I can definitely hear that what was in it that related to what I the music that I liked at that time.

Some readers might expect a straightforward history of music, but that's not what this book is, right? You get a mix of memoir, history and even math, as you alluded to, musical notations you use to describe rhythm.

Well, the notation system that I'm using is what I call clock notation, which is a different notation system than is used in the West.

I thought about the fact in the old days, when you go in the studio, people used to say that drummers are like a clock. And then from there, I was kind of like, maybe I can write the rhythm in a circular way, as opposed to in a flat way.

And it's the thing that's interesting about that is like, even if you don't understand music notation, you can see that there's a structure to what's going on that you can't really see if you look at it through Western notation.

In 2017, a gaunt, bespectacled, 71-year-old woman wearing a crisp white uniform with two stars on the shoulder was arrested in New Mexico.

This was Deborah Green, nee Lila Carter, the leader and self-described general of the Aggressive Christianity Missions Training Corps (ACMTC) — a cult that had been operating with impunity for three decades, despite various attempts by former members to get law enforcement to shut it down.

"But Deborah looked so small, so frail — so old" when she was arrested, writes Harrison Hill in his new book, “The Oracle's Daughter: The Rise and Fall of an American Cult.” And yet this was the woman who with her rantings and ravings about God and hell had struck fear into the hearts of her followers.

Hill's book closely follows two characters — Maura Aluzas and Sarah Green — and their journeys into and out of ACMTC. It also explores the broader landscape of cults in the U.S. and how their logic and approach to religion have become less and less fringe over the years, to the point where ACMTC's messy doctrine seems, in a twisted way, to have been ahead of its time.

Maura Aluzas met Lila in the late 1960s, when Maura worked at a hospital and helped care for Lila's dying brother. The young women became close friends for a time; both women were seekers, each wishing to lead a meaningful, intentional life.

During the near-decade they were out of touch, both embraced Christianity, and they certainly weren't alone in their newfound fervor when, in 1980, Lila Carter — now married to Jim Green — reached out to Maura to share that she and her husband had found God; the 1970s had seen a resurgence of religious zeal.

When the Greens returned to California, the families spent time together and Maura's husband, Steve, was impressed with the Greens' vision of a spiritual army that would "take up arms against the forces of secularism and mainstream Christianity."

Maura wasn't entirely convinced, but she loved her husband and still held an old loyalty to the Lila she'd once known, even if this new, born-again version was harsher and stranger. And, so, when Steve wanted to move closer to Lila and Jim Green, Maura Aluzas agreed.

This began a series of incremental choices that wouldn't, at the time, have felt as extreme as they seem in hindsight. Maura and Steve became the first members of the Greens' church. They raised children in the harsh environment that Lila — who'd renamed herself Deborah — cultivated.

And because of her lingering doubts, or simply because she refused to beat her children as firmly as Deborah thought she should, Maura was punished. She was first ostracized then exiled. Although being banished was painful, for Maura, it eventually became a relief, a way to escape.

The twists and turns Hill follows throughout this true story are extraordinary, and the author does a wonderful job of contextualizing the painful, sometimes horrifying choices his subjects made — especially those involving women leaving their children, which, as he points out, would be perceived very differently if these women had been men.

How and why do people end up in cults? Why did Maura Aluzas join ACMTC if she was never fully on board? Well, Hill reminds readers, no one really "joins" a cult. "They join what they believe to be an alternative community, or an especially devoted religious group." Gradually, things change, but by then, the group has become a home, a kind of family.

Those born into or raised in a cult, of course, have no choice in the matter of joining. Sarah Green, Deborah and Jim's first child, grew up in ACMTC, moving with her parents and their followers as they sought to avoid legal consequences for their various actions. When she escaped in adulthood, she left behind three young children of her own — practically speaking, she couldn't run away with them.

She tried to go back to get them, but her mother allowed her to see them only briefly before effectively hiding them away. Part of Sarah still believed that she was very literally going to hell for leaving ACMTC; she rationalized that her children, at least, could still be granted entry to heaven.

Our culture is fascinated by cults, and there's an element of self-soothing to be found in consuming media about them. We would never join a cult, we tell ourselves. But it's generally believed now that what makes a person vulnerable to a cult isn't anything innate about them but rather a confluence of factors relating to their circumstances, their support networks, and the options open to them.

I was often reminded, while reading this book, of a now-iconic scene in the second season of “Fleabag,” when Phoebe Waller-Bridge's character, who is grieving the death of her friend — which she believes to have been her fault — confesses to the priest she's in love with that she wants someone to tell her what to do. She wants to be told "what to like, what to hate, what to rage about." Most of all, she wants someone to tell her what to believe in and how to live her life.

It's a relatable impulse, even for those who consider themselves fiercely independent. As Hill points out, the Greens were hippies, enthusiastic members of the counterculture before they became Christian extremists.

"Hippies placed a premium on freedom," he writes, "on the right to improvise their lives as they saw fit. And yet the 1960s and seventies also revealed the limits of freedom – how an endless array of options could be confusing, overwhelming, even debilitating. Sometimes it simply feels better being told what to do."

Indeed — and it is precisely when we're most confused and overwhelmed that we are most susceptible to losing sight of what we actually believe in and how we actually want to live. “The Oracle's Daughter” is a story about the terror of losing the self but it's also, gratifyingly, a story about finding the way back to it.

Ilana Masad is a fiction writer, critic, and founder/host of the podcast The Other Stories. Her latest novel is Beings.

Copyright 2026, NPR

April may well be "the cruelest month," as T.S. Eliot famously opined — and even a five-minute doomscroll makes it tough to deny that cruelty is riding at anything but record levels lately. But remember you do have an alternative to doomscrolling, one that's been around much longer: cracking open a book — or doomflipping, I suppose you could call it.

Don't get me wrong: The books expected this month don't exactly radiate escapist good vibes, riddled as they are with anxiety, corruption, unfulfilled desire — even the occasional direct challenge to our notions of reality itself.

But they do offer the opportunity to step into someone else's shoes and get to know their own particular view of our shared world — and sometimes that's consolation enough. Which is nice, because it may have to be this month.

‘Transcription,’ by Ben Lerner (4/7)

The jacket copy of Lerner's novella is basically a journalist's stress dream: Commissioned to write what may be the final profile of his mentor, an aging literary icon, Lerner's narrator fries his only recording device just minutes before the interview by dropping his phone in the sink.

What follows is a meditation on memory, art and fatherhood, expressed in a handful of conversations that we've got plenty of cause to find unreliable, given the circumstances. As in his previous novels, including “The Topeka School,” Lerner centers some version of himself in this strangely captivating blend of fiction, memoir and critical essay, shot through with humor and anxiety.

‘American Fantasy,’ by Emma Straub (4/7)

Speaking of premises that read like one of my nightmares: Straub's novel portrays the American Fantasy cruise ship and its themed voyage dedicated to an aging boyband and their loyal superfans — at this point, mostly middle-aged women addled with nostalgia and the looming terrors of menopause.

The book bounces between the perspectives of a reluctant attendee, a band member and the boat's hypercompetent event director, who really doesn't deserve this. It's infused with a blend of bemused humor and abiding sympathy familiar to readers of Straub's previous novels, “All Adults Here” and “This Time Tomorrow.”

‘London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth,’ by Patrick Radden Keefe (4/7)

In Keefe's previous book “Say Nothing,” the veteran reporter took hold of a single loose thread — a mother's decades-old disappearance — and pulled with such tenacity that the history of an entire tumultuous era raveled into view.

Here, Keefe applies a similar approach — only this time, instead of Northern Ireland's Troubles, the context of his latest book is modern London's obliging relationship with the international financial elite. But as before, there's an intimately human tragedy at the heart of Keefe's investigation: a young man's fatal plunge into the Thames and all the uncomfortable questions British authorities appear reluctant to pursue.

‘The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry and the Cosmic Dream Boogie,’ by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (4/7)

"You too can have your mind altered — no drugs necessary." This, from the book's introduction, offers something of a promise — which Prescod-Weinstein keeps with gusto, in this jaunty affront to just about everything our senses tell us about the world.

The University of New Hampshire physicist's follow-up to her lauded debut, “The Disordered Cosmos,” draws from just about every intellectual nook and cranny — from Bantu linguistics and Star Trek, to hip-hop and gender theory — to weave an idiosyncratic illustration of the universe as physicists understand it today.

It's an accessible take on a flabbergasting subject which, to put it mildly, offers a rather different view of reality than the one I remember learning in school.

‘My Dear You: Stories,’ by Rachel Khong (4/7)

This is Khong's third book of fiction and her first short story collection. In it, she shows off the kind of range suggested by her previous novel, the tripartite “Real Americans” published two years ago.

Here, in the new collection, heavy subjects such as race and grief coexist with conjured spirits and a psychic cat, extraterrestrials and a God who has reconsidered the whole "human" thing — and given everyone a deadline by which they'll need to decide what other species they'd like to be instead. Understandably, given the givens so far.

‘Go Gentle,’ by Maria Semple (4/14)

Now this, my friends, is what we call a romp. Semple is best known for funny, deceptively poignant portraits of mothers in midlife crisis — see: “Where'd You Go, Bernadette,” a smash best-seller with its own Hollywood adaptation. The star of her newest novel is Adora Hazzard, a divorced philosopher with a sullen teenage daughter, a job teaching morals to rich kids and a growing "coven" of friends living nearby.

Hold on tight, though — this one's plot has twists and turns in abundance, as Hazzard certainly earns her last name in a series of, dare I say, shenanigans, animated always by a subtle, irrepressible joie de vivre.

‘On the Calculation of Volume, Book IV,’ by Solveig Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (4/14)

Yep, it's still November 18. This unassuming date has detained Balle's narrator for three novels already, and is likely to continue doing so for another three after this one. I hesitate to relate any more details about where the plot of the planned septology stands at this point, for fear of spoiling it for folks who still intend to catch up.

Suffice to say, change is afoot at this point for our timelocked narrator, who may not be nearly as alone in her plight as she had initially thought.

‘Last Night in Brooklyn,’ by Xochitl Gonzalez (4/21)

Gonzalez stays close to home with her third novel. A dyed-in-the-wool Brooklynite, born and bred, the author of Olga Dies Dreaming has already earned a nod as a Pulitzer finalist for her column concerning gentrification in the borough she calls home.

So the departure in her latest book is less in space than time, as her latest novel deposits readers in Brooklyn in 2007, on the cusp of global financial freefall, for a story of class, race, dangerous aspirations and the looming death of a heady era, which bears unmistakable echoes of “The Great Gatsby.”

‘American Men,’ by Jordan Ritter Conn (4/21)

The American men referred to in the grandly sweeping title of Conn's sophomore book of narrative journalism, in fact, number just four. Each of these men bears the mantle of masculinity differently, grappling differently with all the pressures that the label entails, but each one has also bared his experiences and innermost thoughts to Conn with equally thorough candor.

From these four interspersed stories Conn does not produce any sociological claims, still less a polemic, so much as a portrait of four lives so disarmingly frank, it can be difficult to look away — and maybe we shouldn't.

‘Small Town Girls: A Memoir,’ by Jayne Anne Phillips (4/21)

Phillips won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her last book, “Night Watch,” a wrenching portrayal of trauma and recovery set in a West Virginia mental asylum following the Civil War. Now, Phillips ("one of our greatest living writers," according to Michael Chabon, one of that year's Pulitzer jurors) is returning to the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia, not in historical fiction but in personal retrospect.

It's where Phillips grew up, where she has come to set most of fiction, and her new memoir is not so much about her life alone as it is her lifelong relationship with this place she "can never truly leave."

‘The Story of Birds: A New History from Their Dinosaur Origins to Today,’ by Steve Brusatte (4/28)

Brusatte could not be any clearer about this, folks: Birds. Are. Dinosaurs. The American paleontologist underlines the idea, which is apparently a century and a half old, early and often in “The Story of Birds.” This expansive history of our fine-feathered neighbors, as scientists understand them today, traces an evolutionary thread that leads directly from landbound behemoths like the triceratops to the airborne raptors that patrol our own skies.

As he has done in his previous books — which covered dinosaurs and mammals, respectively — Brusatte offers a lively, loving introduction to his topic that's as comprehensive as it is accessible.

Copyright 2026, NPR

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

Lauren Groff’s novels and short stories have been finalists three times for the National Book Award, and now she’s out with a new collection of short stories entitled “Brawler.”

Maire Wilson of Huxley & Hiro Booksellers in Wilmington, Del., says this work is just as strong as her others.

Unlike Groff's earlier short story collection, “Florida,” the nine stories in “Brawler” vary their locations as well as time periods and life circumstances.

In “What’s the time, Mr. Wolf?,” the longest piece in the book, a young man struggling with alcoholism retreats to his family’s estate to grapple with the ways his life has fallen short of his expectations. “The Wind” is the story of fleeing domestic abuse, passed from mother to daughter.

In each story, Wilson says, “everything is so elegantly simple that it's almost like maintaining a conversation with the person across from you, or just kind of listening into this life story. I feel like I'm in the room.”

Wilson loves Groff’s “attention to the liveliness of the surroundings” in each story, adding that she comes out of Groff’s novels and short stories "just kind of feeling full” and satisfied.

It's been 80 years since Adolf Hitler shot himself in his bunker, yet our fascination with the Nazi era seems eternal. By now I've read and seen so many different things that I'm always surprised when somebody offers a new angle on what the Nazis wrought.

Ian Buruma does this in “Stay Alive: Berlin, 1939-1945”, a new book about living in a country where you have no control over what happens. Inspired by the experience of his Dutch father, Leo, who was forced to do factory work in Berlin, Buruma uses diaries, memoirs and some personal interviews — most of the witnesses are dead, of course — to explore how it felt to be in Berlin during World War II.

He weaves together a chronicle that carries Berliners from the triumphant days when Germany steamrolled Poland and daily life felt almost "normal" (unless you were Jewish, of course) through the end of the war when bombs pulverized the city, and Soviet soldiers arrived to rape and pillage.

As he writes of air raid drills, food shortages and the incessant deluge of rumors, Buruma has to deal with the difficulty that most ordinary Germans left behind very little record. They kept their heads down and tried to stay alive. And so the book moves among more interesting characters whose multiplicity gives dimension to our usual flattened sense of Nazi Germany.

We meet Coco Schumann, a young Jewish guitarist who risks his life to play the jazz music that Nazis considered degenerate. We meet 15-year-old Lilo, who starts off thinking that Nazi ideals make life beautiful, but comes to admire the greater nobility of those who tried to assassinate Hitler.

There's the dissident intelligence officer Helmuth von Moltke, a conservative who seeks to work from inside against the Nazis (he gets hanged for his trouble). And there's Erich Alenfeld, a Jew who converted to Christianity and remained a German patriot: He sent a letter to Reichsminister Hermann Göring asking if he could serve.

We also encounter several of the usual suspects, most notably propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels who, when not coercing young actresses into sex, is busy generating false headlines, ordering movie spectacles to distract the masses (he loved Disney films), and monitoring the city's morale.

Always laying down edicts — like ordering Jews to wear the yellow star — he's the Nazi who may have done most to affect Berlin's daily life: He even keeps banning and reinstating dancing.

Along the way, “Stay Alive” is laced with nifty details. How one family trained its parrot to say "Heil, Hitler" to fool the Nazis if they came to arrest someone. How, a crew of filmmakers kept shooting a movie with no film in the camera so they wouldn't be drafted to fight doomed last ditch battles.

How Jewish villas in the posh Grunewald area were bought up or seized by Nazi bigshots, but now belong to Russian oligarchs. And how some of those trying to elude the Nazis became known as U-boats, because they dived into the city's murky underworld, even hiding out in brothels.

As one who's written well for decades about historical guilt and denial, Buruma is too savvy to belabor familiar Nazi horrors. That said, he offers two dark truths that strike me as being especially apt in these days when authoritarianism is making a worldwide comeback.

The first is that you can't live in a dirty system without somehow being corrupted. Whether you were a famous symphony conductor or a cop on the beat, Nazism tainted virtually everyone, forcing people to do and say abhorrent things they often didn't believe in, and weakening their moral compass.

As von Moltke wrote his wife: "Today, I can endure the sufferings of others with an equanimity I would have found execrable a year ago."

He wasn't alone. The second dark truth is how easy it is to simply go along. Most Berliners — and even Buruma's own father — did their jobs, took their pleasures and preferred not to think about the evils under their noses. This, Buruma says, "is disturbing but should not surprise anyone. Human beings adapt, carry on, turn away from things they don't wish to see or hear."

If the book has a hero, it's probably Ruth Andreas-Friedrich, a journalist who didn't turn away. Along with her partner, the conductor Leo Borchard, she ran a resistance group named Uncle Emil, risking her life to protect Jews, help them escape, and support other groups battling the Nazis. All this makes her much braver than I've ever been.

But I equally admire her refusal to be sanctimonious about those who, fearing prison or worse, didn't rise up against the dictatorship. She had the rare virtue of being righteous without being self-righteous.

Copyright 2026, NPR, Fresh Air

After “An American Marriage,” her wildly successful 2018 novel, Tayari Jones signed a contract for her next book to be about a woman grappling with gentrification in modern Atlanta.

She tried to write that story. But it wasn’t doing that “magical thing that lets you know you have art,” she says on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “It was a good idea. But the book wasn’t booking, as my students say.”

And then 2020 happened. A million Americans died from COVID, including some of Jones’ friends. Then George Floyd was murdered. Protests rocked the country. Jones started to wonder if writing a novel even mattered. And then she got sick with an autoimmune disorder.

She started to write again just to soothe herself.

The new story “kept me company the same way reading a book may keep someone company,” she tells host Kerri Miller. “I loved [main characters] Annie and Niecy. I was eager to see what would become of them. I was delighted with the minor characters. I enjoyed visiting with them — asking them the questions of their heart. And asking the same questions of my own heart.”

The result is “Kin,” Jones newest novel, and by all accounts, this story is doing that “magical thing” that good books do. It’s already an Oprah Book Pick and a New York Times Bestseller.

Jones talks about all of this and more with Miller — including the power of female friends and the grief of family lost and found — on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas.

Guest:

• Tayari Jones is a professor of writing at Emory University and the author of four novels, including “Kin,” her newest book, which was published in February.

Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

Charlotte Glover of Parnassus Books and Gifts in Ketchikan, Alaska, recommends a novel that will immerse you deeply in the Pacific Northwest.

She appreciates the lovely characters, focus on nature, and beautiful writing of Eileen Garvin’s novel “Crow Talk.” Garvin gained national attention for her novel “The Music of Bees,” and her new novel “Bumblebee Season” comes out April 21.

For Glover, it was the mention of crows in the title that first drew her to “Crow Talk”: crows and ravens are of huge importance across the Pacific Northwest, from her bookstore’s location in the Alaskan panhandle to the novel’s setting in the Hood River area of Oregon.

The story follows Frankie, an ornithologist who has retreated to a small family cabin by a lake to mourn the loss of her father and figure out a path to finish her dissertation on spotted owls. It’s autumn, and the only other residents are a family, Anne and Tim and their five-year-old autistic son, who isn't speaking.

As Glover explains, these lonely, wayward characters find each other and converge over caring for a baby crow. Frankie and Anne forge a friendship as they care for both the bird and the boy.

“Nature is a huge character in this book,” says Glover, “It’s a book that you can touch, smell, feel, taste, and hear. That's always what I'm looking for in a book is an immersive experience.”

At the start of the year, Anthony Palmini was taken down by a terrible cold — the kind that made him feel as if there were a pair of hands squeezing his throat whenever he tried to speak. The sickness would be disruptive for most. But for Palmini, a rising audiobook narrating star, it was nearly disastrous.

Palmini, a Bronx native who's living what he calls "a regular life" in New York's Westchester County suburbs, has become a leading figure in the "romantasy" audio publishing world. That's the literature genre combining romance (think fewer beefy Fabio-types and more strong female leads) with fantasy (replete with dragons, vampires and magic-wielding faeries).

He's the voice of some of the genre's most famous MMCs: aka male main characters, aka the internet's favorite "book boyfriends." His deep, resonant voice — especially as Rhysand in the spicy megahit series "A Court of Thorns and Roses" by Sarah J. Maas, and Kingfisher in the breakout "Fae & Alchemy" series by Callie Hart — makes fans swoon and provides fodder for memes.

But when he was sick, he said: "I had all these projects ready to go and my voice was gone for two weeks. And then the week after that, when I tried to record, it was just like I couldn't do anything," Palmini told NPR during a recent interview.

He nearly missed deadlines for six new book projects.

"Before I would just brush it off, and now it's like, 'Oh no, this is a part of my job!'" he said, gesturing to his throat.

It's a scary situation he doesn't want to find himself in again. Because these days, he's busier than ever. Last year, he recorded more than 50 book titles. This year, he's on track to double that.

A niche celebrity is born

Success has been hard-earned for the 44-year-old. And he's been thrilled by the love he's received from romantasy fans who are obsessed with his baritone voice. It's been a decades-long grind.

"I started out wanting to just act, and then that turned into editing and directing. And I've always liked comedy, so stand up comedy and sketch was always in the back of my mind. And being in New York, why not try that out? And so I did that for a while," Palmini said.

He got his first voiceover job by accident around 2015, recording placeholder vocals for an MTV spot when he worked there as a show editor. The bosses decided to keep his voice for the actual broadcast.

But the circuitous journey to admittedly niche celebrity makes perfect sense in retrospect.

As a kid, Palmini was obsessed with comic books. He'd read the panels out loud, coming up with distinct sounds for the villains, heroes and comic relief in the pages. His father, Antonio Palmini, inspired him to work on his vocal range.

"He dreamed of being a radio host," the younger Palmini recalled. "He would practice doing sports recaps using a tape recorder."

Eventually, they shared the tape recorder. "He would say, 'Go, do your own radio show.'" He still has those cassette tapes.

When he was a teenager, Palmini got his first job at a Blockbuster video store. He loved answering the phone, and a coworker had noticed that when Palmini was "super relaxed," he sounded — well, different. "There's like a voice that's coming out that sounds kind of, dare I say, sexy," he said, recalling his friend's words.

From then on, whenever customers called, Palmini would put on the voice. He honed it, making small modifications to get it just right.

"Because the phone felt like a microphone, and so every time I would pick up people would be like, 'Whoa, who is this?'" he said.

Women would come into the store expecting to find a tall, burly grown man. Instead they'd find a scrawny, nerdy teenage boy, he said, laughing.

Nearly 30 years later, fans are still surprised by a seeming mismatch between Palmini's physical appearance and the gravelly voice he puts on for his heartthrob characters. Palmini is slender and compact, 5 feet 9 inches, with a sweet disposition.

Compare that to the characters he plays: usually centuries-old faeries, who tower over their love interests at well over 7 feet. They're brooding, morally gray and often wield dark shadow powers. (In the romantasy world, it's a classic archetype: a "shadow daddy.")

Romantasy ‘continues to win the day’

Romantasy is one of the fastest-growing literary genres in the world. Book sales in the U.S. alone reached 33.1 million in 2025, growing 3 percent compared to the previous year, according to Brenna Connor, a book industry analyst at Circana, which tracks consumer spending. That's on top of the genre's double-digit growth in both 2023 and 2024.

The thirst for audio versions of the books is also proving to be a powerful market force. Audiobook sales revenue topped $2.22 billion in 2024, 13 percent over the previous year, the Audio Publishers Association's most recent annual survey found. The biggest gains were seen in romance, up by 30 percent, and science fiction/fantasy, up by 21 percent.

"On a genre basis, romantasy continues to win the day," Sean McManus, president of the Audio Publishers Association, told NPR in December.

Another trend boosting both book and audio sales is immersive reading: reading the text of the story while also listening to it being performed by professionals.

"It's allowing people to, quite literally, as the name implies, immerse themselves in these books in multiple, multiple ways," Lexi Ayala told NPR.

Ayala and her sister, Nicole Holleman, host a romantasy podcast called Fantasy Fangirls, in which they laugh over the steamiest scenes in the books they're reading. They're also massive fans of Palmini's.

"This man has completely stolen my heart. I will never be the same," Holleman said.

In fact, when the audio version of the second book in the Fae & Alchemy series, Brimstone, was released in November, they made special plans.

"We got ourselves an Airbnb and they had a boom box, so we hit play and we had the audiobook going as we were reading. It was our way of staying at the exact same place as we were reading a book for the very first time together," Ayala said.

The audiobook is 20 hours and 41 minutes long.

Palmini plays the role of the filthy-mouthed Kingfisher, as well as all of the other male characters in the book.

"The way that he elevates audiobook narration is so incredible. It's so much fun to be able to really hear it and read it. And also, just as a reader, I pick up on a lot more, I remember a lot more," Ayala added.

Intimacy is the ‘booby prize’

Jasmine Bina, a brand strategist who studies behavior, trends and culture, has a theory on why these types of books have women of all ages spellbound.

"It's not just the dragons. It's not just the sex. It's justice," she told NPR. Bina posits that these stories are not primarily about desire. They are about vengeance and the heroine's quest for order. Once she asserts that, then she can experience the intimacy that she's seeking — which Bina calls the "booby prize."

Those themes of justice and good triumphing over evil are deeply rewarding for Palmini as an actor, too. The juicy, complicated characters "who go on a hero's journey" are the most fun to play, he said. It's also what he reminds himself to focus on when he's recording an especially graphic sex scene.

Even now, after recording more than 120 racy books across the full "chili pepper spectrum" — that's how people on BookTok rate the level of spiciness in a book — he blushes when talking about steamy lines that have become famous among romantasy readers.

"I get a little embarrassed in the beginning, but then I go, 'Okay, my job is to portray this character sincerely in the scene and the sincerity is spicy.' So you got to go with it and go for it all the way," Palmini said.

Ironically, when he landed the role of Rhysand in GraphicAudio's 2022 dramatized audiobook adaptation, Palmini had no idea what he was getting into. He'd never read romance novels and was clueless about the ACOTAR series' global reach.

Eventually, while Palmini was recording the second book in the series, the director on the project suggested he do some research.

"Just go online. Go on TikTok. Go check out what this book is," she told him. He was flabbergasted by what he found.

In retrospect, he was glad he hadn't done it before the audition. "I think that that would have rattled me," he said.

Instead, he went in without all of that added pressure of knowing the fandom surrounding his character. "I think because I didn't know, I was just like, 'Let me just be truthful.'"

He's trying to take that same attitude moving forward in his own life. His career continues to heat up; he's got 60 new books to record between now and August, he said.

Palmini anticipates the genre becoming even bigger, too. He compares the current clamoring for romantasy-based intellectual property to the comic-book craze that took over film and television for more than a decade.

"I feel like now we're heading into that space where it's just like anything that's romance, if it's good, we're going to turn it into a movie or TV show," Palmini said. That could open new doors for him, ones that have previously been hard to get through.

He added: "It's a great time to be in the genre." And he wants to take advantage of every opportunity.

Copyright 2026, NPR

Six books have been named finalists for the 2026 International Booker Prize. Formerly known as the Man Booker International Prize, this honor is presented annually for a work of fiction that was originally written in a language other than English, then translated into English and published in the U.K. and/or Ireland.

In a moment in which international relations are dominating news headlines around the globe, three of these shortlisted novels explore pivotal moments in world history: imperialist Japan-controlled Taiwan in the 1930s, Nazi-era Germany and the 1979 Revolution in Iran.

"With narratives that capture moments from across the past century, these books reverberate with history," author Natasha Brown, chair of this year's International Booker Prize jury, said in a statement.

"While there's heartbreak, brutality, and isolation among these stories, their lasting effect is energizing. Rereading each book, we judges found hope, insight and burning humanity — along with unforgettable characters to whom I'm sure readers will return again and again."

This year's shortlist particularly celebrates female authors and translators: Five of the authors and four of the translators are women.

As well as hailing from four continents, the shortlisted authors and translators come from remarkably diverse professional backgrounds: Taiwan's Yáng Shuāng-zǐ writes manga and video game scripts, and Bulgaria's Rene Karabash is a well-established actor as well as author.

The winning author and translator will be announced on May 19. They will split a prize of £50,000 (about $66,000).

The finalists are:

‘The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran’ by Shida Bazyar, translated from German by Ruth Martin

This is a multigenerational tale told by four different family members — first during the Iranian Revolution of 1979, then as the family seeks a new home in West Germany – that takes readers back to Iran, and the Iranian people's struggle to come to a new political and social reality during the Green Revolution of 2009.

In Australia's The Saturday Paper, Rhoda Kwan wrote that “The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran” is "a quietly beautiful exploration of the trauma of losing one's homeland to a savage regime, the novel is testament to how hope and the revolutionary spirit endure in the face of crushing tyranny, how courage cannot be fully stamped out."

‘She Who Remains’ by Rene Karabash, translated from Bulgarian by Izidora Angel

An independent-minded young woman named Bekja, living in Albania's rural Accursed Mountains, escapes an arranged marriage, reshapes her life and decides to live as a man. That declaration sets off a chain reaction in the community, ultimately separating Bekja from the person she loves the most.

The International Booker Prize judges called “She Who Remains” “an exquisitely written, brilliantly observed story about a young woman in a contemporary Albanian tribal society, and a blood feud that sets off her journey to self-discovery.”

‘The Director’ by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from German by Ross Benjamin

This novel is the fictionalized story of real-life Austrian film maker G.W. Pabst, who fled a prominent career in Nazi Germany to make a new life in Hollywood. Due to his ailing mother, however, he returns to his native country, where the regime begins pressuring him to make propaganda.

In The New Yorker, critic David Denby called “The Director” a "complex entertainment—a sorrowful fable of artistic and moral collapse, but also a novel composed with entrancing freedom, even bravura."

‘On Earth As It Is Beneath’ by Ana Paula Maia, translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan

This is a horror novella set in a remote penal colony in which every full moon, the warden releases the inmates into the wilderness — only to hunt them down. In The New York Times, critic Gabino Iglesias enthused that “On Earth As It Is Beneath” is "a must read for those who like their poetry written in blood."

‘The Witch’ by Marie NDiaye, translated from French by Jordan Stump

This novel is the oldest of this year's crop of shortlisted nominees: It was originally published in French in 1996. Its protagonist is Lucie, a not terribly gifted witch, who passes on her familial powers to her own daughters, Maud and Lise. Vulture critic Jasmine Vojdani wrote of “The Witch:” "This is NDiaye at her disquieting best."

‘Taiwan Travelogue’ by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King

This novel, which already won the 2024 National Book Award for translated literature, traces a year-long journey through Taiwan by a (fictional) young Japanese novelist, Aoyama Chizuko, a young writer of voracious appetites.

Chizuko has been invited to Taiwan by the Japanese government, which currently controls the island; once there, she meets her Taiwanese interpreter, Chizuru, who enraptures Chizuko. New York Times reviewer Shahnaz Habib wrote that “Taiwan Travelogue” is "a delightfully slippery novel about how power shapes relationships, and what travel reveals and conceals."

The judges for the 2026 International Booker prize are author Natasha Brown; writer, broadcaster and professor Marcus du Sautoy; translator Sophie Hughes; writer, editor and bookseller Troy Onyango; and novelist and columnist Nilanjana S. Roy.

Copyright 2026, NPR

This week, the Supreme Court heard arguments on the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s executive order that would undo birthright citizenship. That long-established legal principle was enshrined in the 14th Amendment. In part, it says: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens."

In her new book, professor and writer Daisy Hernandez says that legal definition is just one layer of a complicated idea. Citizenship is really about who gets to belong.

“We are citizens of the stories we tell,” she writes. “We belong to the stories we scribe about democracy and authoritarianism, about borders and neighbors, about love and grief and one another.”

Hernandez joins host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas for a remarkably relevant discussion about her book, “Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth.” She uses her own family’s immigration story as a starting point to examine how class, race, sexism and nationalism all impact who gets to claim U.S. citizenship. She and Miller also talk about how citizenship has evolved over the course of American history, often becoming a proxy for race.

Guest:

• Daisy Hernandez is a writer and a professor at Northwestern University. Her new book is “Citizenship: Notes on an American Myth.” Her previous books include “The Kissing Bug” and a memoir, “A Cup of Water Under My Bed.”

Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.

For more than a decade, the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop has provided creative writing classes to people in Minnesota correctional facilities. That work has led to the creation of a first-of-its-kind national independent press.

Led by an editorial board of both people impacted by the carceral system and those without these experiences, Lost Kite Editions aims to publish writing from across genres and communities.

For more about the project, MPR News host Nina Moini talked with Mike Alberti, executive director of the Minnesota Prison Writing Project, and Zeke Caligiuri, a documentarian and Lost Kite Editions director of archives.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

The first essay in Joan Didion’s famous collection “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” is an odd bit of true crime writing titled “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.” It covers the case of Lucille Miller, a “housewife’ who was accused of killing her husband in 1964 and convicted in 1965 — and includes Didion's signature blend of smart, beautiful prose and deadpan disdain.

Didion describes San Bernadino County, Calif., where the murder took place as, among other things, “the country of the teased hair and the Capris and the girls for whom all life's promise comes down to a waltz-length white wedding dress and the birth of a Kimberly or a Sherry or a Debbi and a Tijuana divorce and a return to hairdressers' school. ‘We were just crazy kids,’ they say without regret, and look to the future. The future always looks good in the golden land, because no one remembers the past.”

One of these ambitionless girls, Didion implies, is Lucille Miller, who named her eldest daughter Debra (Debbie for short). In 1964, Debbie was a 14-year-old facing the death of her father and the imminent loss of her mother. Debra Miller has now published her own book “The Most Wonderful Terrible Person: A Memoir of Murder in the Golden State” with She Writes Press, a hybrid publisher.

Miller opens her memoir with a reflection on her unsolicited relationship with Didion. Miller found it offensive and unsympathetic, writing: “She taught her children to be offended, too, and I hated the essay until I had enough hindsight to see it through new eyes many years later.”

Indeed, it is likely this distinction — Miller being related to the subject of one of the most famous literary essayists' essays — that will prompt many people to pick up the book, although those looking for a Didionesque narrative will be disappointed, as there is not an ounce of cynicism in it.

Instead, “The Most Wonderful Terrible Person” is a deeply sincere, if sometimes jumbled, reckoning with a life gone off its already rickety rails. Miller's home life before her father's death and her mother's imprisonment was far from picture perfect. Born in Guam where her father, then a military dentist, was stationed, Miller's parents first relocated to Japan and then to Oregon before finally moving to Southern California.

One disturbing anecdote from those early years involves a crying 5-year-old Miller telling her father that her beloved dog, Shep, was too enthusiastic and knocked her down; “Out of ‘love for me,’” Miller writes, “my father gets his shotgun, takes Shep out back, and shoots him… I understood that something awful happened to Shep and it was my fault.”

Both of Miller's parents were physically abusive — and their parents, she learns, were too — but where her father was largely emotionally distant, her mother was more unpredictable with her affections. Lucille ran hot and cold, sometimes telling her daughter that she preferred raising her younger siblings because they were boys, and other times taking her out on shopping sprees and lavishing her with affection.

The defining event of Miller's youth, though, is her father's death and her mother's trial and imprisonment. The kids weren't allowed to see their mother for a while after she first went to jail, and when they finally did and asked her when they'd all be able to go home, she told them: “As soon as this is all over.”

“‘This,’” Miller writes, “came to mean a lot of things, the unspoken things. That day, 'this' meant legal proceedings. Later, it meant the allegation of murder, and later still, a trial. Those abstractions didn't mean anything to us yet. Each 'this' was a component unto itself. 'This' went on and on. It was easier not to call anything by its name, which made it too real, too unbearable. This was momentary, doable. Anybody could do this for a while.”

Not talking about what was really going on became, or perhaps already had been, a pattern in the family.

Miller writes about the events that followed: how she and her brothers helped smuggle drugs, alcohol, and makeup into the prison Lucille was sent to; how they moved around a lot between different family members and friends, often separated from one another and from their baby sister who was born shortly after Lucille was convicted; how they the siblings all began using drugs and alcohol to cope and struggled with substance use disorders for years.

But even though she details these and other troubles both during and after Lucille's imprisonment, the memoir rarely digs deep into any real analysis of what was going on.

Still, Miller's book is moving in its rawness, in its ability to lay out how trauma can derail a person's life without them ever really recognizing it. An especially astute moment is when, following Lucille's death in 1986, Miller realizes that her mother owed money to each and every one of the people attending her memorial.

And still, Miller writes, “They had loved her, been caught in her spell, believed she was innocent of murdering my father, and now that she was gone, they missed her. She had made each one of them believe they were her best friend and that they were the most fascinating, fabulous person in the world. And now here they all were. Who was going to make them feel better than they were now?”

Even someone terrible, Miller recognizes, can be wonderful in some circumstances, to some people; she herself behaved terribly to many, and her regret and grief over her own behavior is palpable.

Miller spent the second half of her life teaching English at a girls' high school in Los Angeles, and although she is now retired, one very much gets the sense that she's attempted, in paying attention to her students, to atone for some of her own sins. “The Most Wonderful Terrible Person” is not a confession, exactly, but it is a reckoning.

Copyright 2026, NPR

A new book by Minnesota author Louise Erdrich is always reason to celebrate.

The acclaimed writer, already graced with a Pulitzer and a National Book Award, returns this month with a collection of short stories, taken from the past 20 years of her work.

“Python’s Kiss” includes both previously published and brand new tales. Each is distinct. They include the aunt with four wedding dresses, a young girl who consoles a lovesick dog, immigrant farmers with a tenuous grip on sanity. There are also two speculative stories set in a corporately owned afterlife, stories that Erdrich says make more sense in today’s A.I. environment than they did when she wrote them.

'Python's Kiss' artwork

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Each chapter is accompanied by specially commissioned artwork by Erdrich’s daughter, Aza Erdrich Abe. Both women join Kerri Miller in the studio for this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, to talk about the writing, the collaboration and the surprises in “Python’s Kiss.”

Guests:

• Louise Erdrich is the award-winning author of many novels as well as volumes of poetry, children’s books, and a memoir of early motherhood. She is also the owner of Birchbark Books in Minneapolis, a small independent bookstore. Her new book is “Python’s Kiss,” a collection of short stories.

• Aza Erdrich Abe is an artist who collaborated on illustrations for “Python’s Kiss.” She’s also been the cover artist for her mom since 2012.

Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

A book can be a vehicle of empathy, inviting us to walk around in someone else’s world for a while.

Elizabeth Mattson of Henry's Books in Spearfish, South Dakota, says her top pick for novels in this category is "Theo of Golden" by Allen Levi.

Here’s the scenario: In the southern U.S. city of Golden, there’s a bustling coffee shop called The Chalice with 92 pencil-drawn portraits of townspeople, created by a local artist.

When Theo, an elderly man from Portugal, arrives in Golden and decides to settle there, the portraits speak to him. He begins purchasing them one by one and gifting them to the individuals depicted in the portraits.

These acts of conversation, connection, and generosity ripple outward through the community.

Running through the story is a question: Who is Theo, and why is he there?

For readers who prefer to listen to their books, Mattson also says the narrator in the audiobook is excellent.

What does it mean to live richly, even radiantly, while facing the impending darkness of climate change? How do we stand in awe at the planet we see around us even as we doubt that humanity will intervene in time to save much of what we love about it?

Terry Tempest Williams’ new book, “The Glorians,” wrestles with that unraveling — the pull of one strand could undo the pattern that weaves us all together.

And yet, as host Kerri Miller says, this book is unexpectedly consoling too.

William writes this from her home in the Utah desert: “I can bear witness with awe and gratitude, translating what I see and feel, and then share it as an offering of joy or bewilderment or love.”

Williams joins Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to talk about glorians — those small moments of awe that anchor our attention — and how to live wide open, holding nothing back, even in the face of despair.

Guest:

• Terry Tempest Williams is an award-winning author of seventeen books of creative nonfiction, including the environmental classic, “Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place.” She also teaches at Harvard School of Divinity. Her new book is, “The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary.”

Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.

Ryan Nelson was at home in Minneapolis listening to a London radio station stream when something stopped him in his tracks. 

"I hear on the radio — unmistakably — I hear Dakota language," Nelson recalled. "I rushed over to the computer. I'm like, 'Who is this?'" 

The voice belonged to Justis Brokenrope — a musician, record collector and DJ spinning his regular set on NTS Radio, an internet station. Brokenrope, Sicangu Lakota, was doing what he does: unearthing rare Native recordings and spinning them for digital audiences. 

That moment of recognition, across an ocean, set something in motion.

Nelson, an author and artist who has been learning Dakota for several years and traces his own lineage to Dakota relatives in the Minnesota River valley, had just received funding for a series of artbooks. He knew immediately he'd found one of his subjects. 

As it turns out, the two men live about a mile apart in Minneapolis. 

Together, Nelson and Brokenrope spent a day poring over Brokenrope's personal archive — vinyl records, 8-tracks, cassettes, collectibles — to produce the Wathéča Records Sourcebook, a compact but dense compendium of contemporary Native music. The 120-plus-page book is packed with album covers, photos, posters and set lists drawn from roughly a quarter of Brokenrope's 250-to-300-piece collection. 

Think of it as a treasure map. Readers can use it as a guide to find songs on streaming platforms or dig through internet record collector auction sites on their own. 

Brokenrope has spent years doing exactly that kind of digging — pulling records from dollar bins, rescuing overlooked artists from obscurity, more recently scouring online. His collection runs from country to rock to heavy metal. Much of it is genuinely rare: recordings made by artists from rural reservation communities who traveled long distances to record and paid out of pocket for small vinyl print runs. 

"It's sort of this underrepresented, hidden part of the music scene," Nelson said. "And here's this guy, Justis, sort of unearthing it." 

But before any of that could happen, the two had to build a sense of trust. 

"With anything Native, I'm always second-, third-guessing — who should I be working with? Is this person the right person to handle this material?” Brokenrope said. 

He invited Nelson to his kitchen table. They asked each other questions. Nelson showed him books he admired as models for a possible collaboration. 

"I liked all of it," Brokenrope said. 

Brokenrope said the experience of flipping through the finished book mirrors the thrill of finding a rare record — like the day he came across Electric Warriors, an album by Winterhawk, a heavy metal band. 

"I saw the cover before I ever heard the music," he said. "It's four uncles posted up on the bank of a river in California, in partial regalia, but also wearing blue jeans — with all their instruments — and they look ready to fight. It's just a really hard album cover." 

Nelson wove Dakota phrases throughout the book, a nod to that first radio moment and to Brokenrope's work as a DJ.

The Wathéča Records Sourcebook is selling fast — available at independent bookstores in Minneapolis and online — and the two are already weighing a second edition. 

For Nelson, it keeps coming back to that day, hearing a familiar language from an unexpected place. 

"Just to hear Justis speaking in Dakota — it was just a really special moment," Nelson said. "When I listen to him, I'm so proud." 

When Ember Reichgott Junge was a young state senator representing the New Hope area in the mid-1990s, she walked into a partner dance studio looking for a husband.

She did find one, but it turns out, he doesn't dance. However, she did find a lifelong passion: a deep connection to partner dancing.

Years later, she looked into its impact on health and wellbeing — and wrote a book about it. In "The Dance of Resilience," Reichgott Junge explores the surprising ways dance can transform people’s lives and health.

She gave Minnesota Now a closer look at the book.

Use the audio player above to listen to the full conversation.

Subscribe to the Minnesota Now podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

We attempt to make transcripts for Minnesota Now available the next business day after a broadcast. When ready they will appear here.

Historian and best-selling author Ibram X. Kendi said he launched his new book in Minneapolis, ahead of its official March 17 release, after the surge of federal immigration enforcement in the city.

The Howard University professor authored the international bestseller “How to Be an Antiracist” in 2019.

His latest book, “Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age,” examines authoritarianism and its relationship to the "great replacement” conspiracy theory.

Kendi reached out to the Black Collective Foundation MN to host a talk and signing at Westminster Presbyterian Church on Saturday evening.

Ahead of the event, Kendi spoke with MPR News about the new book, its Minnesota connections and why he wanted Minneapolis to be the first stop on a national book tour.

Editor's note: The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How would you describe the book’s central argument?

“Chain of Ideas” chronicles the resurgence and global spread of what's known as ”great replacement” theory. This is a political theory that suggests powerful elites are enabling peoples of color to replace or displace the lives and livelihoods of white people who apparently now need authoritarian protection.

When we hear politicians say, “immigrants are invading the nation” or “they're poisoning the blood of the nation” or “diversity is discrimination” — politicians are typically using this theory to justify the erosion of democracy in the name of national security.

The book chronicles that utility or use, not only in the United States under the Trump administration but even in Europe and Latin America and South Asia. This is a theory that's being used by authoritarians everywhere to more or less manipulate people into consenting to their own domination.

Why the title ‘Chain of Ideas’?

I took that from a French thinker in the late 1700s who was basically arguing to the French monarchy that controlling people through iron [chains] is sort of an old way of doing it, and a more effective way to control people is by a chain of their own ideas.

It really speaks to how propaganda seeks to constrain and control people, particularly towards authoritarian ends.

What made you want to write this book?

I was really seeking to understand how politicians were going about seeking to get people to support policies — and even policymakers — that were ultimately harming them and the rest of us.

Why start your book tour here?

I really wanted to visit Minnesota to talk about “Chain of Ideas” for two major reasons.

First, because in many ways, Minnesota became — and really still is — this sort of ground zero for the many stories and ideas and campaigns that I chronicle in “Chain of Ideas,” in which you have these politicians essentially going about occupying particular institutions, or even states, to “free those people from the invaders.” And, ultimately, the people that they claim they're trying to save or protect, they end up harming.

Minnesota became an obvious example of that, which I think allowed people to see that these so-called saviors were actually harming everyone.

Secondly, I think the solidarity that emerged in Minnesota to resist the occupation has galvanized and inspired people around the United States and around the world. And I suspected that as I travel around the country, people will ask me, “Well, what can we do?”

It's one thing for me to say, “Be like Minnesotans.” It's another thing for me to learn from people in Minnesota how they did it, so I can relay that to people across the country and the world.

When you're saying ‘ground zero’ for what you're chronicling, what time period are you referring to? What actions and harms?

Let me just give an example. The book is on great replacement theory. This theory was named by a French novelist named Renaud Camus, who wrote the book “The Great Replacement” in 2011 and a subsequent book in 2018 called “You Will Not Replace Us!” which was taken after the chant in Charlottesville, Va. In that book, he argued that the solution to the great replacement was what he and others have called “remigration,” which is this all-out, systemic effort to remove people of color from states, from nations.

The Trump administration has sought to execute its “mass deportation program” particularly in a state like Minnesota. You have politicians all over the world who are campaigning on or trying to execute similar-type programs, as people in Minnesota have experienced.

Do you have any Minnesota specific references in the book by chance?

My book was finished before the occupation started. However, I have references to the murder of George Floyd and the aftermath of that murder, particularly around those who presented those who were demonstrating against police violence in Minnesota and around the world as the problems, as opposed to police violence itself.

Because that furthered this narrative within great replacement theory that anti-racist protests were actually anti-white. That they weren't seeking to create equal opportunity for all or ensuring no one is subjected to police violence.

Like the demonstrations against police violence were misconstrued or kind of twisted to seem anti-white?

Yes. So, to give a larger context, what “Chain of Ideas” shows is that great replacement theory has evolved from this idea that Black and brown immigrants are coming to replace the “native” white population. The theory is also stating that African Americans are stealing the jobs of qualified white people, and they're replacing them in these coveted positions.

That idea really emerged in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. Because after the murder of George Floyd, you had this surge of interest in trying to eradicate racial disparities and inequities. And in the aftermath of that, you had these great replacement theorists stating that these people were not trying to create equal opportunity for everyone — what they were trying to do is replace white people and take jobs and depress the livelihoods of white people.

And that is how they were able to undermine those racial justice efforts.

What do you think this book offers Minnesotans? Or what do you hope that Minnesotans take away from the book?

I think that people in Minnesota have almost certainly heard or been exposed to great replacement theory, although they may not have recognized what was being told to them as great replacement theory.

I suspect people in Minnesota have been told ideas like “those Black people” or “those immigrants” or “those Muslims” are coming to take their livelihoods or their lives or their jobs or even their power.

And so what I'm hoping “Chain of Ideas” will allow them to see is, not only that this is great replacement theory, but also how these theorists and propagandists and politicians have used this as a pretext to state to Minnesotans that they need protection.

I think that was the pretext for invading Minnesota with all these ICE agents. It was justified by this idea that those immigrants are there, harming people in Minnesota, even as immigrants are less likely to break the law than U.S. citizens.

I think it gives people in Minnesota a context, frankly not just a national but even a global context, of what the state has experienced for several months.

Was there anything that surprised you while researching this book? Or did it expand or challenge your own thinking in any way?

I think people are going to be shocked by how far this theory has spread and the power of the people who are espousing it. And even the wealth of the people who are financing the political parties that are expressing these theories, many of whom are some of the wealthiest people in the world.

For people who are concerned about political polarization and the impact of great replacement theory, is there something that you advise people do? Are there any takeaways?

I don't think we are polarized politically by coincidence. If you think about great replacement theory — attempts to make people believe that different religious or racial or ethnic groups are political enemies, and that this other group is coming to destroy you — it fundamentally is going to lead to political polarization. That's actually the point.

I'm hoping that by reading this book, people can see why certain politicians are trying to divide us. Why they don't want us to see people who don't look like we do — or who don't practice a similar culture or the same religion — to believe that that difference is danger.

I want people to see why certain elected officials are trying to convince us of that, and how that's ultimately not only driving a wedge between us, not only putting us at war with each other, but ultimately allowing those who are doing that to divide and conquer and exploit us.

Because that's ultimately the point: to get everyday people warring against each other so the oligarch could continue to dominate and exploit us all.

On The Thread’s Ask a Bookseller series, we talk to independent booksellers all over the country to find out what books they’re most excited about right now.

Do you love a good villain story? 

Sarah DiMaria of Cavalier House Books in Denham Springs, Louisiana, does, and she’s raving about Rachel Hochhauser’s debut “Lady Tremaine.” This retelling of Cinderella from the point of view of the stepmother is being marketed as “Bridgerton” meets “Circe.”  

Lady Etheldreda Verity Isolde Tremaine Bramley finds herself in charge of two daughters and a step-daughter in a dilapidated house. As her frustrations and worries mount, she supports her family by hunting with her peregrine falcon. 

DiMaria particularly appreciated the way the bond between the protagonist and her fierce, predatory partner is written. 

Lady Tremaine is determined to see her daughters married well so that her family can have financial security. But at what cost? Especially when she discovers the prince’s family is not as charming as it seems on the surface... 

What unfolds, DiMaria says, is a story rooted in female relationships and forging your own path in the world. 

When it comes to megaliths — massive stones set in place by prehistoric people — Americans are probably most familiar with Stonehenge. But the U.K.’s landscape is punctuated with thousands of these majestic stones. Some are set in circles, others in rows. A few even form doorways that align with the sun at solstice.

Long revered for their mythical presence, megaliths woo both curiosity seekers and die-hard enthusiasts. Fiona Robertson falls into that second camp. She was captivated by Britain’s ancient stones from an early age. When she met her husband, Stephen, a shared love of megaliths drew them together.

And it was the megaliths who comforted her and gave her room to grieve when Stephen was diagnosed with terminal cancer.

Robertson’s new book, “Stone Lands,” is part homage to the grandeur and mystery of megaliths and part memoir of a wrenching loss. This week, on Big Books and Bold Ideas, Robertson shares her love and her consolation with Kerri Miller, as they verbally explore Britain’s megaliths together.

Guest:

• Fiona Robertson is a writer and dedicated stone-seeker. Her new book is titled, “Stone Lands: A Journey of Darkness and Light through Britain’s Ancient Places.”

Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.

There's a famous scene in Betty Smith's bestselling coming-of-age novel “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” in which Smith describes the relationship her protagonist, 11-year-old Francie Nolan, has with her local public library: "Francie thought that all the books in the world were in that library and she had a plan about reading all the books in the world."

I couldn't help but think of little Francie Nolan — who, like Smith, grew up in the tenements of Brooklyn in the early 20th century and aimed, as a young girl, to read every book she could find — as I tore through librarian Jarrett Dapier's debut young adult graphic novel, “Wake Now in the Fire.”

The book, illustrated by AJ Dungo, is a fictionalized account of real-life events. In 2013, Chicago Public Schools (CPS) suddenly restricted access to Marjane Satrapi's memoir, “Persepolis,” without explanation of its decision-making process, in some of the school system's classrooms.

This now world-famous autobiographical work, told in comics, tells the story of a young girl and her family as they endure and witness the struggle and violence of the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, and all that comes after.

Fictional high schooler Aditi, one of the central characters in Dapier's book, identifies with little Marji, “Persepolis” precocious, head-strong narrator and protagonist. Like many other students at her high school, Aditi is powerfully affected by the book ban. She describes her experience of moving from Mumbai to Chicago, where the bulk of “Wake Now” takes place, in terms of her interactions with public libraries.

As a young girl in Mumbai, she is allowed to take out only a single book a day. She gets around this strict rule by checking one book out first thing in the morning, reading as quickly and diligently as possible, then returning to take out a new book once the librarians have changed shifts at noon.

When Aditi moves to Chicago, a relocation her parents make in part to protect their family's freedoms, she is astounded to learn that she can check out up to 30 books at a time.

Like Satrapi's young alter-ego, Aditi, too, has strong-willed parents who encourage their daughter to "think for myself. To learn, and to be free." But the focus in Dapier's work, as in Satrapi's, is not so much on the actions of adults as it is on the effects of those actions on young people and their reactions.

In preparation for the book — which stemmed in part from a graduate thesis paper Dapier wrote — the author interviewed students at Lane Technical College Preparatory High School in Chicago.

This is the school that acted as the basis for the fictionalized high school in the book. The students at Lane Tech were at the frontlines of reporting on and resisting the “Persepolis” ban.

Indeed two seniors, who were at the center of many related activities at the time, appeared in a March 2013 episode of Chicago Tonight to eloquently summarize what this experience had meant to them and why they had chosen, essentially for the first time in their lives, to organize a protest in response to events. "It's time for us to have our voices heard," senior Katie McDermott told the press.

The plot of “Wake Now in the Fire” moves seamlessly between different characters, students affected in all sorts of ways by the pulling of the book. The student journalists investigate CPS' actions, focusing, too, on gathering impact statements from as many students and teachers as they can find, and disseminating that information to the wider public.

Meanwhile, members of the banned book club at school, among others, plan actions, like a walk out, to demonstrate their objection to the CPS order. Others, like Aditi, find themselves newly invested in taking on leadership roles in their communities. But these are high schoolers, too, who are dealing with all the issues and conflicts that unfold in day-to-day life.

They worry about their grades and getting into college; they struggle with family matters; they bicker with one another even as they are learning together how to turn frustration and anger into peaceful, and meaningful, action.

Ultimately, in the novel as in life, “Persepolis” was allowed to remain in CPS libraries, and teachers, with required additional training, can teach the book in 8-10 grade classrooms. The book remains forbidden in CPS classrooms below eighth grade, due to concerns about depictions of violence.

Dapier, in an author's note, notes how the pulling of the book in 2013 "foreshadows our current moment," when, according to the American Library Association, targeted attempts to censor books continue to grow. "Censoring literature," one character in the book, a teacher, explains, "is often where oppression starts."

At the same time, young people, in Iran as well as in the U.S., have energetically, and often at great risk to themselves, taken to the streets in order to stand up for their rights. Through these actions, there's a sense of melding into something bigger than oneself — "beautiful disappearances," as one character in the book describes it.

“A Tree Grows in Brooklyn's” Francie Nolan found solace, joy, and possibility in the books she freely took out of the library, then read at her leisure in the shade of an ailanthus tree.

Countless readers over the years have identified with the power of that scene. And today, countless young people bravely continue the fight for their rights to have access to such powerful scenes and stories.

Copyright 2026, NPR

There's a three-story house in Baltimore that looks a bit imposing. You walk up the stone steps before even getting up to the porch, and then you enter the door and you're greeted with a glass case of literary awards. It's The Clifton House, formerly home of Lucille Clifton.

The National Book Award-winning poet lived there with her husband, Fred, starting in 1967 until the bank foreclosed on the house in 1980. Clifton's daughter, Sidney Clifton, has since revived the house and turned it into a cultural hub, hosting artists, readings, workshops and more. But even during a February visit, in the mid-afternoon with no organized events on, the house feels full.

"There's a presence here," Clifton House executive director Joël Díaz told me. "There's a presence here that sits at attention."

Sometimes, rooms where famous writers worked can be places of ineffable magic. Other times, they can just be rooms.

Katie da Cunha Lewin is the author of the new book, “The Writer's Room: The Hidden Worlds That Shape the Books We Love,” which explores the appeal of these rooms. Lewin is a big Virginia Woolf fan, and the very first place Lewin visited working on the book was Monk's House — Woolf's summer home in Sussex, England.

On the way there, there were dreams of seeing Woolf's desk, of retracing Woolf's steps and imagining what her creative process would feel like. It turned out to be a bit of a disappointment for Lewin — everything interesting was behind glass, she said.

Still, in the book Lewin writes about how she took a picture of the room and saved it on her phone, going back to check it and re-check it, "in the hope it would allow me some of its magic."

Let's be real, writing is a little boring. Unlike a band on fire in the recording studio, or a painter possessed in their studio, the visual image of a writer sitting at a desk click-clacking away at a keyboard or scribbling on a piece of paper isn't particularly exciting.

And yet, the myth of the writer's room continues to enrapture us. You can head to Massachusetts to see where Louisa May Alcott wrote “Little Women.” Or go down to Florida to visit the home of Zora Neale Hurston. Or book a stay at the Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald Museum in Alabama, where the famous couple lived for a time. But what, exactly, is the draw?

Lewin said in an interview that whenever she was at a book event or an author reading, an audience question about the writer's writing space came up. And yes, some of this is basic fan-driven curiosity. But also "it started to occur to me that it was a central mystery about writing, as if writing is a magic thing that just happens rather than actually labor," she said.

In a lot of ways, the book is a debunking of the myths we're presented about writers in their rooms. She writes about the types of writers who couldn't lock themselves in an office for hours on end, and instead had to find moments in-between to work on their art.

She covers the writers who make a big show of their rooms, as a way to seem more writerly. She writes about writers who have had their homes and rooms preserved, versus the ones whose rooms have been lost to time and new real estate developments.

The central argument of the book is that there is no magic formula to writing — that there is no daily to-do list to follow, no just-right office chair to buy in order to become a writer. You just have to write.

Copyright 2026, NPR