Books

It’s easy to assume that writing for children is less toiling than writing a novel for the big-brained adults of the world, but having an audience of young learners doesn’t make the task of storytelling any more painless than usual.

We tend to think of Jane Austen as the first great female novelist, whose originality paved the way for creative descendants to dazzle critics and readers. “Jane Austen’s Bookshelf” contends that virtually every part of that sentence is wrong.

When Alia Dastagir became the target of an online mob, a thought gripped her: What if the harassment never stopped? Could she survive it?

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Feb. 22, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana. (Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.) HARDCOVER FICTION 1. "Onyx Storm (Deluxe Limited Edition)" by Rebecca Yarros (Red Tower) ...

Joseph Wambaugh, the master storyteller of police dramas, whose books, films and television tales powerfully caught the hard psychic realities of lonely street cops and flawed detectives trapped in a seedy world of greed and senseless brutality, died Friday at his home in Rancho Mirage, California. He was 88.

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Feb. 15, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana. (Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.) HARDCOVER FICTION 1. "Onyx Storm (Deluxe Limited Edition)" by Rebecca Yarros (Red Tower) ...

Maybe it’s not the most sophisticated critical laurel, but Eric Puchner’s new novel, “Dream State,” made me miss my subway stop.

In 1978, Rick Steves had a good thing going at home in Edmonds, Washington – until he blew it up.

Leyna Krow writes what we could call fairy tales for adults.

Given the monastic pacing of Charlotte Wood’s “Stone Yard Devotional,” I suppose it’s appropriate that we’ve had to wait patiently for it. Wood’s fellow Australians have been praising this story about a small abbey of nuns since the novel was published in 2023. Last year, it was a finalist for Britain’s Booker Prize. And now, as though publishing were operating by steam ship, “Stone Yard Devotional” has finally arrived in the United States.

To understand Jules Feiffer the legendary comic mind, one must look to a transformative point in his young adulthood. He didn’t set his early sights on becoming one of America’s greatest satirists. But his powerful creative conscience was sparked by one event and never ebbed across nearly the next eight decades.

Leyna Krow’s newest short story collection, “Sinkhole and Other Inexplicable Voids” delivers on the fabulist elements fans of Krow’s have come to expect from her writing – an octopus love story originally published in The Spokesman-Review’s 2022 Summer Stories, a baby’s twin appearing out of nowhere, a sinkhole that improves everything tossed into it – while exploring complicated family dynamics and climate change anxiety. Instead of looking to Spokane’s past, as she did in her debut novel, “Fire Season,” “Sinkhole” is a return to the “fiction-science” (a term coined by Spokane author Sharma Shields for Krow’s writing specifically) of her first short story collection, “I’m Fine, But You Appear to be Sinking.”

What it means to be good – or not – is the infected wound at the center of Aria Aber’s debut novel, “Good Girl.” The narrator is a forlorn young woman named Nila Haddadi, and the story she tells sounds like a howl of despair transposed into the key of poetic retrospection. Indeed, the fact that this harrowing story recalls events from more than a decade ago provides the only reassurance that the narrator survived her teens.

Jenna Bush Hager, who became one of the most influential figures in publishing when she launched a book club on the “Today” show nearly six years ago, said Wednesday that she now plans to do more than just recommend books: She’s going to publish them.

Jamie Fortin dumped her heart and savings into her dream of opening a bookstore that sells romance novels. Starting the small business consumed her for more than a year, and in November, she painted the walls, then celebrated the grand opening of her shop in Old Town Alexandria, Virginia.

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Jan. 4, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana. (Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.) HARDCOVER FICTION 1. "James: A Novel" by Percival Everett (Doubleday) Last week: 1 2. "The ...

From page-turning sci-fi and real-life accounts from the wildfire frontlines to a thought-provoking look at the history of electric vehicles, the Bloomberg Green team has you covered. Here are 10 books worth packing for your holiday reading.

Patrick Hutchison’s friends were making bewildering (to him) decisions: getting married, buying houses, enrolling in grad school. He earned decent pay as a copywriter for a Seattle tech company, but his life could be broken down to his commute to work, eight hours under fluorescent lighting and the commute home.