Read about another entry on the list.Not in My Book by Katie Holt
If you loved the romantic and intellectual tension between Jess and Rory, this is a natural addition to your TBR. College classmates Rosie and Aiden have diametrically opposed literary sensibilities, but when they’re forced to team up on a writing assignment, things take a swoony turn.
In New York City a century apart, two women’s fates are bound by the dark legacy of the Midnight DiamondVisit Anna Rasche's website.
2010. Jennie is working as a runner in the Diamond District when a friend’s sudden death leaves her with a cryptic note: “Not Safe.” Her search for answers leads her to an antique jewelry box, a clue to a century-old mystery and the legend of the Midnight Diamond—a rare blue gem rumored to bring ruin to all who possess it. As Jennie is pulled deeper into a world of secrets and danger, she realizes she is not just chasing a lost treasure; she is uncovering a story that was meant to stay buried.
1910. On an ocean liner bound for New York, heiress Marcella Porter returns home after being disgraced by scandal in London. Her path collides with a charismatic nobleman and the magnificent Midnight Diamond, which she unknowingly smuggles into the city. Mesmerized by its brilliance, Marcella feels an irresistible pull toward the diamond, and when the glittering façade of her charmed life begins to crack, Marcella must decide whether the Midnight Diamond is her salvation—or her doom.
Can Jennie break the centuries-old curse before it brings more ruin? Inspired by history’s most captivating gemstone, The Cursed Diamond is a thrilling mystery about fate, obsession, and the deadly costs of ambition.
enjoys playing games, puzzling, sipping matcha, and collecting tattoos. Her creative portfolio includes an array of published fiction, poetry, and nonfiction with Oakland Arts Review, Carolina Muse, Second Story Journal, and others.
I read We Used to Live Here by Marcus Kliewer in a single sitting, trapped in a coffee shop booth with no choice but to turn the page. It was utterly captivating, so well written, and God, one of the scariest books I’ve ever read. Following a queer couple who’ve recently purchased a new home and are in the process of moving in, things shift quicker than expected in this terrifying, lightning-paced novel. I highly recommend it for thriller fans looking to dig their way out of a slump.Read about another novel on the list.
Penelope and Her Maids reconsiders the Odyssey from Penelope's point of view. Her decisions have long been considered to be the product of a fractured characterization, with no coherent human psychology possibly explaining everything she says and does. Emily Shanahan investigates this characterization, and all of Penelope's decisions, in context, reading each one of her scenes diachronically. In doing so, Penelope and Her Maids reveals how the pervasive threat of gendered violence in homeric society―a rape culture―constrains what Penelope may say and do openly.Learn more about Penelope and Her Maids at the Cornell University Press website.
The suitors attempt to fill a power vacuum in Odysseus's absence―by either marrying his wife, Penelope, or alternatively, diminishing his honor, geras, which includes the value of his possessions. As Penelope is an asset in his ledger, the only way to stay safe is to lead the suitors to believe she may become theirs at any moment. Penelope ultimately survives the Odyssey's violence. However, twelve young, enslaved girls in her home do not and ultimately demonstrate the inherent danger that men pose to women in Homer's world.
Things Fall Apart by Chinua AchebeRead about another book on the list.
Chinua Achebe was a Nigerian author who worked to unravel the stereotypes of African people. His first novel, Things Fall Apart, is set in 1890 Nigeria as the land and people are colonized by the British. Where most literature on colonialism continued racist tropes about "primitive" tribes, Achebe humanized the Igbo people through Okonkwo's story.
Things Fall Apart has become one of the pivotal works of post-colonial literature, and it gives perspective to parts of history that have long been silenced. It truly makes the reader sit with the heavy emotions Okonkwo feels, adding even more depth to the tragedy.
When her husband’s tragic death uncovers long-buried secrets, a young mother fights to protect her family and heal her heart in an emotionally resonant novel about loss, love, and second chances.Visit Mara Williams's website.
After her husband’s sudden death, Beatrice Bell retreats to her childhood home in California’s Sierra mountains with her rebellious teenage twins in tow. Her plan is to take over her parents’ antique store, ensure it survives another generation, and build a new life from the rubble of the old one.
But Bea didn’t plan on Simon, the gruff store manager with his own ambitions for the business. As they’re forced to work together, animosity gives way to grudging respect and ignites an unexpected spark. Before Bea can find her footing, everything is upended. First by River, a local boy who bears a striking resemblance to her late husband. Then by her estranged mother-in-law, who reveals devastating secrets that will test everything Bea believed about her marriage.
As Bea navigates grief, betrayal, and an unexpected connection with Simon, she finds that it may be possible to begin again, but only if she confronts the truth of her past.
Read about another book on the list.Empire of AI – Karen Hao
The most intensively reported book on the AI industry so far, Empire of AI covers the rise of OpenAI, as well as the formation of Anthropic and OpenAI chief Sam Altman’s split with Elon Musk. Parts of the book can feel a bit inside baseball, but the reporting is great and shows how the key American AI companies brought us to this point. Some early reviews of the book in 2025 suggested Hao’s take on the industry was overly negative: she has since been entirely vindicated.
Ghosts of Bandung makes the major new argument that the fates of the Black and Palestinian revolutions were bound together through the rise and fall of a larger Third World political project. Drawing on English and Arabic archives, Derek A. Ide shows how Afro-Arab solidarities shaped and were shaped by geopolitics and grand strategy. Through biographical vignettes of forgotten figures and underexplored groups, Ghosts of Bandung interweaves the histories of movement dynamics and those of contending states in the global Cold War. This story binds the United States and the Middle East―Detroit and Damascus, Oakland and Algiers―while spanning the globe. From the Sino-Soviet split to the Beijing-Jakarta Axis, this global retelling of Black Power and the Palestinian Revolution engages China, Cuba, Ghana, Indonesia, Jordan, and others. At the heart of this broader project is the hitherto untold story of CONEFO, Indonesian President Sukarno’s attempt to construct an alternative United Nations–like organization in Jakarta. Centering on 1965 and the collapse of CONEFO, Ide links the fates of Black Power and the Palestinian Revolution to the fall of Third Worldism and the “Bandung Spirit.”Learn more about Ghosts of Bandung at the University of California Press website.
others, the Cabinet Office, Home Office, and Department for International Development. Her enthusiasm for travel has taken her around the world several times, from Madagascar to the Galapagos, Guatemala to Zimbabwe, Japan, Russia, and South Korea. A playwright and screenwriter, she penned the feminist Shakespearean stage comedy NetherBard and cowrote the feature film Retreat. She lives in London and is the author of The Appeal, The Twyford Code, The Christmas Appeal, and The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels.
Tana French, Dublin Murder Squad seriesRead about another novel on the list.
In the Woods, Tana French’s debut novel, featured Detective Rob Ryan and his partner Detective Cassie Maddox. It was such a hit that it inspired the entire Dublin Murder Squad series of six books over ten years. However, interestingly, the focus shifted from Ryan to Maddox, as she proved the more popular and interesting character of the two.
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Melissa R. Collings's website.
Quite a bit, although it took us a while to get there.
My original title was Operating on the Past, which I loved because it worked on two levels. Cordelia is a spine surgeon who approaches problems as things to diagnose and fix, and she’s also operating on information from her past.
But my publisher wanted a title that put the romance more front and center. This led to a lot of back-and-forth.
Eventually, I proposed The Love Operation, which was close to one of the ideas my editor had suggested but still gave me the double meaning I wanted. Cord is essentially performing an operation on her love life, but an “operation” can also be a mission, and she definitely treats it like one.
I think it does a pretty good job of telling readers what they’re getting. Cord approaches her love life much the way she approaches surgery: identify the problem, gather the information, make a plan, fix it. Unfortunately for her, people are significantly less...[read on]
Devon Halliday’s fiction has been awarded a Pushcart Prize and distinguished by Best American Short Stories. Her writing appears in Ploughshares, One Story, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Liberties, and elsewhere. She is the author of To Stay, To Stay, To Stay (McSweeney’s), which was longlisted for the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize.
Stoner by John WilliamsRead about another entry on the list.
William Stoner gives himself entirely to the work of loving and teaching literature. In so doing, he alienates students, battles withcolleagues, dooms his marriage, and dies unremembered. It is impossible to read the account of the small victories and painful setbacks of Stoner’s life without both rooting for him and resigning oneself to his eventual disappointment. This novel maps out the long and embattled path of academia, from youthful ambition to cutthroat office politics to the fading of relevance. Through it all, Stoner somehow continues to love teaching, and to value the opportunity he has to discuss literature with successive generations of students. Stoner is a compassionate and unsparing view of the life of professors, and shows how even this apparently cushy daily grind has its share of hard and thankless labor.
Right now, I seem to be reading about awful people. Like a lot of writer/readers, I have a few books going at once and it usually feeds into what I’m working on in some way.About Murder on 34th Street, from the publisher:
I’m trying to get up the nerve to write something about Dorothy Parker, so I’m deep into a second read of Marion Meade’s 1987 biography, What Fresh Hell is This? It’s a fascinating work because Meade doesn’t pull punches; at times I find myself disliking Parker intensely. Her wit is so fast and so lethal, it puts you mind of Bruce Lee. But she didn’t always pick on people her own size and there are times you think, Oh, shut up. Like many of her era, Parker wasn’t fond of other women. But then she surprises you, showing strength and integrity when under fire from McCarthy, her genuine dedication to civil rights, her empathy for Marilyn Monroe. Her frenemyship with Lillian Hellman at the end of her life is worth an entire book. I can’t say I have Parker figured out yet. But...[read on]
From the author of The Girl in the Green Dress comes a delightful and captivating novel about a fictional murder mystery at the iconicVisit Mariah Fredericks's website.Macy's parade leading up to the holidays in historic New York City.
New York, 1932. Grace Verlander is the secret beating heart of Macy's. She's the "assistant to the assistant to the someone who's in charge", the go-to person for keeping everything running smoothly behind-the-scenes at the famous, bustling store.
It's not every day you get a letter from Santa Claus, but three days before the Macy's annual Thanksgiving Day Parade, Grace arrives at work to find a note from the store Santa Claus in her locker: someone has sent him a death threat. Shocked, Grace promises to look into it and speaks to the store detective about the parade's security, confident that they've found a solution that will keep everyone safe. But on the day of the parade, despite all their precautions, a dead body is found on one of the floats.
Using her wits and deep knowledge of the ways of the place, Grace is determined to find the killer and seek justice-not just for the dead man, but to save the reputation of this iconic store from ruin.
Steeped in glittering glamor and nostalgic wonder, this is a remarkable, unpredictable mystery set in the evocative world of one of New York's most memorable institutions.
The Incendiaries: A Novel by R.O. KwonRead about another entry on the list.
Fans of Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” will be drawn to R.O. Kwon’s debut novel about the posh Phoebe Lin and the outsider Will Kendall. The two students meet while attending a liberal arts college. Will is drawn to the beautiful and charismatic Phoebe, and Phoebe is drawn to an extremist religious cult. Before attending college, Phoebe’s mother died, and the grief she feels consumes her. In her emotionally vulnerable state, she’s drawn to a carefree and enigmatic barefoot man, John Leal. Phoebe finds purpose through John’s Christian proselytizing, as do others at the college, and he begins to assemble a group of followers. But John’s appeal is not as easily won from Will, who struggles with Phoebe's newfound commitment to what he begins to recognize as a cult. At the book’s climax, Phoebe disappears, leaving Will obsessed with finding her.
An eye-opening story of the people who make the census, the United States’ largest and most consequential dataset, and the growing threats to their crucial work.Visit danah boyd's website.
By many measures, the US census is the government’s largest non-wartime operation, and one of the world’s oldest and biggest data-making endeavors. The 2020 census required more than a decade of planning and technical work―not to mention managing nearly a quarter of a million temporary workers simultaneously―to collect data about the American public. That data was then processed to count each of 331,449,281 residents once―and only once―and in the right place. The operation is also one of the country’s most consequential. Census data determine how political power and federal funding are allocated. Census data make politics, and consequently, politics make census data. In this urgent book, danah boyd explores what it took for the Census Bureau to make the 2020 census, amidst a global pandemic and natural disasters, and while navigating political forces that constrained the budget, micro-managed the schedule, and attacked statisticians’ methods.
With rare insider access to the Census Bureau, boyd observed and interviewed hundreds of government civil servants who made the 2020 census. By documenting the perspectives of government workers, Data Are Made, Not Found provides a rare glimpse into what it takes to make democracy’s data. Each chapter reveals a different challenge―ranging from the last-minute fights about a citizenship question to the not-so-helpful help of well-intended stakeholders to avoid undercounts―and shows how civil servants responded to each problem, controversy, and hurdle. Boyd shows how many of the challenges that the Census Bureau faced in 2020 resulted from decades of political operatives, data users, and various stakeholders playing what boyd calls “Jenga politics,” weakening the administrative state for short-term political gains by removing support and adding more requirements.
Civil servants saved the 2020 census, but future censuses―and other data-making efforts related to elections, health, and the economy―are precarious. Boyd’s message is clear and compelling: protecting democracy means protecting the people and institutions that produce this data.
The Lesser Dead (2014) // Christopher BuehlmanRead about another entry on the list.
Christopher Buehlman was inspired to write The Lesser Dead from a single mental image: “a little girl with makeup on riding the subway in the 1970’s.” The story then grew from him “play[ing] around with different explanations of who she was, exactly what kind of vampire, and who it was that was seeing her.” The finished result is set in New York in 1978 and is told from the point of view of 14-year-old Joey Peacock, who was turned into a vampire a few decades earlier. While riding the subway one day, Joey encounters some out-of-control vampire children, and the story takes off from there. The Lesser Dead goes to some dark places, but it’s also absolutely hilarious.
A brilliant spine surgeon gains the power to perfectly recall her past—only to discover that some memories are better left undisturbed. A witty, emotional story about the intersection of medicine, memory, and the messy reality of loving imperfectly.Visit Melissa R. Collings's website.
Dr. Cordelia Wren has always been in control—of her surgical career, her emotions, and especially her memories. But when she joins a cutting-edge memory enhancement study at her hospital, she gains an unexpected ability: the power to vividly relive any moment from her past. It seems like the perfect opportunity to analyze her failed relationships and finally understand why every man she’s ever loved has walked away.
There’s just one problem. Actually, three:As Cordelia dives deeper into her past, the lines between memory and reality begin to blur. The truth she uncovers forces her to question everything she thought she knew about love, ambition, and what it means to be “in control.”
- She may have…borrowed…access to the highly restricted memory study.
- She’s secretly dating the hospital’s new COO while competing for chief of surgery—a relationship that could destroy both their careers if discovered.
- Her first love has just reappeared in her life, stirring up feelings she thought she’d buried.
With her career hanging in the balance and her heart pulled in two directions, Cordelia must decide: Should she trust the memories that have shaped her life, or finally let go of the past to embrace an uncertain future?
Perfect for fans of Emily Henry and Ali Hazelwood, The Love Operation is a witty, emotional story about the intersection of medicine, memory, and the messy reality of loving imperfectly.
They Never Learn, by fellow Chicagoan Layne Fargo, follows Scarlett Clark, an English professor who’s good at her job—and at getting away with murder.Read about another entry on the list.As the body count of problematic men on her university’s campus grows larger, the school begins to look more closely into the cases, and Scarlett slips up, putting her secret at risk of discovery.
How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Visit Adam Plantinga's website.
I’m hoping it does some heavy lifting. This is a road trip book where my main character and a 17-year-old boy he’s protecting push west to escape the reach of some dangerous men who are after the boy. The title Dark Country refers to both the deadly terrain they have to navigate and the fact that they have no idea why the boy is being hunted—they’re operating in the dark.
In a previous Q&A you explained how Kurt Argento, your main character, got his name. For good reason, he's now living under an assumed name. How did you/he come up with the alias?
His alias is...[read on]
Katherine Daniel is a fiction writer based in Atlanta, Georgia, where she loves to explore the dark and twisty parts of what it means to be human through storytelling. She received a bachelor’s degree in English and creative writing from Georgia State University.
Stephen Graham Jones, The Buffalo Hunter HunterRead about another novel on the list.
A historical novel with dual timelines in 2012 and 1912, this story follows a modern-day professor, Etsy, as she transcribes the diary of her great-great-great grandfather, a Montana pastor named Arthur. The narrative dives deeper into the past based on the entries of Arthur’s diary, which center around an array of confessions given by a vigilante Pikuni man named Good Stab, who’s been turned into a vampiric creature driven by guilt and a need for justice for the violent wrongs committed against his people.
Utilizing the frigid, snowy Montana frontier, this story vividly explores the horrors of colonization and the generational scars that long-linger.
Novel Constitutions and the Making of Race argues that Anglo-American racial slavery emerged from a constitutional crisis in seventeenth-century England between divine-right absolutism of the Stuart kings, and their people's claims to an 'ancient constitution': an immemorial, heritable protection of life, liberty, and property under the common law. As Stuart imperial expansion transported these conflicts overseas, Crown jurists and colonial lawmakers developed new procedures for the absolute mastery of human labour that severed kinship ties, alienated labour, and ultimately converted people of African descent into perpetual, inheritable property, while simultaneously transforming some English subjects into colonial slavocrats. These English slaveholders, like the Stuart kings, asserted absolute power over their human subjects.Learn more about Novel Constitutions and the Making of Race at the Oxford University Press website.
Sarah Marsh argues that contemporary racial categories in the United States of America took shape through these legal improvisations, which this study names 'novel constitutions': practices that inserted absolutist power into the very constitutional idioms meant to restrain tyranny, turning an old set of English constitutional safeguards into a rationale for owning human beings, and setting that rationale upon the arbitrary logic of human skin colour.
Early modern literary texts are essential to perceiving this history because, in real time, they recorded this constitutional contest between the rights of the king and the rights of the people. Novels, autobiographies, petitions, and even mathematics disclose the moral drama, political conflict, and spiritual struggle through which modern American conceptions of slavery and antislavery were brought into being--often showing, with unmatched nuance, how race was developed at law, challenged, and ultimately exposed as a legal fiction. Reading these texts alongside statutes, slave codes, charters, and landmark legal decisions, Novel Constitutions reframes slavery and antislavery as competing constitutional impulses that shaped the American founding and continue to inflect its unfinished claims to liberty and equality.
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