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There are two historical mysteries taking you to New York: one is set during the Harlem Renaissance, the other is set in the Jazz Age. We have got a psychological suspense that will keep you on your toes and a classic Japanese mystery that was inspired by an Agatha Christie favorite. There is a contemporary YA of a sister investigating her older sister’s killing, a PI looking for her girlfriend, a new release in a favorite series, and two nonfiction books: one a true crime looking into the murders that Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys was based on....

“Diversity Day”: Welcome to Braggsville by T. Geronimo Johnson Diversity Day in the office is supposed to be about learning tolerance and acceptance. Instead, Michael Scott bogarts the conversation in an attempt to impart his own knowledge and perspective on diversity. As all good Office fans know, he upsets pretty much everyone in the room. In T. Geronimo Johnson’s satirical Welcome to Braggsville, a group of mostly white college kids also attempt to reframe racism, with the goal to educate their audience....

Toni Morrison famously criticized the failures of the “white imagination,” a subconscious viewpoint of white creatives wherein they seem to be literally incapable of imagining the very existence — let alone the thriving or full being — of people of color. This sometimes leads to the Rue problem, or, y’know, just a publishing landscape that remains overwhelmingly white in professional makeup and literary content. That’s problem A. As for B?...

My mother is strong and she is black and she is a woman. She is also weak, she is also fragile, and she is also human. I have spent my life wanting to grow up to be a strong black woman but what does that even mean? Where did this title and stereotype, that at first glance sounds like a compliment until you realise how debilitating it is, come from?...

“…Little Free Libraries are exactly what they sound like…tiny “libraries” where anyone can pass by and take a book that’s inside or leave one if they’d like. They are alllll over the world and you can register to “host” one on your property, or wherever. You can order a pre-built little library OR you can build one yourself. They are all really cute, but here are some extra-cute ones.” Some of these are nicer than my Average Unfree Apartment....

What follows is an account of who Fanny Hill was and what the publishing of this work has meant for the history of erotic literature. It’s also one of the first books to be banned, leading to the formalization of laws around what is considered pornography and not. These laws were what guided the trials of works of literature to come like Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Fanny Hill is considered the first prose erotica written in English and the first erotic work produced in novel form, but it also remains one of the most banned books in history, and the subject of a number of historically significant obscenity trials....

There isn’t actually a wrong way to do this, and you can go out of order! This plan will take you from (pre-)birth to age 15, but you can jump in wherever you and your child(ren) are at! Again: there is no wrong way to introduce your children to Star Wars. I promise. (After all, I watched a taped-off-TV video of The Empire Strikes Back in 1993 with no previous Star Wars knowledge and I turned out okay!...

And then we grew up, and some things about our faith just didn’t make sense anymore. We saw suffering in the world and could no longer dismiss it as “part of God’s will.” We saw LGBTQ people being ostracized and demonized by the church and we knew it was wrong. We couldn’t reconcile the Jesus described in the gospels with God commanding his people to commit genocide in the Old Testament....

This has been especially true during the last two years. With the pandemic, books which had initial publication dates in early 2020 saw their shelf dates shift to summer, or to fall, or to 2021, in the hopes of giving the book the best chance at reaching readers during quarantines, shutdowns, and the complete upheaval of traditional in-person events. Now, with the challenge of sourcing paper and supply chain breakdowns, even books published in 2021 facing comparatively fewer challenges than those of the previous year are themselves in deep limbo....

Advice columns began in the 1890s — although some reports say as early as the 1690s — as precursors to today’s forums and online communities. Before people could post their questions to the masses and receive advice from anyone willing to give it (whether you like it or not), people wrote in to advice columnists. In the United States, more specifically, people wrote to columnists like Dear Abby and Ask Ann Landers....

Twelve hours later, we came together again, but this time it was to burn it all down. On the evening of Monday, December 23, Alyssa Cole posted a thread that would lead to a ripple effect for days to come, and the outcome is still uncertain. She posted it on behalf of her good friend and fellow romance author, Courtney Milan, who I would imagine at the time was still reeling in shock....

In 2019, it was announced that The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo was being adapted as a Freeform series to be produced by Ilene Chaiken and Jennifer Beals, but that series did not come to fruition. You can read more about the adaptation of Reid’s works currently being produced at Deadline. Find more news and stories of interest from the book world in Breaking in Books.

Before Breakfast at Tiffany’s was adapted into a timeless film classic, the story of party girl Holly and the man infatuated with her was the brainchild of literary icon Truman Capote. Originally, he had sold the novella to Harper’s Bazaar for $2,000 but the magazine later backed out, claiming a story about an independent woman with multiple male friends and a prominent nightlife was just too risqué to publish. Capote, an expert at holding grudges, vowed to never associate himself with Harper’s again, and briefly alleged that Breakfast at Tiffany’s would never see the light of day....

If you’re reading children’s literature from a certain era, a Susan is bound to pop up sooner or later. She will be the second child, and the oldest girl. She will always be the group mum, keeping her siblings in line and standing in for their actual mum, who is always absent and sometimes dead. She will make sure that her brothers and sister are fed, clothed, and have somewhere warm to sleep....

Registers Of Illuminated Villages by Tarfia Faizullah Faizullah is a Bangladeshi American poet, and Registers Of Illuminated Villages is her second book, the first one being Seam, which explores the history of the women raped by Pakistani soldiers during the Liberation War of 1971. In this book, she speaks of war, violence, and loss, in a powerful collection which will keep us with eyes and hearts wide open up until the last page....

I found that often, when I read a book I loved, I struggled to express why. My reviews came down to a “did I like it or didn’t I and how much,” an expression of totality which was very subjective and never plumbed deeper into the good stuff. The truth is, reviewing things is hard. Critical reading and writing are really difficult; there’s a reason why my local bookstore has a section for “Criticism” and why my name isn’t on the shelf....

—Jeanette Winterson Books and literature are meant to be an escape into worlds that aren’t our own. But what happens when the worlds they are meant to represent are nothing like what they show them to be? And the characters they hold within their pages are only stock caricatures of real life? Muslim women are mostly portrayed as the other, particularly in books by white non-Muslim authors. This in itself is problematic because it often tends to create an idea that Muslim women all fit under the same umbrella of Arab culture as well....

Pre-parent me would have been like, “Ha! All those dumb parents letting kids go on their iPhones better listen.” Because yeah, I was that person with the Strong Opinions about screen time. I had long before decided that my future children would get zero screen time ever. Fast forward to now: I have a 2.5-year-old son who knows how to swipe and click on an iPhone better than some grandparents I know....

To understand when kids start reading, you need to know what reading is. A general explanation is the action of reading words correctly, but there is more to reading than that. Reading Rockets, a very respected reading research site, defines reading as “making meaning from print.” This larger definition allows us to pull in the valuable skills of younger children, and involve young kids in the process of building their reading lives....

Who is Toni Morrison? Morrison has written eleven novels and countless other essays, nonfiction books, plays, children’s fiction, and even a libretto. She was the 1993 winner of the Nobel Prize of Literature, and won the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award in 1988 for Beloved. In 2012, President Barack Obama awarded her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and in 2016, she received the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction....