In Homework: A Memoir, Geoff Dyer recalls his postwar English childhood with comic affection. The son of a sheet-metal worker and local school dinner lady, he wins a coveted grammar school place, sparking a love of literature. From schoolyard scrapes to gig-going misadventures, this witty memoir paints a portrait of an eroded but resilient England, tracing the deep roots of class society. moderated by New York Times Book Review editor Gilbert Cruz. Buy Homework: A Memoir – Dyer…

In I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir, Keith McNally – legendary proprietor of Balthazar, Pastis, Minetta Tavern, and Morandi – takes us from his gritty London childhood in the 1950s to his arrival in New York, where he founded era-defining establishments including Odeon. Eloquent and opinionated, he writes about being a child actor, his two marriages, his devastating stroke, and his Instagram notoriety. In conversation with Aleksandra Crapanzano, Chocolat: Parisian Desserts and Other Delights. Buy I Regret Almost Everything: A Memoir – McNally Buy Chocolat: Parisian Desserts and Other Delights – Crapanzano…

In Jason Mott’s People Like Us: A Novel, two Black writers are trying to find peace and belonging in a world scarred by gun violence. One is on a global book tour in the wake of a big prize win; the other is to give a speech at a school that has suffered a shooting. As their storylines merge, People Like Us turns wickedly funny and achingly sad. When Zelu, the lead character in Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author: A Novel,…

In Exit Wounds: A Story of Love, Loss, and Occasional Wars, Peter Godwin longs for his childhood in Zimbabwe, where he was born and where his mother, now dying, was a doctor. He reflects on his time as a war journalist and life in New York with his English wife and transatlantic children, and comes to terms with everything his family was – and wasn’t. In The Emergency: A Novel, George Packer writes a tale about an empire that has collapsed from boredom and loss of faith in itself.…

Susan Choi’s Flashlight: A Novel traces the disappearance of Louisa’s father across time, nations, and memory, after a tragic summer night on the breakwater. Spanning decades and through shifting perspectives, Louisa and her mother navigate grief, estrangement, and family secrets – and the invisible currents that shape our lives. In Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny: A Novel, two young people first glimpse each other on an overnight train, bound by their grandparents’ failed matchmaking.…

In Misbehaving at the Crossroads: Essays & Writings (Harper), Honorée Fanonne Jeffers reflects on the historical and personal tensions shaping Black women’s lives. From girlhood to womanhood, she explores ancestry, adultification, respectability politics, and womanism, while confronting white supremacy and patriarchy. With empathy and brilliance, she illuminates the journeys, resilience and possibilities of Black women throughout American history and in contemporary times. Throughout history, the concept of Blackness has been remarkably intertwined with the color blue. But while blue skies and blue water offer hope,…

The 2025 honorees across all five National Book Award categories – including Gbenga Adesina, María Dolores Águila, K. Ancrum, Jazmina Barrera, Gabrielle Calvocoressi, Cathy Linh Che, Susan Choi, Tiana Clark, Angela Flournoy, Caleb Gayle, Julia Ioffe, Hamid Ismailov, Jonas Hassen Khemiri,…

Join Altie Karper, editorial director of Schocken Books/Penguin Random House for more than 20 years; Todd Portnowitz, senior editor at Alfred A. Knopf; and Rose Waldman, translator of Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters: A Novel, for a discussion centered around the book, held by many as one of the foremost collections of contemporary Yiddish literature. Originally serialized in the 1960s and ’70s in New York–based Yiddish newspapers, the epic Sons and Daughters is a precious glimpse of the rich Yiddish culture of Poland and Lithuania that the Holocaust would eradicate.…

In Baldwin: A Love Story, Nicholas Boggs reveals how profoundly James Baldwin’s personal relationships shaped his life and work. Drawing on newly uncovered archival material and original research and interviews, this spellbinding book tells the overlapping stories of Baldwin’s most sustaining intimate and artistic relationships, spanning the Black American painter Beauford Delaney to the iconoclastic French artist Yoran Cazac, Baldwin’s long-overlooked last great love. Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. She was the first Black woman to write and publish science fiction at a time,…

Karen Russell’s The Antidote: A Novel tells the story of the fictional Uz, Nebraska, and begins as a historic dust storm ravages the town. But Uz is already collapsing, not just under the weight of the Great Depression and the dust bowl drought, but because of its own violent history. Patricia Lockwood’s Will There Ever Be Another You: A Novel chronicles a young woman’s descent into illness and insanity amid a global pandemic. Struggling with grief and a mystifying disease,…

Iddo Gefen’s Mrs. Lilienblum’s Cloud Factory: A Novel, translated by Daniella Zamir, begins with the title character drinking a martini in a crater in the Israeli desert. Her adult son, Eli, navigates handling his wacky mother, a missing hiker, and a possible romance with Tamara, a visitor to their family hostel. Then the Lilienblums build a company around its matriarch’s invention, making comedy out of startup culture and family secrets. In Ed Park’s An Oral History of Atlantis: Stories,…

Jane Hamilton’s The Phoebe Variations: A Novel is a coming-of-age story about girls, mothers, and finding one’s way in the world. On the verge of graduation, Phoebe meets her birth family for the first time – and runs away. With her best friend Luna in tow, she makes an escape to their friend Patrick’s chaotic household, and she begins navigating the tumultuous road out of girlhood. Lily King’s Heart the Lover: A Novel is an intimate story of desire,…