Susan Hood’s Friends in the Dark is a picture book about an unlikely friendship, told in spare, musical language and brought to life through illustrations that understand something essential: sometimes the most important things happen in the quiet between words. The book follows a child who is afraid of the dark and a firefly who…
Some books arrive at exactly the right moment. Casey McQuiston’s debut novel Red, White and Royal Blue landed in 2019 and immediately became one of those rare reads that people pressed into the hands of friends with the words “you have to read this.” It is a romantic comedy about Alex Claremont-Diaz, the half-Mexican, politically…
A structurally audacious debut from Maud Woolf: thirteen assassins, thirteen versions of one woman, and a sharp satirical investigation into identity, selfhood, and who controls the story of a woman’s life.
Ike Onyema Obi opens his memoir at the end of the story: sitting in his modern Accra townhome, listening to his young son’s laughter echo from the bath, aware that running water and electric light are things he once had to earn. That quiet opening does more work than most entrepreneurship books manage in their…
Most books about writing a book are, in a quiet way, dishonest. They describe the finished experience of a finished person: how it felt when the words finally came, how the structure eventually emerged, how the struggle was eventually worth it. They document a process in retrospect, which means they document the clean version, the…
The opening line of AI or Die lands before the first chapter even begins: in February 2024, Klarna launched an AI customer service system that handled 2.3 million conversations in thirty days, replacing the equivalent of 700 full-time employees, cutting resolution times by 67 percent, and saving the company $39 million in a single year….
Ethan Wate has spent his whole life in Gatlin, South Carolina, dreaming of leaving. He has also spent months dreaming of a girl he has never met — the same girl, in the same burning field, in dreams that feel more real than his waking life. When Lena Duchannes arrives at Gatlin High as the…
Cassia Reyes lives in a Society that has solved the problem of choosing: officials called Matched select your career, your diet, your activities, and ultimately your spouse — the person with whom you are statistically most compatible. On the night of the Matching banquet, Cassia is Matched to her best friend Xander, a reassuring outcome…
Thomas Harris published The Silence of the Lambs in 1988, and the novel has never really left the cultural conversation since. It follows Clarice Starling, an FBI trainee from a working-class background in West Virginia, who is sent to interview the imprisoned psychiatrist and serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter. The assignment is not casual curiosity:…
In August 1914, Europe went to war in ways its leaders had not planned for, against opponents they had not fully calculated, with consequences none of them foresaw. Barbara Tuchman’s account of the first thirty days of World War I — the mobilizations, the miscalculations, the early battles along the Belgian and French frontiers —…
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