Siri Hustvedt's essays bring into focus the profound contradictions of motherhood — often eclipsed by the cultural idealization of mothers as the model of self-sacrificing nurturance.
Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan says 2021 was a spectacular year for literary fiction. As such, her annual Best Books list is exclusively composed of novels and short story collections.
As the year draws to a close, critic John Powers singles out seven revelatory people or things that made 2021 a little brighter. At the top of his list? Basketball star Steph Curry.
Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Nair were under lockdown in Paris only miles apart from each other. A Different Distance compiles the almost daily poems they wrote from March 2020 to March 2021.
A thousand pages is a lot. But there's Ken Liu's voice to hold onto in this third installment of his epic — beautifully deployed and fully in command of the language of his imaginary universe.
Most readers spend a lot of time happily immersed in words. But for a change of pace, these gorgeous art books provide hours of blissful visual diversion.
The youngest presidential inaugural poet writes about how looking at our history tells us what our bodies are made of – and of how collective memory of strength re-energizes us in our darkest moments.
Faith Jones, a successful lawyer, is the granddaughter of David Berg, founder of The Family. She tells of how she was raised in the cult from infancy until managing to leave it in her early 20s.
Books We Love, formerly known as NPR's Book Concierge, is back for 2021. Here are a handful of books that NPR staffers named as some of their favorites of the year.
The Damocles threat Fonda Lee has let dangle over this entire series is that no one in these pages is ever safe — the world she has created is dangerous and everyone in it has a place where they end.
Celso Hurtado's YA horror novel combines a real San Antonio legend with classic elements of YA narratives to tell a story of friendship that explores the possibility of the supernatural.
Books We Love (formerly known as NPR's Book Concierge) is back with a new name and 360+ new books handpicked just for you by NPR staff and trusted critics.
Even when nominally about something else, the essays in These Precious Days are about the weight and grief of relationships. "I was asking what mattered most in this precarious and precious life."
