Mathematician and comedian Matt Parker’s Love Triangle celebrates the wonders of the titular shape, and is bound to please the math-hesitant and math-fluent alike. ... Read full Story
The Jig Is Up is a well-crafted cozy mystery that deftly explores complicated family dynamics while also transporting readers to an adorable Irish-themed town. ... Read full Story
A gentle, ghostly love story with a queer Jewish relationship at its center, Rules for Ghosting will make you laugh and make you cry, maybe even at the same time. ... Read full Story
Audre Lorde gets her flowers in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Survival Is a Promise, a masterful, poetic biography of the literary and feminist icon. ... Read full Story
Jesse Q. Sutanto pulls back the curtain on the world of mom-fluencers in her unforgettable, brilliantly executed thriller You Will Never Be Me. ... Read full Story
Acclaimed authors T.I. Lowe and Amanda Cox use the renovation of old buildings to parallel their characters’ pursuit of emotional repair and new beginnings. ... Read full Story
In Elif Shafak’s spellbinding novel There Are Rivers in the Sky, a single drop of water falls and regenerates and falls again across continents and centuries, touching four lives linked by the Epic of Gilgamesh. ... Read full Story
Gina María Balibrera brings a bravura, magical-realist style to this story of resilience and love through impossible circumstances, an imaginative retelling of a difficult piece of Central American history. ... Read full Story
Black Butterflies follows an artist’s life in Sarajevo during the Bosnian War, in a story of how art sustains and gives purpose in moments of desolation and terror. ... Read full Story
The audiobook of Kevin Kwan’s latest standalone novel, Lies and Weddings, is a thoroughly entertaining global romp packed with colorful descriptions of fashion, contemporary art and food. ... Read full Story
Mushroom Gastronomy’s part cookbook, part encyclopedia approach to the ever-fascinating fungus is as educational as it is mouthwatering. ... Read full Story
Beautiful, complex and affirming, Ash’s Cabin will prompt deep conversations about how best to support one another and our environment, at a time when the future is uncertain and peace can be hard to find. ... Read full Story
A breakout success can bring new attention to an author’s body of work—or, one book can so define them that it overshadows earlier titles that are just as excellent. Here are four overlooked books from great authors that deserve their own moment in the limelight. ... Read full Story
Yoko Ogawa’s Mina’s Matchbox is filled with wonder, conveying 12-year-old Tomoko’s enchantment with her extended family during the year she spends with them, from 1972 to 1973. ... Read full Story
Not for the faint of heart, The Dark We Know draws a profound connection between supernatural forces and the terrors of grief and dishonesty. ... Read full Story
“The eagerness to vilify ‘the other side’—usually on social media—complicates the less reactionary work that defines our mission.” — Jerry Brewer, The Washington Post, 11 June 2024
Did you know?
It seems reasonable to assume that the words vilify and villain come from the same source; after all, to vilify someone is—in some ways—to make them out to be a villain. Such is not the case, however. Although the origin stories of both vilify and villain involve Latin, their roots are quite different. Vilify came to English (via Middle English and Late Latin) from the Latin adjective vilis, meaning “cheap” or “vile.” Someone who has been vilified, accordingly, has had their reputation tarnished or cheapened in such a way that they’re viewed as morally reprehensible. Villain on the other hand, comes from the Medieval Latin word villanus, meaning “villager,” and ultimately from the Latin noun villa, meaning “house.” The Middle English descendent of villanus developed the meaning of “a person of uncouth mind and manners” due to the vilifying influence of the aristocracy of the time, and the connotations worsened from there until villain came to refer to (among other things), a deliberate scoundrel.