Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, April 12, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana.

(Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.)

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "Say You’ll...Read more

There’s a pocket of the literary world where the name “Lidia Yuknavitch” is spoken in reverent tones, as if invoking a sort of high priestess. You might think I exaggerate; I don’t.

It all started in March 2011 with the publication of her first book, a memoir titled “The Chronology of Water.” Among lovers of the memoir genre, poetry...Read more

To enter a Katie Kitamura book is to get lost in an ice palace. We marvel at its crystalline mazes, chills tingling our spines, wisps of breath twirling from the page. Nobody writes like her, those lissome lines and abundance of commas. She’s one of the few who can pull off tell-don’t-show.

“Audition,” her new mousetrap of a novel, ...Read more

Jon Hickey is enrolled in the Lac du Flambeau Band of the Anishinaabe Indians and follows tribal politics fairly closely. And yet he has this question: How authentic of an Indian is he?

“That debate is a sort of sport among Indians, I find,” said Hickey, 44, whose novel “Big Chief” is out now. “I think a lot of people who are enrolled...Read more

One reason the mystery genre has remained popular is its infinite adaptability. Someone can get whacked anywhere and once you’ve got a corpse, the game’s afoot!

French writer Laurent Binet’s “Perspective(s),” newly available in a brisk and breezy English translation by Sam Taylor, is a delightfully inventive whodunit , set in Florence...Read more

“These [essays], carried out as both criticism and autobiography, are my attempt to think through what it means to write and read from the position of an other, which is for me the starting point of an ethical and political art.”

That’s Viet Thanh Nguyen, writing in his latest collection, “To Save and to Destroy: Writing as an Other.”...Read more

If “The Impossible Thing” were a song, we’d call it a banger.

Like Miley Cyrus’ “Flowers” or Kendrick Lamar and SZA’s “Luther,” Belinda Bauer’s 10th novel is a pure pleasure machine, all the moving parts of which are designed to delight. It took a while for “The Impossible Thing” to come together, apparently — ...Read more

Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature, whose novels explored the military dictatorships and political corruption of Latin America, has died. He was 89.

His son, Alvaro, announced his death on social media, without attributing a cause. Mario Vargas Llosa, a towering figure in literature and politics ...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, April 5, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana.

(Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.)

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "Say You’ll ...Read more

LAS VEGAS — As soon as former Las Vegas resident Lee Scrivner released his latest book “Casinolabs” he started getting people asking if he’d seen the hit show “Severance” from Apple TV+.

“My sister was the first one who insisted I watch it,” said Scrivner, who grew up in Las Vegas, “so I finally broke down and watched it and ...Read more

If you polled 100 people about who is the awfullest among the awful people in “The Great Gatsby,” I bet 99 of them would answer “that louse Tom Buchanan.” In the new “The Gatsby Gambit,” Buchanan finally gets what’s coming to him.

Daisy Buchanan’s loathsome husband is murdered early on in “Gambit,” Claire Anderson-Wheeler’...Read more

Although its publisher is comparing “Freakslaw” to Katherine Dunn’s great “Geek Love,” the reference point you might want to keep in mind is the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

In tone, “Freakslaw” — which could be described as light horror with strong queer representation — is nothing like “Geek Love.” It’s more playful and ...Read more

Shannon T.L. Kearns is ready to talk. Ready to talk about why being a man can be confusing. To talk about masculinity, hopefully without the word “toxic” in front of it. And to talk about why, as a transgender man, he has a unique perspective on all of that.

Kearns hopes his self-help book, “No One Taught Me How to Be a Man,” will spark...Read more

Sometimes a book comes along at just the right moment in life, aligning with what’s happening and offering eye-opening commentary. John Kenney’s “I See You’ve Called in Dead” is that book.

It’s not a self-help guide, although it sometimes reads like one, or a “Hallmark card,” as protagonist Bud Stanley says to his best friend ...Read more

Never read “The Great Gatsby”? Got 6½ hours free? Then, are you in luck.

As part of its yearlong celebration of the 100th anniversary of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel, Friends of the St. Paul Public Library has put together a reading of “The Great Gatsby” in its entirety, from “In my younger” to “into the past.” It’s ...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, March 29, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana.

(Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.)

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "Summer in ...Read more

Think of “A Better Ending” as a true crime book that becomes a memoir.

James Whitfield Thomson’s book is subtitled “A Brother’s Twenty-Year Quest to Uncover the Truth About His Sister’s Death.” It was ruled a death by suicide in 1974, a conclusion that never sat right with James and other family members. But it wasn’t until ...Read more