For “Beard” author Kelly Foster Lundquist, the signs were there.

Her husband reminded her of Montgomery Clift (gay), they moved to the rainbow-striped Chicago neighborhood known as Boystown (gay), their courtship features him repeatedly saying some version of “You don’t know the real me” (gay) and most of their friends were gay men. ...Read more

Amy Bower Cordalis’ “The Water Remembers” does not flow in a straight line.

Her book “is written in the format of Yurok [the largest Native tribe in California] storytelling,” she writes, meandering here and there, much like the Klamath River that supported her people for millennia.

No spoiler alerts necessary here. The title tells ...Read more

On Jan. 9, 1942, heavyweight champion Joe Louis won his 20th straight title defense, knocking out Buddy Baer in the first round. The next day, he enlisted in the Army.

For good measure, Louis donated his $47,000 boxing paycheck to the military. He was “a loyal American,” Johnny Smith and Randy Roberts write in their terrific new biography, ...Read more

Thomas Schlesser is the author of “Mona’s Eyes,” which was a No. 1 bestseller in France and has been translated into 37 languages, including Braille.

The director of the Hartung-Bergman Foundation in France, he teaches art history at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris.

Q. Please tell our readers about your new book.

“Mona’s Eyes”...Read more

The subtitle of “An Eye for an I” warns us the book will be packed: “Growing Up with Blindness, Bigotry, and Family Mental Illness.”

Retired Hamline University professor James Francisco Bonilla’s book is billed as a memoir. That’s accurate, but “Eye” tends not to go very deep into what he felt or what events meant because ...Read more

Nearly a decade after his 2016 novel, "All That Man Is," was passed over for the Booker Prize, David Szalay has taken home gold with his latest work, "Flesh."

"Flesh," Szalay's sixth novel, follows István, a socially isolated Hungarian teen who through circumstances beyond his control is thrust into London's upper echelon. In the coming ...Read more

When Xavier "X" Atencio was plucked by Walt Disney in 1965 to be one of his early theme park designers, he was slotted on a number of projects that placed him out of his comfort zone.

Atencio, for instance, never would have envisioned himself a songwriter.

One of Atencio's first major projects with Walt Disney Imagineering — WED Enterprises...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Nov. 1, 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. "Bonds of ...Read more

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — The conservative jurist whose powerful belief in individual liberty shaped some of most influential U.S. Supreme Court rulings of the past 40 years has blue eyes that flash and sparkle as he looks at you, and a life story that outlines the history, culture and politics of Sacramento, his beloved hometown.

Also, Anthony M....Read more

Margaret Atwood’s new “Book of Lives” is subtitled “a memoir of sorts” — and in fact, it’s a venerable sort, a cradle-to-rocking-chair telling of a celebrated life.

Today, most books of this type are produced by movie stars or musicians, while literary memoirs tend to focus on one particularly dramatic or entertaining passage: ...Read more

Are dictionaries going the way of dodos, pocket calculators and civil discourse?

Some dictionaries are still printed but, increasingly, the reference books have moved online. And, as Stefan Fatsis describes it in “Unabridged” — his lively history of dictionaries that also looks at how they reflect and ratify changes in our language — ...Read more

Two new collections, “Night Watch” by Kevin Young and “Startlement: New and Selected Poems” by Ada Limón, showcase strikingly different voices in contemporary poetry.

Young, poetry editor for the New Yorker and former director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, always surprises. His tone shifts ...Read more

Oliver Wang, a sociology professor and author at Cal State Long Beach, spent years griping to his friends about the lack of Asian American representation in Southern California’s car history.

“I was talking to an old friend,” Wang began during a recent Zoom interview. “And he said to me, ‘Oliver, you’ve been complaining that there�...Read more

The first step was easy.

A book editor, impressed by Jeff Chang‘s acclaimed 2005 cultural history of hip-hop, “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop,” asked if he’d consider writing a book on Bruce Lee, the martial arts icon and movie star.

The next 99 steps? Well, that’s something altogether different.

The editor who’d pitched the biography ...Read more

LOS ANGELES -- Dr. Roy Meals, a longtime hand surgeon, likes to move his feet. He has climbed mountains and he has run three marathons.

But when he shared his latest scheme with his wife a couple of years ago, she had a quick take.

"You're nuts," she said.

Maybe so. He was closing in on 80, and his plan was to grab his trekking poles and take...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Oct. 25, 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. "The Widow: A ...Read more

Bookstores and libraries will undergo big changes in November.

There are always new books hitting shelves, of course, but the first couple weeks of November are unusually jammed with big-name authors such as Patti Smith (the “Just Kids” writer has another memoir, “Bread of Angels”), Nate Berkus (the designer wrote “Foundations,” ...Read more