Brandon Taylor’s fourth book, “Minor Black Figures,” begins in New York City in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

As political and societal tides shift, as the city rises up in agitation, we meet Wyeth, a Black, millennial artist who hasn’t made art in a while and is struggling with what to paint next....Read more

Novelist John Irving says he knew he was on track when he figured out how “Queen Esther” would end. Now he faced a new challenge: How the story began.

“Like all my novels, that’s the thing I see most clearly or I don’t begin,” Irving says on a recent video call from his home in Toronto. “A timeline begins that is instigated by the...Read more

In October 1995, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson hadn’t yet become the pop culture science star he is today.

Tyson was newly appointed as the interim director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, where as a 9-year-old from the Bronx, he’d first seen the stars and glimpsed his future career.

Then the first exoplanet was discovered...Read more

Like many an epic Russian tale, “Tigers Between Empires” fittingly opens with a cast of characters, some with two legs, but most with four.

Minneapolis writer Jonathan C. Slaght’s book is a deep look at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s Siberian Tiger Project, which begins in the early 1990s and covers three decades of exhausting ...Read more

Call him a master wordsmith, formal innovator, Booker prize winner, Nobel laureate-in-waiting, a sorcerer. Call him Sir Salman Rushdie.

He slips into a story as gracefully as Laurence Olivier vanished into a Shakespearean role. Rushdie’s towering talent is evident throughout “The Eleventh Hour,” a quintet of tales that are his follow-up ...Read more

Bianna Golodryga, a news anchor for CNN International, immigrated to the U.S. from the former Soviet Union in 1980 with her family to escape antisemitism.

Now a parent of two children, the onetime political refugee finds herself having to explain the hatred expressed toward Jewish people in the country she loves — much of it expressed in the ...Read more

“Some Bright Nowhere” is infuriating, and it’s supposed to be.

Ann Packer’s novel is about Claire, who is dying of cancer and who wants to be in charge of that as much as possible. How her in-chargeness manifests itself, in the latest novel from the author of “The Dive from Clausen’s Pier” and “ The Children’s Crusade,” is ...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Nov. 8, 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

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