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Weekly series: Ask a Bookseller

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Weekly series: Big Books and Bold Ideas

Big Books and Bold Ideas is a weekly series hosted by Kerri Miller every Friday at 11 a.m., featuring conversations about books and other literary ideas. Listen here.

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A San Francisco store is shipping LGBTQ+ books to places where they are banned
In what she calls "Books Not Bans," Becka Robbins sends titles to groups that want them in the face of a movement by conservative advocacy groups and lawmakers to ban them from schools and libraries.
4 crime and suspense novels make for hot summer reading
There’s something about the shadowy moral recesses of crime and suspense fiction that makes those genres especially appealing as temperatures soar. Here are four novels that turn the heat up.
Minnesota author Tai Coleman on families, hope and surviving America while Black
Poet and writer Taiyon Coleman’s new essay collection, “Traveling without Moving,” is a personal take on what it’s like to be a Black woman in today’s America.
The high cost of medical whistleblowing
MPR News guest host Euan Kerr talks with University of Minnesota bioethicist Carl Elliott about his new book, “The Occasional Human Sacrifice: Medical Experimentation and the Price of Saying No.”
Author Gabrielle Zevin to speak in Minneapolis for the paperback release of 'Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow'
“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” is a New York Times best-selling book about love, art and video games. MPR News reporter Kyra Miles spoke with author Gabrielle Zevin ahead of her visit to Minneapolis.
Can you create your own luck?
Social scientist Mark Robert Rank says: not really. You can and should work hard. Talent plays a role. But random chance has far more to do with success than sheer determination.
Catherine Newman’s novel “Sandwich” centers on a woman vacationing with her young adult children and her elderly parents. Julie Satow’s “When Women Ran Fifth Avenue” profiles three NYC department stores.
As anti-trans legislation has ramped up, historian Jules Gill-Peterson turns the lens to the past in her book, “A Short History of Trans Misogyny.” This week, NPR talks about how panics around trans femininity are shaped by wider forces of colonialism, segregation and class interests.