The Thread® - Books and Literary News

The Thread from MPR News

The Thread® is your source for book recommendations and other literary news.

Ask a Bookseller

Ask a Bookseller is a weekly series where The Thread checks in with booksellers around the country about their favorite books of the moment. Listen to Ask a Bookseller to find your next favorite book.

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 to Big Books and Bold Ideas here.

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Sign up for The Thread newsletter to get reading recommendations from Kerri Miller and other bookworms around the MPR newsroom. Find reviews for new releases, as well as hidden gems you may have missed.

Talking Volumes

Talking Volumes is back for its 25th season. Join us at the Fitzgerald Theater for four special events with renowned authors, celebrating our anniversary with a special $25 ticket price for MPR members and Star Tribune subscribers. Buy tickets here.

In ‘The Manicurist's Daughter,’ a refugee family goes on after its matriarch’s death
Author Susan Lieu transforms her acclaimed 2019 one-woman show — “140 LBS: How Beauty Killed My Mother” — into a memoir of her family after the death of her mother due to botched plastic surgery.
How memory works
Why is music so evocative? Why do some memories stick and others fade? How important is slow-wave sleep to the way memory works? One of the country’s leading neuroscientists joins MPR News host Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold Ideas this week to talk about why memory isn’t so much who we were as who we are.
The stories in ‘Green Frog’ are wildly entertaining and wonderfully diverse
Gina Chung’s collection is a fantastic medley of short stories that dance between literary fiction, fable, Korean folklore and science fiction — and one that’s full of emotional intelligence.
‘The Extinction of Irena Rey’ asks: Can anything be truly individual and independent?
Jennifer Croft’s novel, centered on a group of translators working on a book, is surprising at every turn, moving from profound observations about nature, art, and communication — to surreal events.
3 collections take the poetic measure of America in the aftermath of the pandemic
New collections “The Gone Thing,” “Silver” and “Modern Poetry” offer, if not a solution to trying times in America, then a kind of truth-telling companion, a mirror with a real person on both sides of it.