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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.

Sign Up for The Thread® Newsletter

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.

Clint Smith on how to reckon with slavery as America's original sin

Clint Smith on how to reckon with slavery as America's original sin

Clint Smith’s acclaimed book, “How the Word Is Passed,” is now out in paperback. In it, he examines how slavery has been central in shaping our country’s collective history, and ourselves.
by Kelly Gordon

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From the archives: Naima Coster on her novel 'What's Mine and Yours'

From the archives: Naima Coster on her novel 'What's Mine and Yours'

This Friday, Big Books and Bold Ideas will feature Clint Smith, celebrated author of “How the Word is Passed,” which powerfully examines the legacy of slavery in America. Kerri Miller’s conversation with Naima Coster in 2021 trod a similar path, only Coster used a fiction lens to look at effects of segregation in her novel, “What’s Mine and Yours.”
by Kerri Miller and Kelly Gordon

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'Brotherless Night' explores a young Sri Lankan Tamil woman's life, love and idealism set against civil war

'Brotherless Night' explores a young Sri Lankan Tamil woman's life, love and idealism set against civil war

Twin Cities writer V.V. Ganeshananthan didn’t expect her second novel to take so long to write. But after almost two decades “Brotherless Night,” a tale set against the Sri Lankan civil war, is drawing critical acclaim. It’s a depiction of a determined young Tamil woman struggling with life, love and family even as her country descends into chaos.
by Euan Kerr

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Ask a Bookseller: LA crime fiction at its best 

Ask a Bookseller: LA crime fiction at its best 

Patrick Millikin is a bookseller at The Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona, which specializes in mysteries, and the crime novel he’s been waiting for finally hit the shelves this month. It’s “Everybody Knows” by Edgar-award winning author Jordan Harper. 
by Emily Bright

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Racism tears a Maine fishing community apart in 'This Other Eden'

Racism tears a Maine fishing community apart in 'This Other Eden'

In 1912, the 47 residents of Malaga Island were forcibly removed from their small, interracial community. Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Harding fictionalizes the story in a stunning new historical novel.
by Maureen Corrigan

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Author Katie Hickman on the women of the American West

Author Katie Hickman on the women of the American West

Old West mythology is full of dust-covered cowboys, lonesome gun slingers and gold-seeking prospectors. But if you only know the men’s side of the story, you only know part of it.
by Kerri Miller and Kelly Gordon

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Bret Easton Ellis' first novel in more than a decade, 'The Shards,' is worth the wait

Bret Easton Ellis' first novel in more than a decade, 'The Shards,' is worth the wait

Hermetic, paranoid, sleek, dark — and with brief explosions of the sex and violence that have characterized Ellis' oeuvre — The Shards is a stark reminder that the author is a genre unto himself.
by Gabino Iglesias

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From the archives: Mary Doria Russell on what really happened at the O.K. Corral

From the archives: Mary Doria Russell on what really happened at the O.K. Corral

This week, Big Books and Bold Ideas heads West. Friday, host Kerri Miller talks with Katie Hickman about her new book, which tells the tales of the women of the American West. To get you in the mood, this week’s archive is a conversation between Miller and Mary Doria Russell about her book, “Epitaph,” which investigates what really happened at the O.K. Corral.
by Kerri Miller and Kelly Gordon

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'Inside the Curve' attempts to offer an overview of COVID's full impact everywhere

'Inside the Curve' attempts to offer an overview of COVID's full impact everywhere

Visually striking — NatGeo and superb photography have always walked hand-in-hand — and incredibly complete, deep and nuanced, this is a book that comes close to the impossible.
by Gabino Iglesias

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Joanna Quinn on her best-selling novel 'The Whalebone Theatre'

Joanna Quinn on her best-selling novel 'The Whalebone Theatre'

This week on Big Books and Bold Ideas, host Kerri Miller talks with the British author whose debut novel took England by storm. “The Whalebone Theatre” tells the story of three children who grow up on a posh seaside estate in the 1920s, and how their imaginations and familial bonds both anchor and inspire their lives.
by Kerri Miller and Kelly Gordon

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