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A special Check This Out episode featuring three librarians from around the state chatting about their favorite books of the year and offering suggestions for this holiday reading season.
We also discuss how librarians feel about audiobooks — does it count as reading? Plus, the explosion of "Young Adult" titles and whether the name should be changed, how libraries decide which books to put on their shelves, and the pros and cons of self-publishing.
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A beautiful, tender, yet searing debut novel about intergenerational fractures and coming of age, following a young woman who immigrates to the United States from the Philippines and finds herself adrift between familial expectations and her own desires.
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An unlikely production of Euripides in a prison quarry, set in ancient Greece with a contemporary Irish accent. As funny as it is moving, the novel is an ode to the power of art in a time of war and brotherhood in a time of enmity.
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Based on (mostly) true events, "The Bullet Swallower" is a magical realism western about violence and revenge, a story that asks who pays for the sins of our ancestors, and whether it is possible to be better than our forebears.
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The third season of in-depth author interviews continues with Essie Chambers, author of "Swift River."
Longlisted for The Center for Fiction 2024 First Novel Prize, there’s a lot to unpack in this novel. Sixteen year old Diamond is the only Black person in the town of Swift River, stuck in a town she hates it as much as it hates her.
Her mother is a drug addict who can’t pay the bills, and making things even worse, Diamond is buried in an obese body she can’t escape, a symbol of the generational trauma that weighs on her every single day.
"Swift River" focuses on three generations of women in one family, the trauma they endure and pass on.
It also shows us the hope Diamond holds for her future, and a historic setting in a northern ‘sundown town,’ a town where Black people are only allowed to pass through during the day.
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Set around Maine’s Penobscot Reservation, a novel about one man’s family, divided, like the river that separates him from his childhood home. The novel is about belonging, the shifting nature of memory - and bloodlines. Shortlisted for The Center for Fiction 2024 First Novel Prize.
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A heartfelt epic about friendship, betrayal, and redemption during three transformative decades in Iran.
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Kaliane Bradley's debut is a time travel romance, a spy thriller, a workplace comedy and a testament to what we owe each other in a changing world.
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In Andrew Boryga's debut "Victim," the protagonist is a hustler from a family of hustlers. He learns to talk about his background in just the right way to open doors to an elite college and writing gigs. The novel asks: What does real diversity look like?
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“Blank” by Zibby Owens follows the story of Pippa Jones, a fortyish former literary sensation who fears she will be a one-hit wonder. Her solution to writer's block is an idea her 12-year old son came up with as a joke.
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"The Extinction of Irena Rey" is the new novel by famed translator Jennifer Croft. Eight translators arrive at a house in a primeval Polish forest on the border of Belarus. It belongs to the world-renowned author Irena Rey, and they are there to translate her magnum opus, Gray Eminence. But within days of their arrival, Irena disappears without a trace.
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Inci Atrek brings readers a seductive and lyrical debut novel. “Holiday Country" follows a young woman’s dangerous summer romance during an idyllic vacation on the Aegean coast.
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Set against the backdrop of developing modern China, Aube Rey Lescure’s “River East, River West” is part coming-of-age tale and part family and social drama. It follows two generations searching for belonging and opportunity in a rapidly changing world.
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Rachel Barenbaum interviews author Leo Vardiashvili’s about his debut novel“Hard By a Great Forest” – a story about a man who fled the Republic of Georgia in the midst of war. It’s a unique tale about the traumas of war and the lasting effects of those families driven not just to survive, but to remember, love and live.
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Rachel Barenbaum interviews author Maura Cheeks who talks about her new novel Acts of Forgiveness. Set in a speculative America, readers navigate a world where the government has approved reparation payments for black Americans – but only if they can prove they are descended from slaves.
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Vauhini Vara's story collection, THIS IS SALVAGED, has been named by The New Yorker, Publisher’s Weekly, Vox, and the New York Public Library as one of the best books of the year.
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Host Rachel Barenbaum sits down with her colleagues from the Howe Library in Hanover, New Hampshire to discuss their favorite reads from 2023.
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This week on Check This Out, host Rachel Barenbaum sits down with Emma Törzs, author of "Ink Blood Sister Scribe." Törzs' debut novel will soon be available in 13 languages. It's a fast paced, magical book about two estranged half-sisters tasked with guarding their family's library of magical books. They work together along with a stranger, a magical scribe, to unravel a deadly secret at the heart of their collection. It's a tale of familial loyalty and betrayal and the pursuit of magic and power.
Törzs says swaths of the story were inspired by her family’s Hungarian roots, and by what it took for them to survive the Holocaust.
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Episode 109. You may know Ayana Mathis from her debut novel, The Twelve Tribes of Hattie. Published 11 years ago, the excitement and noise around that debut took up all the space and energy Mathis had to write fiction. Her new second novel is called The Unsettled. It’s a mother-daughter-son story that braids two narratives - one from the south and one from the north.
- Visa fler
