NPR's Book of the Day

It’s been 15 years since Chad Harbach published The Art of Fielding, a book about a star college baseball player at a fictional Wisconsin liberal arts college. His new book The Brightness isn’t quite a sequel, but a follow-up that returns to that same world. The novel focuses on a group of young women who execute a controversial prank on campus. NPR’s Andrew Limbong spoke with Harbach about writing a campus novel that predates Covid, Trump’s presidency and TikTok, the author’s experience being “scooped by reality” and why he chose to focus this project on female friendship.

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Lawrence Wright’s new book Redemption is a story about two groups of women who live surprisingly similar lives. One is on death row in Gatesville, Texas. The other group is a nearby Catholic order, the Sisters of Mary Morning Star. Redemption: Faith, Justice, and Sisterhood on Death Row is an account of their alliance. In today’s episode, Wright speaks with Morning Edition’s Steve Inskeep about the idea of second chances, the likeness betw

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In Sophie, Standing There by Meg Mason, Sophie Pattison’s life is falling apart. On paper, there shouldn’t be an issue: She works her dream job mic’ing up authors at a local book festival – and she has a robust support system. So why, when it all comes crashing down, does she feel so alone? Sophie turns to books for solace and develops a crush on her favorite author. In today’s episode, All Things Considered’s Mary Louise Kelly talks with Mason about starting over, a desire for human connection, and books as a means of coping with loneliness.

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Writer and The Office star B.J. Novak says that when his friends started having kids, he would connect with their children by reading books aloud. He began to pay attention to what would make kids laugh and eventually “printed and glue-sticked and paper-clipped” his own book that ended up being The Book with No Pictures. Now, Novak is out with a sequel for younger children called The Little Book with No Pictures. In today’s episode, he chats with Morning Edition’s Michel Martin about how the book turns words like “bonk” and “hug and squeeze" into symbols and art objects.

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It’s been almost one year since Heti, the main character of Laleh Khadivi’s Female Life on Planet Earth, lost her mother. But when details from her mother’s secret past resurface, Heti must grapple with what it means to know someone, womanhood and how to grieve parts of her mother she never knew existed. In an interview with NPR's Debbie Elliott, Khadivi talks about motherhood, how physics books became a surprising inspiration and why this is her most personal novel yet. 

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