Our friends at AudioFile magazine recommend the best fall audiobooks, from Sally Rooney’s buzzy new Intermezzo to a delicious memoir from actor Stanley Tucci, plus Earphones Award–winning audiobooks from Rumaan Alam, Liane Moriarty, Rachel Kushner, and more. This is listening to settle in with. Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, read by Éanna Hardwicke [16.5...

On the afternoon of 18 March 2018 my family and I visited Book Soup in West Hollywood, California. We had arrived in town earlier that day, having driven down from the Bay Area, and walked to the bookshop from our hotel. My wife and daughter, who was almost three at the time, went to the children’s section, while I browsed in Fiction, now pushing an...

In The Bookshop: A History of the American Bookstore, history professor Evan Friss explores how bookstores have shaped reading, publishing, politics, and community, beginning in the 18th century. I talked with Friss about the value of indie bookstores, the bygone dominance of Barnes & Noble, and bookselling as activism. Lenny Picker: How did this...

Earlier this May, an Esquire article by Kate Dwyer called “Why Are Debut Novels Failing to Launch?” channeled the fear of debut novelists everywhere: What happens if no one buys my book? Book sales are an important way for editors and agents to gauge whether to invest in an author. If her first novel doesn’t sell, the debut novelist fears, will she...

Emily Witt spent much of this past summer feeling nervous about what people were going to think of her book, Health and Safety: A Breakdown, which chronicles her falling in love with both the Brooklyn dance music scene and a music producer she met through it, as well as the eventual nightmarish breakup that followed during the pandemic. When I spoke...

Emily Van Duyne’s Loving Sylvia Plath is a deeply researched, beautifully written look at Plath’s complicated legacy and what the writers’s life can tell us about womanhood, ambition, domestic violence, and artmaking. Van Duyne writes the book as both a Plath scholar and a “superfan,” and as someone whose own experience of domestic violence gave her...