Biblioracle: ‘Fresh Air’ host Terry Gross is one of the great readers of my lifetime
Thanks to a viral video posted to social media by “Fresh Air” and NPR, we are now privileged to have an inside look at the specific method of Terry Gross’...
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Biblioracle: Why the Associated Press is ending weekly book reviews
Many publishers have seen that reviews no longer have a significant impact on sales. If books are going to catch the attention of readers, it's coming through other forms.
Biblioracle: In ‘Fonseca,’ Jessica Francis Kane turns a real author’s life into a work of imaginative fiction
Penelope Fitzgerald lived and wrote; we can know her. Jessica Francis Kane has taken this knowing and made something fresh and beautiful.
Biblioracle: Marcy Dermansky puts ordinary people in almost absurd situations in ‘Hot Air’
It is hard to describe the wonderfully disorienting sensation of entering a Marcy Dermansky novel.
Biblioracle: Finally reading ‘Zuckerman Bound,’ and why we don’t have writers like Philip Roth anymore
By an accident of fate, I recently found myself reading a couple of previously unread (by me) Philip Roth novels just as a New York Times columnist was wondering why...
Biblioracle: Hannah Pittard’s novel ‘If You Love It, Let It Kill You’ lives on its own terms
Hannah Pittard's "If You Love It, Let It Kill You" is funny, searching, anarchic and ultimately somewhat unexpectedly and satisfyingly open-hearted.
Biblioracle: The Chicago Public Library needs to hear from you
The CPL has a 2025 survey to better understand what people want from their local library.
Biblioracle: Yiyun Li writes about life after her sons’ suicides in ‘Things in Nature Merely Grow’
"Things in Nature Merely Grow" is about what Yiyun Li calls life inside an “abyss,” the abyss marked by the deaths of her children.
Biblioracle: Dana A. Williams tells the tale of the indomitable Toni Morrison in ‘Toni at Random’
With “Toni at Random,” Dana A. Williams has crafted a book that manages to satisfy as narrative, literary analysis and cultural criticism.
Biblioracle: Remembering the writers Frederick Forsyth and Edmund White
There have been two recent deaths of writers who did very different things in their work and that I encountered at two very different times in my life who now...