It’s payback time.

Raymond Biesinger says he wrote his new book, “9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off: An Informal Self-Defence Guide for Independent Creatives,” for a very simple reason.

“Spite, quite honestly,” he laughs, before adding another purpose. “And tactics. It was a tactical move.

“My goal with the book is to open up ...Read more

It might be the best opening line of a novel this year: “The week I shot a man clean through the head started like any other.”

That’s how Emma Stonex’s “The Sunshine Man” starts. Her followup to “The Lamplighters” (a book club favorite — or at least, a favorite of my book club) alternates between two perspectives. One is the ...Read more

Publishers will release as many as 1 million books this year, so good luck summarizing that. But if what I read and loved in 2025 is any indication, writers have pulled their focus in from the big picture to the world writ small: how families are adapting to the climate we live in, how a person overwhelmed by the screwed-up justice system can ...Read more

CHICAGO — There are 49 books in front of me, stacked like colorful bricks in a wall. These are the 49 books I didn’t include in the Chicago Tribune’s 10 Best Books of 2025. If you’re curious about the recipe for this list, here’s how I do it: I read all year long, and when I finish a book and loved it — a comic book, a mystery, a ...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Nov. 29, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana.

(Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.)

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "The Widow: A ...Read more

The Middle Passage has been a touchstone of storytelling for generations — the television series “Roots” and Charles Johnson’s award-winning “Middle Passage” spring to mind — but no artistic work can truly translate its atrocities.

Hence the necessity of nonfiction: Siddharth Kara’s wrenching, superb “The Zorg” depicts a ...Read more

I love a Western.

Maybe it’s because my dad had old movies playing on the TV throughout my childhood, or maybe it’s because I grew up in rural California, where it was easy to imagine cowboys and campfires.

Nowadays, I gravitate toward what I would call “modern literary Westerns,” with their strong sense of place and complex look at ...Read more

The singular, disconcerting uneasiness that is so characteristic of Joy Williams’ fiction, yet so hard to pin down, is once again dazzlingly on display in her latest collection, “The Pelican Child.”

The critically beloved author’s first book of full-length stories since 2015’s “ The Visiting Privilege” contains a dozen works, all ...Read more

The phrase “Time is a flat circle” often refers to how the manic post-pandemic news cycle makes comprehension of the recent past impossible. A similarly dazed bafflement is explored in W. David Marx’s lucid and entertaining —yet despairing — book about the new millennium’s flattening of culture, “Blank Space.”

One of the primary...Read more

Emily Maxwell is back.

The star of Stewart O’Nan’s novel “Emily, Alone” and a co-star of O’Nan’s “ Henry, Himself,” she plays a supporting role in the author’s latest, “Evensong.” She’s one of several elderly female characters, mostly widows, mostly living in an independent-living complex where they have settled into ...Read more

Kate Baer tries her best not to give people advice.

But the bestselling poet and author of the new collection “How About Now” does want to share some of what she’s been reminding herself lately.

“I think most of us, when we get into our 40s, we’ve lived enough life to know that we’re so lucky to age and that there’s a lot of ...Read more

A lifetime of reading has convinced me that books are more likely to get worse — not better — as they go. “The Breath of the Gods” bucks that trend.

You could say Simon Winchester’s book, subtitled “The History and Future of the Wind,” is running against the wind. There’s too much hot air in its first half, which has an awful ...Read more

Next July marks 250 years since a handful of upstart American colonies declared independence from Britain. A war was fought, as we all know, and almost immediately after it was over, Richard Bell asserts in “The American Revolution and the Fate of the World,” a “collective amnesia” took hold.

The preference for historians and Americans ...Read more

The #MeToo movement may have faded from the news, but its influence still reverberates in the literary world.

Recent years have seen a handful of authors reassessing relationships between young women and older men. Some of these scenarios derived from an author’s past fiction, as with Mary Gaitskill’s “Minority Report,” which retells ...Read more

Here are the bestsellers for the week that ended Saturday, Nov. 15, compiled from data from independent and chain bookstores, book wholesalers and independent distributors nationwide, powered by Circana BookScan © 2025 Circana.

(Reprinted from Publishers Weekly, published by PWxyz LLC. © 2025, PWxyz LLC.)

HARDCOVER FICTION

1. "The Strength ...Read more

LOS ANGELES — It's a rare gray Saturday in Los Angeles; raindrops collect along a window overlooking a row of trees at Le Parc at Melrose.

Light trickles its way into the hotel room, illuminating a brown coffee table. An unreleased novel from Swiss author Nelio Biedermann sits next to a cup of tea, and a wood cross string necklace lies on the...Read more

Brandon Taylor’s fourth book, “Minor Black Figures,” begins in New York City in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

As political and societal tides shift, as the city rises up in agitation, we meet Wyeth, a Black, millennial artist who hasn’t made art in a while and is struggling with what to paint next....Read more