10 Best Books of 2023

Xenobe Purvis’s slim but powerful debut novel, “The Hounding,” opens with a jolt: “The girls, the infernal heat, a fresh-dead body. Marching up the river path, the villagers.”How did we get here, with five young sisters living in 1700s England being hunted by an angry mob that su ...  Show more

The journalist, novelist and cultural critic Chuck Klosterman is best known for writing about rock music and pop culture in astute essay collections like “The Nineties,” “X” and “Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs.” But Klosterman got his start in college as a sports journalist, and with ...  Show more

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In Episode 131 of Book Talk, Etc. Tina and Renee share their top 10 books of 2023. They also share what they've been loving lately, their latest reads, and ...

In Episode 131, Catherine (@gilmoreguide) and I share the best backlist books we read in 2022. We each share our top 5 backlist books from 2022, some underrated backlist gems, and our backlist reading stats. Catherine and I both had a successful year of backlist readin ...

On our first Best Books episode, Lily King discusses Five Tuesdays in Winter (Grove, Nov. 9), one of Kirkus’ Best Books in fiction for 2021. Kirkus: “The first collection of stories from an acclaimed novelist…. Full of insights and pleasures” (starred review). Then fiction editor ...  Show more

On our final Best Books episode, Cynthia Barnett discusses The Sound of the Sea: Seashells and the Fate of the Oceans (Norton, July). This “absolutely captivating nature book” is one of Kirkus’ Best Books in young readers’ literature for 2021 (starred review). Then nonfiction edi ...  Show more