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Books

Speaking to BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, Atwood said she believed the plot was bonkers when she first had the concept for the novel as the US was the democratic ideal at the time. It was the land of freedom and people in Europe just didn't believe that it could ever go like that, she said. Despite this, Atwood added: I've always been somebody who has never believed it can't happen here. It can happen anywhere, given the circumstances.

Taking the crown as the most checked-out adult title this year at San Jose Public Library branches is Kristin Hannah's The Women, a compelling coming of age story. The prequel to The Hunger Games, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes by Suzanne Collins, remains the top pick for teen readers for the second consecutive year. And once again, a Dav Pilkey title comes out on top among children's books: Dog Man: The Scarlet Shedder was the most-checked out title for that age group.

I'm going to ask you to describe this man in as much detail as you can. What's the most distinctive feature on his face? It would be the eyes. He's called Kristian Hadeland. Twenty years old. Narrow eyes, high cheekbones. He's a photographer, wants to be a photographer. And he is ruthless, obsessive. He wants to be an artist for whatever price it takes. There's something that kind of releases all of that and he's very successful.

A fter reading that Selena Gomez looked ethereal in a custom Ralph Lauren wedding dress, that the Vitamix 5200 is a legend for a reason, and that scientists made a yogurt using ants, I feel sufficiently bad about myself because of how much time I have spent staring at inconsequential words and meaningless images on my little screen that I transition to the big screen that is my laptop.

Winter is the perfect time to curl up with a good book, sip on some hot cocoa (or coffee, if you're me), and get smarter. But hey, let's not limit ourselves to design books alone. As a designer, growth isn't just about mastering tools, it's about mastering life and the skills that can help you elevate your work and your hustle. So, here's a list of books that will level up your game in ways you didn't see coming.

If the moon were to suddenly turn to cheese, the movie pitches would be insufferable. Astronauts would be irritated, grad students would be demoralized and news articles would overflow with terrible puns. The great jaws of the Internet would get hold of the details, churning out doomsday scenarios, memes and conspiracies. And that's even before the moon cheese would start to compress, creating geysers of material and a dangerously unstable lunar landscape.

In a chaotic and distressing year, books provided a respite, a chance to commune with works of coherent voice and vision. Some people find it harder to read during days overflowing with one-minute distractions and incessant notifications, but when I took the time, I was rewarded with a slightly bigger foothold in a world of decency, humanity, patience, and compassion. Here are 10 good reasons to give that a try.

Make their holidays even more magical. Find the perfect gift for the reader in your life. Shop our list of top picks for book lover essentials. Sofa Sack Bean Bag Chair What better way to enjoy a good book than to cozy up in a comfy chair? This simple and soft, medium-sized bean bag chair could be a great addition to reading time. The chair is designed to resist stains and discoloration, making maintenance easier.

Kane: So in trying to find the best fiction and the best nonfiction of a year it means doing a ton of research, which, thankfully, we're a bunch of good-natured nerds, and we love any excuse to research and any excuse to read more books. I mean, it was a great self-assigned homework project this year. [Laughs.] So some of the most important things that we were looking at for every book is it had to have an exceptional voice in writing and an incredible story.

For the hand-painted cover, Murugiah recreated his digital mock up drawings onto heavy stock watercolour paper with red ink. After the ink drawings were done, they were then taped to the drawing board where Murugiah dripped paint and moved the paper around, applying randomised brush strokes onto the paper. The result is a richly textured background wash, made in reaction to the natural dripping of the paint.

unrealistic, not very evidence based-just designed to make you feel good,

Death comes for us all, but if you're a character in a Muriel Spark novel, it may come faster than you think. In Not to Disturb, a poetry-quoting butler orchestrating the murder-suicide of his master and mistress says of two intruders that they are nothing more than minor characters: "They don't come into the story." The unhappy pair is later dispatched, as if by afterthought, in a subordinate clause:

Jillian Lauren has filed for divorce for from Weezer bassist Scott Shriner after 20 years of marriage, according to TMZ. She cited irreconcilable differences as the reason for their separation. Back in April of this year, Lauren was arrested and charged with attempted murder after allegedly firing a gun at police who were pursuing three suspects in a hit-and-run chase in Los Angeles.

It took the last traces of Homo sapiens 10,000 desperate years to reach the semi-oxygenated rock orbiting Proxima Centauri. Widely known as a cosy bothy among the stars, it was a place where stellar ramblers in all their multitudes could pause and rest as they meandered the lightyears. They came in so many forms it took the humans a couple of decades to realize they weren't alone.

One of the many delights of America is that its geography is also a vocabulary. If I say "Portland, Oregon," or "the Hamptons," or "Appalachia," the reader knows instantly which stereotypes are being invoked: the middle-class Maoist, the summering WASP, the hick. This shorthand allows American authors to invest their prose with extra meaning, just by using it somewhere. The rollout for Olivia Nuzzi's new book, American Canto, has therefore leaned heavily into the elementary turbulence of California.

It was only after I joined that I began to hear contrary notions. This was the most combustible part of my life. All these ideas were new to me. I'd never heard of pacifism. I didn't know about the idea of defying your government. I knew you could do that if you wanted to be a criminal, but I didn't know you could do it on moral grounds. I learned.

When November's Genius puzzle germinated in July, no one knew how popular its hidden theme would be by the time of publication. A celebrity version of The Traitors? sniffed the sceptics. We and they will already know the personalities. Typical terrible TV idea. Won't work. Eleven million live viewers later, we can now have a look at the filled version of Glyph's remarkable grid. Or rather, grids.

Alison Roman, star of online food culture in the 2010s, has a new cookbook out that is (in an apparent first for her) slumming it in the Budget Cooking category on Amazon. It's a pantry book called Something From Nothing, which promises recipes with ingredients that might already be lying around your house, ready to be made into something ... from nothing.

At necessary moments in my life, Tom Stoppard, the preeminent British playwright who died last Saturday, has popped up like one of his frenetic characters, spouting enigmatic lines and leaving me thrilled, confused, and somehow heartened. The first time, I was in graduate school, reading Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, his breakthrough homage to Hamlet; I was surely thinking grad-school thoughts when I came across the line "the toenails, on the other hand, never grow at all"-the best bad joke ever.

Consider Do This, Do That your holiday advent calendar this month, where you'll pry open one of those little perforated cardboard doors (read our weekly round-ups) to reveal a foil-wrapped piece of chocolate shaped like a star (find events you should check out each day). If anything, Do This, Do That is a bit better than a physical advent calendar. It's less packaging-dense, just as joyous, and also, it doesn't cost you anything. Let's get into some glad tidings.

Listen and subscribe: Apple | Spotify | Google | Wherever You Listen Sign up to receive our weekly Books & Fiction newsletter. Joan Silber reads her story " Safety," from the December 8, 2025, issue of the magazine. A winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story, Silber is the author of nine books of fiction, the most recent of which are the novels " Mercy" and " Secrets of Happiness."

When Quentin Farmer was getting his startup Portola off the ground, one of the first hires he made was a sci-fi novelist. The co-founders began building the AI companion company in late 2023 with only a seed of an idea: Their companions would be decidedly non-human. Aliens, in fact, from outer space. But when they asked a large language model to generate a backstory, they got nothing but slop. The model simply couldn't tell a good story.

Over 600 pages this memoir of sorts ranges from her childhood growing up in the Canadian backwoods to her grief at the death of her partner of 48 years, the writer Graeme Gibson, in 2019, with many friendships, the occasional spat and more than 50 books (including Cat's Eye, Alias Grace and the Booker prizewinning The Blind Assassin and The Testaments) in between.

There's an old myth that Inuit cultures have as many as a hundred words for snow. I remember learning about it in school, and there was just something wonderful about the idea that people's perceptions can be so deeply rich and different. I guess that's why, although it has been debunked many times, the story keeps getting repeated. There is also a lot of truth to the underlying concept.