US Elections
fromIndependent
14 hours agoColum McCann: Never in my 40 years in the US have I felt an atmosphere as poisonous as this
Donald Trump is likened to a carnival barker, enticing people with promises and taking their money.
The most common titles on hold with the longest waits include The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, Theo of Golden by Allen Levi, Project Hail Mary by Andrew Weir, Heart the Lover by Lily King and Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage by Belle Burden.
Nothing is Impossible with God topped the Advice, How-To & Misc. category during its debut week, establishing it as 2026's leading faith title and surpassing all competitors in the genre.
Tracking a river through a cedar forest in Ecuador, Robert Macfarlane comes to a 30ft-high waterfall and, below it, a wide pool. It's irresistible: he plunges in. The water under the falls is turbulent, a thousand little fists punching his shoulders. He's exhilarated. No one could mistake this for a dying river, sluggish or polluted. But that thought sparks others: Is this thing I'm in really alive? By whose standards?
What does it mean to subscribe to something? Whether we mean a belief or a magazine, the definition is complicated. I began subscribing to The New Yorker when I was a sophomore in college; more than 30 years later, I have yet to stop and I feel strongly that I never will. Yet during some of those years-okay, many of them-the weekly issues have piled up in my home and gone mostly unread between biannual days of bingeing and purging. If these reading habits could somehow be converted into digital clicks, the resulting "traffic report" might look like I don't want the product at all.
"Race Against Time: A Reporter Reopens the Unsolved Murder Cases of the Civil Rights Era" quickly became one of my favorite nonfiction books written by a journalist. I appreciated how he showed the grueling, day-to-day work local journalism requires, and how many layers of people fought him in revealing the despicable work of the Ku Klux Klan.
Dilara, the protagonist of this début novel, is consumed by the absence of a stable home in her life. She and her family flee Turkey, where she is from, after a failed coup in 2016. When they end up in Italy, something inexplicable happens: Dilara's bathroom transforms into a cell in an infamous prison on the outskirts of Istanbul.
Two fiction books about good friends coming from different circumstances. Two biographies of people whose influence on American culture is, arguably, still underrated. One Liza Minnelli memoir. These are just a handful of books coming out in the first few months of 2026 that we've got our eye on. Fiction 'Autobiography of Cotton' by Cristina Rivera Garza, Feb. 3 Garza, who won a Pulitzer in 2024 for memoir/autobiography, actually first published Autobiography of Cotton back in 2020, but it's only now getting an English translation.
In this collection of essays, reported pieces, and criticism dating back to the nineteen-seventies, Frazier's sharp eye for finding the complex in the quotidian is on full display. From tales about monster trucks and the Maraschino-cherry empire to musings about lantern flies and Lolita, the collection-much of which was published in this magazine-spotlights the vibrancy of topics often under-noticed. In the playful and diligent hands of the seasoned staff writer, these ordinary things feel extraordinary.
We meet him as a Gumby-like figure, asleep on a dirt floor, with only a jug of water and a toy horse. He has no idea how he got there. When he's around seventeen years old, Kaspar meets his captor, rendered in the book as a shadowy, hatch-marked father: "The Man in Black." The man teaches him to write his name; he teaches him to take a few fumbling goose steps outside.
What does it mean to dig into the past, to uncover obscure facts about bygone decades or centuries and bring them to light in 2026? There's a lot of that in this rundown of February books, everything from a clear-eyed look at someone who history has depicted as a monster to investigations into the past situated a little closer to home.
I guess I could explain the plot to you: An actress meets up with a man who is convinced she's his mother. It turns out she's not. I think? Maybe she is? Or, maybe she's not but actually kind of is? What is a mother? The most impressive thing about this Booker Prize finalist is how Katie Kitamura plays with the narrative and toys with the reader without being overly clever about it all. She's stingy with details and answers, but generous with intrigue and depth.
One of America's greatest living fiction writers returns with his first novel since 2018's Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the Booker Prize. In Vigil, the dying CEO of an oil company gets the Scrooge treatment when the ghost of a woman returns from the afterlife to help him cross over. If that sounds similar to Lincoln in the Bardo, don't be fooledthis one hits different. Despite its shorter length, Vigil is an equally powerful exploration of memory, compassion, and atonement.
Below, you'll find the top 10 fiction reading lists for four local library systems-DC, Alexandria, and Arlington and Prince George's counties-and the top nonfiction picks in DC and PG County. Book-lovers across the Washington area spent the past year reading sweet and funny romance titles, historical fiction, and engrossing mysteries that explored family secrets. In the nonfiction stacks, readers gravitated to popular books like Michelle Zauner's Crying in H Mart and Isabel Wilkerson's Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents.