Kerri's picks
 
 
Book of the week

I’m on a college campus roll this month!

Last week, the Thread Book of the Week was “Vladimir” about a lit professor who was wrestling with aging, desire and campus politics.

This week, I’m back on campus at the University of Arkansas where Millie has returned from a year away to complete her senior year, get a job and buy a long-coveted house.

We also meet Agatha, a visiting professor who is there to interview students about weddings but who then proposes that she eavesdrop on the young women so that she can gather more material for her writing.

She makes Millie an offer she can’t refuse.

The dialogue in “Come And Get It” by Kiley Reid, the author of the award-winning “Such a Fun Age” is perceptive, painfully revealing, even cleverly vacuous at times as Reid tackles the way money drives them, and us, even as we deny it.

Kiley Reid’s first novel was longlisted for the Booker Prize and was optioned to a film production company.

She says she likes slipping stinging social commentary into her novels with humor. She told The Guardian of London: “The premise that literary fiction has to be a drag, it’s just so silly.”


— Kerri Miller | MPR News
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This week on The Thread
How memory works

Why is music so evocative? Why do some memories stick and others fade? How important is slow-wave sleep to the way memory works? One of the country’s leading neuroscientists joins MPR News host Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold Ideas this week to talk about why memory isn’t so much who we were as who we are.
Ask a Bookseller: ‘Is God Is’

Blake Worthey of Two Friends Bookstore in Bentonville, Ark., recommends Aleshea Harris’ play “Is God Is.”
Anne Ursu’s new middle-grade novel tackles chronic fatigue and COVID

Minneapolis writer Anne Ursu has made her name writing fantasy books for middle-grade readers, but in her new novel, “Not Quite a Ghost,” she sidesteps into a different genre: horror.
First Black female jockey Cheryl White celebrated in Minnesota

Have you ever heard of Cheryl White? She was also a trailblazer athlete. At 17 years old she became the first Black woman to race horses professionally. White died in 2019 at 65 years old.

Now her younger brother Raymond is trying to make sure people remember her name and her story. He co-wrote a middle grade book called “The Jockey and her Horse” with New York Times reporter Sarah Maslin Nir.
The stories in ‘Green Frog’ are wildly entertaining and wonderfully diverse

Gina Chung’s collection is a fantastic medley of short stories that dance between literary fiction, fable, Korean folklore and science fiction — and one that’s full of emotional intelligence.
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