From its earliest years, Mount Pleasant was known as the "Athens of Iowa": a small town with a big story and a center of learning and culture. Even during the town's pioneer era, the citizens of Mount Pleasant championed education, establishing numerous schools and a college. Progressive ideals, including abolitionism and women's education, took root. As the home of Sen. James Harlan, an important ally of Abraham Lincoln, the city emerged as a bastion of support for the president. During t...

**A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • USA TODAY BOOK CLUB PICK • ONE OF AUDIBLE'S BEST BIOS AND MEMOIRS OF 2023 • “A raw, intimate look at [Hendrickson's] life with a stutter. It’s a profoundly moving book that will reshape the way you think about people living with this condition.”—Esquire • A candid memoir about a lifelong struggle to speak.“Life On Delay brims with empathy and honesty . . . It moved me in ways that I haven’t experien...

**A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • USA TODAY BOOK CLUB PICK • ONE OF AUDIBLE'S BEST BIOS AND MEMOIRS OF 2023 • “A raw, intimate look at [Hendrickson's] life with a stutter. It’s a profoundly moving book that will reshape the way you think about people living with this condition.”—Esquire • A candid memoir about a lifelong struggle to speak.“Life On Delay brims with empathy and honesty . . . It moved me in ways that I haven’t experien...

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKWinner, Tillie Olsen Award for Creative WritingNamed a Best Book of the Year by: Time * Harper’s Bazaar * Esquire * Booklist * USA Today * Elle * Good Housekeeping * New York Times * Electric Literature * TodayFrom the bestselling author of ALL YOU CAN EVER KNOW comes a searing memoir of family, class and grief—a daughter’s se...

A Time and New York TimesTop 10 Book of the Year * New York Times Notable Book and Times Critic’s Top Book of 2018NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2018 BY * Elle * Bustle * Kirkus Reviews * Lit Hub * NPR * Oprah DailyThe bestselling and critically acclaimed debut novel by Lisa Halliday is “a brilliant and complex examination of power dyna...

From the New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves—and our world today.For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of t...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR • Nine stunningly original, provocative, and poignant stories—two published for the very first time—all from the mind of the incomparable author of Stories of Your Life and OthersTackling some of humanity’s oldest questions along with new quandaries only he could imagine, these stories will change the way you think, feel, and see the world. They are Ted Chiang at his b...

**WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR FICTIONONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES’S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21ST CENTURYA NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF 2022LONGLISTED FOR THE 2022 BOOKER PRIZE“Buzzy and enthralling . . . A glorious novel about empires and erasures, husbands and wives, staggering fortunes and unspeakable misery . . . Fun as hell to read.” —Oprah Daily"A genre-bending, time-skipping s...

This program is read by Rosalind Chao, who stars as Ye Wenjie in the Netflix adaptation, 3 Body Problem.WINNER OF THE HUGO AWARD FOR BEST NOVELOver 1 million copies sold in North America“A mind-bending epic.”—The New York Times • “War of the Worlds for the 21st century.”—The Wall Street Journal • “Fascinating.”—TIME

Winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award • Winner of the Orange Prize • National Book Critics Circle Award Finalist • New York Times Readers’ Pick: Top 100 Books of the 21****st Century""Bel Canto is its own universe. A marvel of a book."" —Washington Post Book WorldNew York Times bestselling author Ann Patchett’s spellbinding novel about love and opera, and the unifying ways people learn...

**NOW A HULU ORIGINAL SERIES • From the New York Times bestselling author of Normal People . . . “[A] cult-hit . . . [a] sharply realistic comedy of adultery and friendship.”—Entertainment WeeklySALLY ROONEY NAMED TO THE TIME 100 NEXT LIST • WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES (UK) YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD • ONE OF BUZZFEED’S BEST BOOKS OF THE DECADE AND THE TELEGRAPH’S 20 BEST NOVELS OF ALL TIME • ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOK...

**A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Winner of the Alex Award and the Massachusetts Book Award • Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, San Francisco Chronicle, Entertainment Weekly, The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, Grantland Booklist, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Shelf Awareness, Book Riot, School Library Journal, Bust...