NPR's Book of the Day

The history of Jewish revolutionary groups is fraught with complexity, violence and surprise — as author Molly Crabapple discovered when she traveled across eastern Europe to dig through the archives of her ancestors. Her journey is the subject of her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country. In it, Crabapple reveals the largely-forgotten history of the Jewish Labor Bund: a secular, anti-Zionist, and socialist political party founded in the late 1800s. In today’s episode, Crabapple joins NPR’s Leila Fadel to discuss the book, and why the Bund remains so controversial to this day.  

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A Perfect Hand has all the ingredients of a charming Victorian romance novel: a scheming matchmaker plot, an upstairs-downstairs dynamic, and a hefty dose of petticoats. But author Ayelet Waldman also explores what lies beneath the shiny historical romanticism. When protagonist and lady's maid Alice partners with an attractive valet to set up their wealthy employers, she discovers there could be more to life than servitude or marriage. But can she make it happen? In today’s episode, Waldman joins NPR’s Elissa Nadworny for a conversation about A Perfect Hand, and its unexpected political edge.

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In Ilona Bannister’s Five, five strangers wait on a train platform. One will die in the next five minutes but only one person knows: the reader. In Anthony Horowitz’s A Deadly Episode, his real 2018 novel The Word is Murder becomes a fictional film adaptation with one problem: the actor playing the protagonist is dead. Today’s episode features conversations on metafiction with both authors. First, Bannister talks to NPR’s Ayesha Rascoe about writing a novel with a five-minute timespan. Then, Horowitz talks to NPR’s Scott Simon about poking fun at true crime — with a novel about true crime.

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Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw is a foundational legal scholar, theorist, and Civil Rights advocate, known for coining such significant and controversial terms as intersectionality and Critical Race Theory. But what — or who — inspired her work? Crenshaw examines just this in her new memoir Backtalker, which delves into her past, and the legal cases that shined light on complex and underresearched structures of inequity. In today’s episode, Crenshaw joins NPR’s Michel Martin for a conversation about Backtalker and why, as she says, “forward momentum has always been met by retrenchment.”

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Becks is a queer teenager in the 1980s struggling to find a sense of belonging. When she picks up an unfinished coding project left behind by her beloved late uncle, she isn’t quite prepared for her efforts to ripple centuries into the future. Told in the years 1983, 2090, and 2586, Portia Elan’s novel Homebound weaves Becks’ story with that of future humans who experience similar struggles in a vastly different landscape. In today’s episode, Elan speaks with NPR’s Scott Detrow about her debut novel, and the timelessness of searching for a place — or a feeling — to call home. 

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