When author Elinor Lipman sits down to write, she rarely has the concept of the whole book in mind.

Colored Television, the seventh book by Danzy Senna, was published in September of 2024 and won the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction, which focuses on books that make a contribution to the subjects of race and social justice. It was also nominated for a Pen/Faulkner Award.

You can learn a lot about an editor from reading the publication they edit. Consider Graydon Carter, former editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair, whose new memoir is titled When the Going was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines.

In Joseph Lee’s debut book, Nothing More Of This Land: Community, Power and the Search for Indigenous Identity, he tells the story of Indigenous tribes around the country in an attempt to answer the question of what it means to be Native.

In Jessica Harris’ latest cookbook, Braided Heritage: Recipes and Stories on the Origin of American Cuisine, the author, professor and culinary historian describes food from three cultures that are foundational to America’s history and cuisine.

I Regret Almost Everything, the new memoir by celebrated New York City restaurateur Keith McNally, reveals a life marked (so far) by serendipity, ambition, vision, love won, love lost and sometimes retrieved and, finally, the shock and disability of a stroke.