Shannon Carlin

Carlin is a contributor for TIME.

Recent Articles

How to End a Love Story

Screenwriter and director Yulin Kuang’s debut novel, How to End a Love Story, is a sorrowful yet fiery romance about learning to forgive. Thirteen years after losing her younger sister, Helen Zhang is still trying...

By Shannon Carlin

A Complicated Passion

With A Complicated Passion: The Life and Work of Agnès Varda, the first major biography of Agnès Varda, film critic Carrie Rickey offers a fascinating deep dive into the illustrious life and career of the...

By Shannon Carlin

Survival Is a Promise

Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde is what scholar and poet Alexis Pauline Gumbs likes to call a “quantum biography.” To understand Audre Lorde’s life and lasting legacy, the author chose...

By Shannon Carlin

Margo's Got Money Troubles

Rufi Thorpe’s witty and endearing fourth novel (soon to be an Apple TV+ series) begins with Margo, a bright college freshman, discovering she is pregnant with her former English professor’s baby. Her decision to keep...

By Shannon Carlin

Ghostroots

'Pemi Aguda’s debut, a 2024 National Book Award finalist, is an unsettling short story collection set in a mythical version of the author’s homeland of Lagos, Nigeria. The 12 gothic tales spotlight characters, often mothers...

By Shannon Carlin

Whiskey Tender

Deborah Jackson Taffa’s debut memoir, Whiskey Tender, looks at her coming of age as a member of the Quechan (Yuma) Nation and Laguna Pueblo tribe in 1980s New Mexico. Taffa was raised by a mother...

By Shannon Carlin

Traveling

With Traveling: On the Path of Joni Mitchell, NPR music critic Ann Powers takes readers on an introspective journey through the life and career of the legendary artist, assessing the victories and contradictions that make...

By Shannon Carlin

Feeding Ghosts

Author and artist Tessa Hulls’ debut graphic memoir, Feeding Ghosts, is a lush and moving portrait of the women in her family. In 1957, Hulls’ maternal grandmother Sun Yi fled Communist China with the author’s...

By Shannon Carlin

The Book Censor's Library

National Book Award finalist Bothayna Al-Essa’s 2021 novel, The Book Censor's Library, newly translated from the original Arabic by Ranya Abdelrahman and Sawad Hussain, is a Kafkaesque satire set in a near future where most...

By Shannon Carlin

The Lions' Den

Iris Mwanza’s debut novel, The Lions’ Den, is a riveting legal thriller set in the corrupt and homophobic political world of Zambia in the early 1990s. Grace, a defiant rookie lawyer, has finally been assigned...

By Shannon Carlin

Get the Picture

After tackling the inner workings of the wine business with her first book, Cork Dork, journalist Bianca Bosker returns with an engrossing and often absurd examination of the fine art world. With Get the Picture:...

By Shannon Carlin

I Cannot Control Everything Forever

With unfettered honesty, literature professor Emily C. Bloom details her difficult journey to becoming a mother in her late 30s, which included a chemical pregnancy, a late-term miscarriage, and an abortion. She writes woefully of...

By Shannon Carlin

Another Word for Love

Another Word for Love, Carvell Wallace’s debut memoir, offers a compassionate look at a complicated coming of age. Across a series of vignettes, the author and journalist explores what it was like to grow up...

By Shannon Carlin

Devil Is Fine

John Vercher’s gut-wrenching third novel begins with its unnamed protagonist, a biracial writing professor and struggling author, having a panic attack on his way to his teenage son’s funeral. These attacks have become an all...

By Shannon Carlin

The Anxious Generation

Giving a child unfettered access to social media is like sending them to Mars unaccompanied, social psychologist (and one of this year’s TIME100 Health honorees) Jonathan Haidt argues in the opening pages of The Anxious...

By Shannon Carlin

All Things Are Too Small

In critic Becca Rothfeld’s opinion, less is definitely not more. Her debut essay collection, All Things Are Too Small, explores the ways in which minimalism is ruining our lives. With curiosity and wit, she tackles...

By Shannon Carlin

The Bookshop

The Bookshop is author and history professor Evan Friss’ big-hearted ode to the local bookstore. These shops—the term, Friss explains, most indie booksellers prefer over “store,” believing it sounds less commercial—provide more than just books....

By Shannon Carlin

You Glow in the Dark

You Glow in the Dark, Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi’s English-language debut, is a terrifying trip through a dystopian Latin America where past, present, and future collide. These seven stories, newly translated from Spanish by Chris...

By Shannon Carlin

James

With his best-selling 24th novel, Percival Everett offers an audacious reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Huck’s enslaved friend Jim—who, as the book’s title suggests, prefers to...

By Shannon Carlin

The Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2024

From Ina Garten's memoir to Sabaa Tahir's new YA fantasy

By Shannon Carlin
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