At The New Yorker, Anna Russell speaks with Bernardine Evaristo about her new memoir, Manifesto: On Never Giving Up. Evaristo reflects on early days of literary experimenting and writing “fusion fiction;” her leaving and reentering the heterosexual dating scene and eventually meeting her husband on a dating app; and her many years of living paycheck to paycheck.

When asked why she thought it had taken so long for her to find a wide readership, Evaristo was diplomatic, pointing out that though it had been a long wait for her, some women of color had risen faster. “There are always exceptions,” Evaristo says.

Emma Paterson, Evaristo’s agent, adds that, “there’s a myth in British publishing, which is overwhelmingly white, that books about Black British characters—Black British women—don’t sell, and that Evaristo has, “had to work her way through glass walls.”

At The Marginalian, Maria Popova features Robert Dawson’s The Public Library: A Photographic Essay, a visual love letter to libraries and a testament to the power of reading. The book is full of evocative imagery of different libraries across the nation, plus essays, letters, and poetry by some of America’s most celebrated writers, including Bill Moyers, Ann Patchett, Anne Lamott, Amy Tan, Barbara Kingsolver, and more. The Public Library is perfect for book lovers and anyone with a love for learning. Popova says it is, “absolutely wonderful in its entirety, at once an ode to the glory of our most democratic institutions and a culturally necessary prompt to defend them like we would defend our freedom to live, learn, and be—a freedom to which the library is our highest celebration.”

At The Guardian, Kathryn Hughes reviews Sofi Thanhauser’s Worn, a wide-ranging exploration of the materials our clothes are made of and how they impact our daily lives and the planet. Thanhauser takes readers on a trip around the world—from the luxurious courts of Louis Quatorze to the original silk route to modern-day textile factories in southern India— shedding light on how clothes were first used to stimulate the economy and conjure illusions of power and prestige, while also revealing the industry’s harsh consequences: environmental destruction and the exploitation of workers. Thanhauser also illuminates small groups of tailors around the world who utilize ancestral and ethical methods for making what we wear.”Worn,” Hughes writes, “consists of much more than a string of entertaining anecdotes about people raiding the dressing-up box and embarrassing themselves in the process. Its starting point is the terrible state of our current clothing industry, which, as Thanhauser describes it, exists in a nightmare wasteland of overproduction, toxic waste, choked rivers, child labour and collapsing factories. Following five threads—linen, cotton, silk, rayon and wool—she sets out to chart a deft course through material history, arguing that “there is scarcely a part of the human experience, historic or current, that the story of clothes does not touch.”

At Electric Literature, Diane Cooke speaks to Jessamine Chan about The School for Good Mothers, Chan’s incisive debut novel that revolves around how a young mother’s error lands her in a government reform program and at risk of losing custody of her child. They discuss one of Chan’s main inspirations for the book, a Rachel Aviv article in The New Yorker called “Where Is Your Mother?”, the need for more complex and messy Asian American protagonists, the challenges of being an art mom, and the purpose of satire in her novel in spotlighting how Western culture in particular reinforces restrictive ideas about how mothers should behave.

“The satire was my way of processing my thoughts, feelings, and anxiety about a generally upper-middle-class and white American parenting culture and all the pressure. I found, and still find, the sheer number of instructions about any parenting task or decision to be overwhelming, so part of the satire was taking the idea of instruction and making it insane” Chan says. “Through satire and using speculative elements, I wanted to call into question who is making those rules and whether it’s possible to ever have a set of universal standards that’s separate from the influence of race, class, and culture. How can the teaching of parenting ever be truly objective?”

At The Guardian, Hephzibah Anderson interviews Raven Leilani, author of the award-winning novel Luster. Now published in paperback, Leilani’s sexy and blisteringly honest debut follows Edie, a 23-year-old black woman and aspiring painter trying to stay afloat in New York City. But after being fired from her publishing job, she finds herself moving in with her married white lover and his family.

Leilani discusses her own connection to painting, books currently on her bedside table, literary characters that played a part in the creation of Edie, and her choice to write a scene in which Edie fantasizes about being hit and permits her older white boyfriend to actually strike her—a moment that incited a lot of reactions from readers. “It’s a deeply tricky thing to write about a black woman who is inviting this kind of violence,” Leilani says. “I wanted her to be a character who has the freedom to find pleasure where she finds it, but it is, too, still quite intertwined with the fact that because she is a black woman, she experiences these loud and soft violences in her public life, and choosing it in her private life is a way to exert that control that she doesn’t have elsewhere.”