Jonathan Haidt's bestselling indictment of smartphones and social media reshaped how parents, schools, and lawmakers think about teen mental health — even as leading psychologists dispute its central causal claim.
How Percival Everett's Pulitzer-winning retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn turns Twain's silent Jim into a literate narrator, code-switching survivor, and the moral center of his own story.
Percival Everett's James topped Fiction, Jason De León's Soldiers and Kings won Nonfiction, and three other titles took the National Book Foundation's 75th annual prizes — who won, why the judges chose them, and what happened at Cipriani Wall Street.
From Colson Whitehead's twin Pulitzer wins to Percival Everett's James, these nine novels published since 2016 are the ones prize juries, critics, and readers keep coming back to.