NBN Book of the Day

From Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist Anand Gopal, an epic and enthralling account of six Syrians fighting for a better world, in the tradition of classic works by Philip Gourevitch and Katherine Boo.In 2011, in a northern Syrian city, a small group of men and women began a movement that overthrew a brutal dictatorship. For the next eighteen months, many of the citizens of Manbij carried out one of the most remarkable experiments in democracy in modern times.Days of Love and Rage (Viking, 2026) details the powerfully intimate narratives of the men and women who led this struggle, and who experienced the highs of camaraderie and the lows of betrayal. Among them: a pair of best friends torn apart by political polarization, a mother who stands up to male dominance, and a worker who risks everything for the dream of equality.Anand Gopal immerses you in the world of a single city in the throes of revolution, and lays bare the danger that inequality poses to democracy. But this book transcends the particulars of one terrible conflict to tell the broader story of rising authoritarianism in our times. Days of Love and Rage has the force, sweep, and artistry of a great novel, and is ultimately a story of our enduring human need for dignity and hope.

Anand Gopal is a writer for The New Yorker. He is the author of No Good Men Among the Living and writes about democracy, inequality, and conflict.

Recommended Books:

Loubna Mrie, Defiance

Walter Ang, Orality and Literacy

Chris Holmes is Chair of Literatures in English and Professor at Ithaca College. He writes criticism on contemporary global literatures. His book, Kazuo Ishiguro Against World Literature, is published with Bloomsbury Publishing. He is the co-director of The New Voices Festival, a celebration of work in poetry, prose, and playwriting by up-and-coming young writers.
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You can stock your life with important work, relationships, activities, and art, and yet, you can still ask: what's the point of it all? Almost every thinking person has had that question—many more than once. Granted, you're more likely to worry about the point of life when things are not going well, but you're also likely to still ask this question when you've finally received that promotion, achieved a goal, or raised your children—exactly when it seems like the question shouldn't arise. 

In The Meaning of It All: Ultimate Meaning, Everyday Meaning, Cosmic Meaning, Death, and Time (Oxford University Press, 2026), Rivka Weinberg argues this is because there are different kinds of meaning, and some of them, sadly, are impossible to achieve. She explains what they are, illuminates which types of meaning are possible, which are impossible, and shows us how we might orient our lives in light of these bittersweet truths. Although we all die in the end, Weinberg explains why death doesn't make life more or less meaningful. Instead, it is time that is necessary for meaning, even as it also undermines it by wearing away the fruits of our efforts and commitments. Weinberg shows that most advice on how to reduce the agony of time's erosions cannot work. However, she also shows how we can tease out some insights from failed attempts to escape time's wounds and thereby make progress toward coping with things as they are. A meaningful life is one lived in the fullness of time, accepting suffering, acknowledging our tragic losses and limitations, and making the most of Everyday Meaning.
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The N-word is one of the most perplexing, controversial and misunderstood words in the American lexicon. It’s a word that Elizabeth Pryor has not only contemplated, it’s one that she has taught and observed up close.When a white student quoted her father and blurted out the N-word in the middle of a class she was teaching, Professor Pryor’s worlds collided. In that moment, she was forced to confront the history of the notorious slur in the United States, and her complicated relationship with her father Richard Pryor, who made the word a trademark of his comedy in the 1970s.As she dives into her research, her own memories of the N-word come flooding back in unprocessed memories that she hadn’t thought about for decades. In reckoning with those memories, Elizabeth goes on a more public journey of discovery of the messy and sometimes surprising legacies of racism in the United States.A braided narrative that seamlessly integrates the history of the N-word with Elizabeth’s own story of growing up the Black Jewish daughter of Richard Pryor, Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word and Me (37 Ink, 2026) follows Elizabeth as she becomes a leading scholar and teacher of the very word her father put on the pop culture map.

You can find Elizabeth on her website, Instagram, and TikTok. Her viral Ted talk, “Why it’s so hard to talk about the N-word,” is here. And Richard Pryor: Live in Concern (1979) can be streamed on YouTube. 

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From about the middle of the first millennium of the Common Era through to the fifteenth century, Southeast Asian societies underwent a political transformation that produced the first, early states that were the forerunners of the countries we know today as Myanmar, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam. Dougald O’Reilly’s Empires of the Southern Ocean: Early Civilizations of Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026), tells the complicated story of the development of these earlier polities from ‘chiefdoms’ to more complex states. The book highlights the role of local factors in the rise of these states, as well as the influence of early Southeast Asia’s participation in long-distance trade networks in the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea.
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In Race, Class, and Affirmative Action: College Admissions in a New Era (Harvard Education Press, 2026), Julie J. Park offers deft analysis of the changes to college admissions and campus life since the US Supreme Court ruled to restrict race-conscious policies in two 2023 cases: Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) v. Harvard and SFFA v. the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Park offers clear explanations of the rulings, their historical context, and their implications for higher education policy. She highlights how the Supreme Court still allows campuses to consider the role of race in students' experiences and that numerous tools to advance diversity in admissions remain. In this lively, timely work, Park points out the swift and stark post-ruling shifts in campus demographics and grapples with questions of how to push toward a more equitable admissions system. She investigates alternative initiatives, such as test-optional and test-free admissions, percent plans, and others, weighing their merits and drawbacks. She also examines inequality affecting college applications themselves and offers ideas for reform. Integrating up-to-the minute research on admissions, standardized testing, enrollment management, and the campus racial climate, Park recommends actions that can advance equity-oriented access to higher education despite the current restrictions on race-conscious admissions. Park ends with a call to campus leaders, policymakers, and practitioners to reimagine selective college admissions and attendance and offers a glimpse of what the future could hold.

Julie J. Park is a professor in the College of Education at the University of Maryland, College Park. An expert on race and diversity in higher education, she served as a consulting expert in the landmark case Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard on the side of Harvard.

Caleb Zakarin is CEO and Publisher of the New Books Network.
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