Anne Tyler loves the everyday. With her 20th novel (20th!!!!), A Spool of Blue Thread, Tyler continues to sew together stories about the mundane and turn them into something approaching the magical.

To understand spooling, think of it as the process of reeling a document or task list onto a spool, like thread, so it can be unreeled at a more convenient time. Spooling is useful because devices ...

The characters in "A Spool of Blue Thread" look like the same Baltimore family members we've socialized with for 50 years in Anne Tyler's fiction. In fact, everything about her new novel — from its ...