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The hero of this year's Booker Prize winner, The Finkler Question, is a non-Jew fascinated by Jewishness. For writer David Sax, these efforts to simulate Judaism — to take on a persona outside of one's own — offer a broader commentary on human experience.

In her new memoir, NPR's All Things Considered co-host uncovers some painful family secrets — the "things left unsaid" by her African-American relatives as they tried to shield the younger generation from memories that haunted the past.

On March 3, 1943, 173 people were crushed to death in a stairwell leading to a London air-raid shelter. The crowd was mostly made up of women and children. In her tender and sorrowful novel, Jessica Francis Kane meditates on the disaster, and how humans try to make sense of inexplicable events.

For the past three years, sportswriter Jim Gorant has been following the pit bulls rescued from Michael Vick's compound. Gorant, along with an animal behaviorist and dog trainer, explains how the Vick dogs have been evaluated and rehabilitated.

Dinaw Mengestu follows up The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears with a new novel: How to Read the Air. As his own marriage unravels in New York, Jonas — the son of two Ethiopian immigrants — retraces the journey of his parents' lives.

What's the difference between wooden and plastic cutting boards? When should you throw out frozen fish? Harold McGee, an expert on the science of food and cooking, untangles these kitchen mysteries and more in his Keys to Good Cooking.

Forty years ago, freshman Mike Doonesbury met his roommate at Walden College, and since then, the funny pages haven't been the same. Cartoonist Garry Trudeau reflects on the beloved, irreverent strip, which he first sketched as a Yale undergrad in 1970.

Author and screenwriter Nick Hornby joins Fresh Air host Terry Gross to discuss his novel, Juliet, Naked, and his screenplay for the movie An Education.

Bernard Cornwell recounts a less-than-heroic chapter of American history in his latest novel. The Fort is an exciting account of the failed siege of Penobscot — a mostly forgotten event — and a thoughtful exploration of the absurdity and futility of war.

David Grossman began working on his novel To the End of the Land while his son Uri was in the Israeli Army. He hoped it would protect him. It didn't. Uri was killed, and Grossman's fiction explores the fragility of families, nations and life itself.