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How can we understand the experiences of those who have lived through war? What do they have to teach us? Author Hilary Thayer Hamann's favorite book attempts to answer these questions, and reinforces just how beautifully implausible life during conflict can be. It's The War by Marguerite Duras.

"If you mention the word love at a congressional hearing, they look at you like you're Oprah," David Brooks says. But new research has convinced the New York Times writer that to make truly effective public policy, you have to see the emotional and social connections behind the numbers.

In the 1970s, writer Elena Gorokhova sat in her apartment in St. Petersburg — then Leningrad — writing books she knew wouldn't make it past the censors. She recommends three revolutionary reads affirming that the human voice endures, even under the most suffocating circumstances.

Former CIA operatives Robert and Dayna Baer met on the job and fell in love. They talk about their relationship and some of their assignments in The Company We Keep: A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story.

Teju Cole's debut novel, Open City, follows Julius, a half-Nigerian and half-German doctor, as he wanders the streets of New York. Julius struggles to understand his identity as an immigrant, an experience the author himself is familiar with.

Translated from German, Johanna Adorjan's An Exclusive Love reconstructs the day of her grandparents' joint suicide. Adorjan wonders what led the two Holocaust survivors to take their own lives together after years of marriage.

It took Michael David Lukas seven years to write his debut novel, The Oracle of Stamboul, but as Martha Woodroof writes, the long struggle was worth it. Woodroof speaks with Lukas about going by three names, the young girl who inspired his novel and going broke for one's writing dreams.

At the core of everything lies a binary on-off switch, says James Gleick, the author of a new book called The Information. Small bits of information, Gleick says, make up our DNA, our brains and our ideas.

Swedish author Henning Mankell has become famous for his Kurt Wallander detective stories. Now, he is back with the 11th and possibly last installment, The Troubled Man.

A blockbuster Korean novel has just been translated into English, in which a mother from the country goes missing in Seoul. Fresh Air's Maureen Corrigan says the book delves deeply into traditional values, putting the mother's melancholy squarely on the shoulders of her grown (unappreciative) children.