Search results for

The Daily Beast editor-in-chief joins NPR's Steve Inskeep for another chat about the best reading she's been doing lately — books and articles about an iconic Depression-era photo, campaign promises and a country that has a way of flying too close to the sun.

The summer sun may be shining, but vampires don't seem to be going anywhere. NPR's Margot Adler has read more than 100 vampire books this year, and gives a heads-up on two bloodsucking books expected to be summer blockbusters: Christopher Farnsworth's Blood Oath and Justin Cronin's The Passage.

Sloane Crosley follows I Was Told There'd Be Cake with a new collection of sparkling personal essays. She serves up humorous observations and mordant opinions in carefully calibrated cocktails of self-absorption and self-deprecation.

Influenced by both The Sopranos and Marcel Proust, Jennifer Egan takes her readers on a swirling, playful ride through time in A Visit from the Goon Squad, a novel of linked short stories — including one told as a PowerPoint presentation — that defies categorization.

Tired of vampires? Here are five freaky summer reads featuring gods, monsters, aliens, mutants, pulsating brains, sword-canes, dirigibles and derring-do. Each one, says critic Glen Weldon, is enlivened by wit and wordplay — not weepy, bloodsucking introspection.

Read these books at the beach, and people two towels over will wonder why you're chortling. There are plenty of books that will make you laugh, but critic Heller McAlpin separates the mere giggles from the all-out gut-busters.

After sailing the Antarctic Sea and traversing the deepest Tibetan gorge, Peter Heller became a "kook," or beginner surfer. It was while surfing in Huntington Beach, Calif. that he caught a glimpse of his next great adventure: a trip down the West Coast, in search of the perfect wave. In Kook he tells the story of that journey, and what he learned along the way.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks is famous for his case studies of people with neurological disorders that cause unusual problems with perception. In The Mind's Eye, Sacks turns to himself, explaining how an eye tumor affected his vision and perception of the world.

Dinaw Mengestu's How to Read the Air is an unsentimental meditation on the immigrant experience and the illusory idea of asylum. With lyrical prose, he reassesses the by-your-bootstraps mythology associated with American mobility.

Why all the adulatory attention, critics ask, for Jonathan Franzen's latest domestic drama about marriage and family? Even though Franzen gets more praise for doing what many fine female writers do "backwards and in heels," critic Maureen Corrigan says Freedom has earned its high praise.