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The surgeon and writer talks about the massively complicated process of keeping patients alive and shares his simple solution for how that process might be streamlined. Gawande's newest book is called The Checklist Manifesto.

During his lifetime, South African poet Dennis Brutus made incredible contributions to the fight against apartheid. Brutus died on December 26, 2009, after successfully battling segregation in athletics with global recognition. Fresh Air remembers the life and achievements of Brutus in this interview from 1986.

This week, Anne Tyler's new novel explores one man's rudderless existence, and Elizabeth Gilbert offers an older and wiser follow-up to Eat Pray Love.

Alan Cheuse reviews the newest novel by the Nobel Prize-winning South African author J.M. Coetzee. Summertime is a pseudo-biographical novel based on interviews conducted by an imaginary biographer about the life of a writer named John Coetzee.

The Swan Thieves, Elizabeth Kostova's follow-up to her 2005 novel The Historian, revolves around twin stories: a 19th century love affair between two artists, and a modern-day psychiatrist treating an artist arrested for stabbing a painting at Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art.

Too Much Happiness, the newest collection of short stories from the master of the form, features a cast of lovers and losers, husbands and widows, scientists and woodworkers. "Is there anyone writing short fiction today in English who has more authority?" asks reviewer Alan Cheuse.

A novel asks, does God exist? David Malouf reimagines an episode from Homer's Iliad, and surgeon-writer Atul Gawande offers a simple solution for the complicated problem of healing patients.

You might think of Alexander McCall Smith's new novel, La's Orchestra Saves the World, as a literary tea biscuit: sweet and easily digestible, says reviewer Heller McAlpin. The WWII-era story, set in rural England, tells the story of a new McCall Smith heroine, Lavender Stone.

Thomas Keller is one of those chefs people speak of with awe. Now, he shares his recipes for caramelized sea scallops, iceberg lettuce slices, rainbow chard and brownies.

Jane Gardam has spent her long career writing dry, honest books about British life. Her new novel, The Man in the Wooden Hat, showcases the regrets of a woman never quite sure that marrying her husband was the right choice. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls Gardam the best British writer you've never heard of.