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Elsie Washington, who died last month, is hailed as the Barack Obama of romance writers. Colleagues say she showed that publishing novels with worldly black characters was possible. She established a precedent that influenced the genre over the past 20 years.

The new film Angels & Demons revolves around a group whose name has become synonymous with shadows and global conspiracy: the Illuminati. But how big — and how bad — are they really?

For those who found Stephen Hawking as clear as a black hole, Christopher Potter's You Are Here offers a friendly, poetic introduction to our current understanding of the big bang, relativity, evolution, life, particle physics and the universe in general.

Part Russian mafia thriller, part postmodern reflecting pool of sentence fragments and literary allusions, Jose Manuel Prieto's confounding, glimmering Rex celebrates the aesthetic and spiritual power of writing.

Brothers Johnathan and Andy Hillstrand are captains of the Time Bandit on Discovery Channel's Deadliest Catch. They battle the frigid Bering Sea fishing for opilio and Alaska king crab, doing one of the world's deadliest jobs.

Trying to put the listening or playing experience into words has led to some embarrassing moments in literary history. But in her new novel, Appassionata, former musician Eva Hoffman manages to avoid this fate.

With a bride on her wedding day and an ex-boyfriend lurking among a houseful of eccentric guests, Cheerful Weather for the Wedding seems set on a predictable track. But Julia Strachey's frenetic, screwball novel has some twists in store.

Adams photographed 13 wars, and made some of the most iconic images of the Vietnam War. But the Pulitzer Prize he won for one photograph left him conflicted for the rest of his life.

NPR's Scott Simon talks with humor writer Joe Queenan about "Closing Time," Queenan's memoir of growing up in a Philadelphia housing project with an abusive father and indifferent mother.

Most anyone who's had a beginning art history class knows the story of how the great painter Vincent van Gogh sliced off part of his left ear during a fit of madness. Now a new book argues that the whole tale isn't true. The story of van Gogh's madness was part of a coverup, the authors say, by none other than van Gogh's friend and fellow artist Paul Gauguin.