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Maxine Hong Kingston's free-verse memoir contemplates her 70 years of "always writing, writing" and the conflicting impulses to catalog each instance or to "[take] my sweet time to love the moment-/to-moment beauty of everything."

Oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee chronicles how our understanding of cancer has evolved in his new book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer.

Can you tell a story in 25 words or fewer? Inspired by Ernest Hemingway's six-word novel — "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" — Robert Swartwood has compiled a new anthology featuring bite-sized works of fiction.

In the 1400s, the ships of the trans-Atlantic trade system began carrying cargoes of human beings. Some 12.5 million people would be shipped as slaves from Africa over the next 350 years. Historians David Eltis and David Richardson talk about their new book, Atlas of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Novelist Peter Carey returns with a funny riff on de Tocqueville's America, while David Remnick looks at the rise of President Obama, Rhodes scholar Wes Moore considers the prison life he might have lived, and Simon Johnson and James Kwak argue that America's megabanks should be cut down to size.

In Mary Gordon's luscious, wistful new novel, two former lovers meet in Rome after not having seen each other for almost 40 years. Book critic Maureen Corrigan praises the book's "undeniable appeal."

Danielle Evans, a young writer whose recent short story collection, Before You Suffocate Your Own Fool Self, made several "Best of 2010" lists, stopped by NPR for a reading in honor of Black History Month. In this video, she reads from her story, "Wherever You Go, There You Are."

The author of House of Sand and Fog, Andre Dubus III grew up in poverty with his mother and tried desperately to develop a relationship with his father, a college professor and short-story writer. The tension between the two worlds brought about a violent side, which he explores in his new memoir, Townie.

In celebration of National Poetry Month, O, The Oprah Magazine has published its first-ever poetry issue. The April issue features interviews with poet Mary Oliver and poet laureate W.S. Merwin. Several celebrities, including Diane Sawyer, Demi Moore and, of course, Oprah Winfrey, talk about why poetry is important to them.

In this novel, women in one town suddenly lose their libido after a drama teacher at the high school starts staging Lysistrata. Nobody talks about the sudden decrease in drive in this off-kilter thought experiment, where desire and love retreat into listlessness with mysterious force.