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She may not have reached what she calls "the nadir of old age, the Land of Anecdote," but the Oscar-nominated screenwriter still knows how to tell a story. Sassy and wise, her memoir I Remember Nothing takes a self-deprecating look at aging in the modern world.

Crosley says the novel by Irvine Welsh — also the author of Trainspotting — aces every category of "dirty" we have. Reading it, she explains, is like watching "a rusty car careen into a garbage dump of filthy phonetics and explode into a strangely beautiful ball of flames."

Making suggestions for your book club can be risky business. If everyone loves the book, you're a hero. If they hate it, it takes a while to live it down. NPR's Lynn Neary comes to the rescue with five book club recommendations that are sure to make for good conversation.

We all know what it's like to escape into a great work of fiction — but it's quite another leap of pleasure to get lost in a truly exotic, alternate-reality world of an author's unique creation. Critic Glen Weldon trips out on the haunted, vivid landscapes of 2010's best speculative fiction.

When British chef Jamie Oliver took a road trip in search of quintessential American food, his biggest discovery was that there was no such thing. He visited American families to gather a diverse and delicious group of recipes that make up his new book, Jamie's America.

Hamburg-born Astrid Kirchherr met the Beatles in 1960, before they were famous. She took some of the earliest photographs of the group and was engaged to Stuart Sutcliffe, the Beatles' original bassist, before he died of a brain hemorrhage in 1962.

Almost all modern computers descend from a machine built before World War II by physics professor John Atanasoff. But today, almost no one has heard of him. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jane Smiley set out to remedy that.

In his memoir, Garbio, author Larry VanderLeest recalls his time hanging off the side of a garbage truck and dealing with other people's unwanted refuse as a worker in the Dutch-dominated sanitation industry of 1960s Chicago.

Reading Kelly Link's writing isn't really like reading at all — it's more like experiencing the strangest dream of your life. Writer Karen Russell says the uncanny short stories are genre-bending, mind-blowing masterpieces of the imagination that draw on fable and myth to achieve an unbearably painful realism.

Attorney David Dow has spent his career representing inmates who have been sentenced to death. Despite his efforts, many of his clients have been executed — and most of them were guilty. He details what it's like to become emotionally involved with the people living on death row in a new memoir.