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Margi Preus' Heart of a Samurai tells the story of Manjiro, a fisherman's son who dreams of becoming a samurai. When his boat is shipwrecked off the coast of Japan, he embarks on a series of adventures that turn his dreams into reality.

Have you thought about switching to barefoot running? New York Times exercise columnist Gretchen Reynolds did — and promptly injured herself. She details what she did wrong — and how to keep your own feet healthy — in her new book, The First 20 Minutes.

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely has found that very few people lie a lot, but a lot of people lie a little. He talks about his findings in his new book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie To Everyone — Especially Ourselves.

NPR editor Krishnadev Calamur didn't expect to like Hindoo Holiday. It looked like a tedious colonial book about India, full of dust and poverty and elephants. But the book's charm and silly characters made it a favorite guilty pleasure.

A drunk (and dying) sportswriter embarks on a journey to track down Sri Lanka's greatest and most elusive cricket star in Shehan Karunatilaka's irrepressible debut, The Legend of Pradeep Mathew.

Author Solomon Jones says death can seem angelic at first — especially to the lost, addicted kids in his book The Last Confession. He says many of his stories come from his own experiences as a homeless drug addict on the streets of Philadelphia.

Michael Ondaatje's fifth novel, The Cat's Table, follows an 11-year-old boy on a 21-day journey from Sri Lanka to London. Unsupervised, he and his companions live by only one rule: to every day do at least one thing that is forbidden.

Sam Kean's The Violinist's Thumb: And Other Lost Tales of Love, War, and Genius, as Written by Our Genetic Code delves into the history of genetics, in the anecdotal and engaging mode of his previous exploration of the periodic table, The Disappearing Spoon.

This Friday marks the 50th anniversary of William Faulkner's death. His novel The Reivers was the coming-of-age story that author Ralph Eubanks needed to rocket him into his teenage years and on to adulthood. What is your favorite coming-of-age story? Tell us in the comments below.

In The Price of Inequality, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz argues that widely unequal societies don't function effectively or have stable economies. Even the rich will pay a steep price if economic inequalities continue to worsen, he says.