Search results for

Fred Hiatt's new young-adult novel, Nine Days, is based on the real-life story of a Chinese dissident's daughter trying to solve the mystery of her father's disappearance. Ti-Anna Wang, the real-life woman who inspired the tale, says her father had been kidnapped by Chinese agents during a trip to Vietnam.

Author Ethan Rutherford started reading Daphne du Maurier's collection of stories, Don't Look Now, while it was still light out and didn't move from his chair until dark. Each one features characters who endure the strange and the extreme, and who are forever changed by the events that befall them.

Historian Rick Atkinson's new book completes his trilogy on the second world war. He tells NPR's Steve Inskeep that the events of the war may be 70 years in the past, but they're still very much a part of American culture.

Curse words change over time — back in the ninth century you could say the "s" word and no one would be offended. But we always need a set of words that are off-limits, and in her new book, author Melissa Mohr explains how the words that shock us reveal a lot about society's values.

To some, Detroit may be a symbol of urban decay; but to journalist Charlie LeDuff, it's home. In Detroit: An American Autopsy, he says the city's heart beats on. "We're still here trying to reconstruct the great thing we once had," he tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies.

The author of Swamplandia! has a new collection of short stories called Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Critic Maureen Corrigan says the stories are daring and devastating, and with them Russell establishes herself as one of the great American writers of our young century.

Brian Moore's The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, a book about an alcoholic looking for love, is the novel that author Ann Leary always turns to when she's depressed. What books do you read when you're sad? Tell us in the comments.

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald wed in 1920, and the two went on to have a famously turbulent literary marriage. Would Zelda have been better off without her husband? Novelist Therese Anne Fowler says, "They were two sides of one coin."

The world-famous Nigerian author Chinua Achebe has died. Annalisa Quinn reflects on the legacy of Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart.

Aleksandar Hemon's first book of nonfiction, The Book of My Lives, is a collection of essays about a shifting sense of home and displacement. Reviewer Ben Percy says these stories, which balance despair with hope and anger with humor, slashed through his defenses.