Search results for

Roy Scranton and Jacob Siegel edited and contributed to the collection of short stories by veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They tell Fresh Air about how soldiers cope with the fear of death, and why many soldiers feel conflicted about sharing their experience with a larger audience.

If you liked the movie No Way Out, writer and editor Adam Sternbergh has one message for you: The book was so much better. Kenneth Fearing's 1946 noir novel The Big Clock, which inspired the Kevin Costner thriller, is just as tightly plotted and suspenseful — but it's also a moving meditation on mortality and time.

Defining poverty is not straightforward, says Tim Harford, author of the new book The Undercover Economist Strikes Back. It's also about how people view themselves and how they're viewed by others.

Since about age 2, Atlantic editor Scott Stossel has been "a twitchy bundle of phobias, fears and neuroses." Today, his phobias include asthenophobia, a fear of fainting; aerophobia, a fear of flying; and turophobia, a fear of cheese. He wrote his latest book to help understand and find relief from his anxious suffering.

Ishmael Beah was 12 when he was orphaned by Sierra Leone's civil war and recruited as a child soldier. He described the ordeal in his 2007 memoir, A Long Way Gone. Now, Beah's debut novel, Radiance of Tomorrow, tells the story of a shattered community struggling to rebuild itself after war.

Novelist Chang Rae Lee is known for his sober depictions of things you can probably imagine — like war and spies, family and immigration. So it might surprise you that his newest novel, On Such a Full Sea, is a dystopia that begins in a place called B-mor, a town that — a very long time ago — was known as Baltimore.

Olivia Laing illuminates the complex relationships between writers and alcohol in The Trip to Echo Spring — Echo Spring being, of course, the euphemism Tennessee Williams used for the liquor cabinet in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Reviewer Jane Ciabattari says the book is "beautifully written, haunting, tragic and instructive in the best sense."

In a recent ruling, the Indian Supreme Court reinstated a colonial-era ban on gay sex. Two authors react to the news with two very different recommendations. Manil Suri suggests that readers check out a book of interviews, while Ruth Franklin turns to Victorian England for a look at a similar law's effects.

Joe Sacco has made a career of tackling difficult subjects through imagery. He's a journalist and cartoonist who has reported on the Middle East and Bosnia — in both written and comic form. In his latest book, The Great War, Sacco turns to history, producing a 24-foot-long depiction of the horrifying first day of the Battle of the Somme.

Alan Greenspan was often celebrated during his long chairmanship of the Federal Reserve. But Greenspan's policies have been blamed by some for the Great Recession. In an interview with NPR about his new book, The Map and the Territory: Risk, Human Nature, and the Future of Forecasting, Greenspan discusses difficulties in predicting economic calamity.