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You've seen him on television in hit shows like CSI: NY and Covert Affairs, but Hill Harper's most important role may be off-screen. He sat down with NPR's Michel Martin to discuss his longtime friendship with an inmate, documented in his new book, Letters to an Incarcerated Brother.

For many young readers, Dahl is a beloved author. But to Lucy Dahl, he's also Dad. "Matilda was one of the most difficult books for him to write," she says. "I think that there was a deep genuine fear within his heart that books were going to go away and he wanted to write about it."

Laurie Halse Anderson's latest young adult novel, The Impossible Knife of Memory, follows 15-year-old Hayley and her dad, who suffers from PTSD after serving in Iraq. Anderson says the book draws on her own experience of growing up with a World War II veteran father who still struggles with his war memories.

Lee is acclaimed for his realistic and historical fiction, but he's made a foray into the futuristic sci-fi genre with a new novel called On Such a Full Sea. Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan says sometimes it's better for writers to stick closer to familiar shores.

Armistead Maupin's famous series Tales of the City winds down with one last story about Anna Madrigal, the transgender landlady of 28 Barbary Lane. Maupin tells NPR the series originally grew out of his attempts to write a nonfiction piece about the heterosexual pickup scene at his local Safeway.

When author Chris Abani was a boy, he was miserable at Catholic seminary and he felt like an outsider in his own family. One summer break, at home in Afikpo, he discovered James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room. The tragic, taboo love story made young Abani feel that at last he'd found someone who understood how out of place he felt in his own life.

The Supreme Court justice tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross, "In every position that I've been in, there have been naysayers who don't believe I'm qualified or who don't believe I can do the work." She has committed herself to proving those people wrong.

Jason Mott's novel The Returned is now an ABC television series called Resurrection, which premieres this weekend. The plot was inspired by a dream Mott had about his mother.

This week, we're joined by Hillary Rodham Clinton, who joins us to talk about the Clinton Global Initiative and Pete Davidson. She may be part of one CGI, but what does she know about CGI'd movies?

Nicole Mones' new Night in Shanghai follows an African-American pianist making his way in the city's nightclub scene on the eve of World War II. Reviewer Alan Cheuse says the story really swings.