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With Congress expected to pass its first bipartisan budget in years, renewed focus has fallen on the tactics that brought it about. These tactics may be puzzling (or alarming), but according to author Tim Harford, they're not new: They're rooted in game theory. He suggests reading Thomas Schelling's The Strategy of Conflict to learn more.

Earlier this week, international negotiators agreed on a deal to curb the Iranian nuclear program temporarily. Author Ariel Dorfman offers context to the reactions that have followed. He suggests a book of poetry by the Sufi master Rumi, a fascinating glimpse into the lives and ideas that shape Persian identity.

Jenny Offill's new book, Dept. of Speculation, uses anecdotes and bits of poetry to tell a nonlinear story of love, parenthood and infidelity. Offill tells NPR's Rachel Martin that her experiences as a mother inspired the book — but that her own marriage is far less dramatic than the one in her novel.

Despite being the daughter of a child psychologist and self-help author, Jessica Lamb-Shapiro has spent most of her life recoiling from the self-help industry. But eventually, her curiosity got the best of her. She tells Fresh Air about self-help's high- and low-brow iterations and the ways the industry helped her address her fears.

Rachel Joyce's new novel offers two parallel narratives: the 1972 story of Byron, an anxious schoolboy, and the present-day account of Jim, a supermarket worker who has spent most of his life in institutional care. But critic Ellah Allfrey says that the novel is made up of two distinct and unequal parts.

Ann Patchett got married and divorced young. When she met the man who would eventually become her second husband she said: "I'll be true, I'll be faithful, I'll see you every day ... but I don't want to get married and I don't want to live together." Her new book is This Is The Story of a Happy Marriage.

In A Curious Invitation: The Forty Greatest Parties in Fiction, London-based party promoter Suzette Field offers a guide to literature's most famous and fabulous hosts and their soirees — from Proust and Tom Wolfe to Jay Gatsby and Hollywood Wives.

This week marks the release of Bartlett's Familiar Black Quotations. Which leads us to the question: Just what is a black quote, anyway?

In times of tragedy, our deepest insecurities can take over. In Celeste Ng's new novel, set in the Midwest in the late 1970s, the fear that bubbles up is related to race and identity.

Essence might be the longest-running magazine for black women, but the authors of a new book, The Man From Essence, say that the road to building the brand had many twists and turns.