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What's wrong with saying "No problem" instead of "You're welcome"? Is it acceptable to answer a phone call with an email? In Would It Kill You To Stop Doing That?, Henry Alford goes on a quest for modern manners; he says most bad behavior is based in ignorance.

Danish director Lone Scherfig is making a name for herself as a female director whose movies tend to focus on human relationships. "I like to see losers win," she says. Her latest film, One Day, chronicles a day in the life of two characters over the course of 20 years.

"The truth of poetry is not the truth of history," according to the new poet laureate of the United States. Philip Levine's work is most famous for an urban perspective that began with a youth spent working in Detroit's automobile factories.

Writer St. John Fox is killing off his heroines, and his imaginary muse Mary has had enough. "You're a serial killer," Mary tells Fox, before challenging him to write stories that don't end in death. Novelist Helen Oyeyemi talks about her fourth novel with NPR's Audie Cornish.

Pakistan's port city of Karachi is 30 times larger now than it was at the end of World War II. In his first book, Morning Edition co-host Steve Inskeep explores the violence and vitality of a city experiencing explosive population growth.

Poet Ouyang Yu imagines an Olympic event in which he lifts up just one extraordinary word. "The magic of the word is that, when well lifted, it has the power to transform," Yu says.

The National Book Award fiction nominations have caused a small controversy this year over their obscurity. Should the best book in America be one that you have never heard of?

Unlike the Great Depression, our current recession hasn't yet produced much memorable literature, but book critic Maureen Corrigan says that situation, like the economy, seems to be changing.

As the supernatural enjoys a pop culture resurgence — from vampires to fairy tales — there's also been a firestorm of fascination with dragons, who appear this year in two movies, a new book, video games and a Washington, D.C. museum exhibit. Allison Keyes explores the mystical creatures' appeal.

In 2008, an online community of bakers vowed to bake one recipe a week from Dorie Greenspan's cookbook Baking: From My Home to Yours. Four years and 370 recipes later, the enthusiastic cooks finished baking all of the galettes and cobblers in December 2011.