Layla Alammar's new novel is about a journalist who's fled the Syrian civil war for a new life in London — but can only tell anonymous stories about her neighbors because trauma has left her silent.
David Zucchino says Wilmington, N.C., was once a mixed-race community with a thriving Black middle class. Then, in 1898, white supremacists staged a murderous coup. Originally broadcast Jan. 13, 2020.
In a new book, former NPR reporter Shankar Vedantam suggests attaining "a deeper psychological understanding of why people believe what they believe," being empathetic and considering costs involved.
Newman was a founding member of the improv group The Groundlings and an original Saturday Night Live cast member. She's voiced dozens of animated characters and has just published a new audio memoir.
The woman who turns up dead at the start of Elly Griffiths' new novel billed herself as a "murder consultant" for writers. Griffiths says she was inspired by her aunt, who enjoys thinking up murders.
Katie Engelhart explores the complexity of physician-assisted death in the book The Inevitable. She says patients seeking to end their own lives sometimes resort to veterinary drugs from overseas.
The Code Breaker profiles Jennifer Doudna, a Nobel Prize-winning biochemist key to the development of CRISPR, and examines the technology's exciting possibilities and need for oversight.
After Pulitzer Prize-winner John Archibald read sermons from his father's time as a Methodist preacher, he went on a quest to find out why his dad, a devout man, didn't speak out publicly on racism.
You're Leaving When? is a witty memoir of Gurwitch's many middle age misadventures — and it doesn't even cover the stage IV lung cancer diagnosis she received in the midst of the pandemic.
McBride's most recent novel, Deacon King Kong, is set in a Brooklyn housing project in 1969. "Time and place is really crucial to good storytelling," he says. Originally broadcast Feb. 29, 2020.
NPR's Audie Cornish speaks with Naima Coster about her novel What's Mine And Yours, about a North Carolina high school in the middle of an integration program in the early 2000.
Cartoonist and zine-maker John Porcellino has been a hugely influential figure in the world of zine-making. As several of his classic books are reissued, we talk to him about his life and work
Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer Prize-winning spy novel The Sympathizer told the story of a communist double agent just after the Vietnam War — his quest for revolution resumes in The Committed.
The new movie Cherry follows an Iraq war vet who gets addicted to heroin and starts robbing banks. It's based on a semi-autobiographical novel by Nico Walker, who was just released from prison.
NPR's Michaeleen Doucleff found that parenting books she read after becoming a mom left a lot out. When she went through a tough period with her daughter, she traveled the world in search of guidance.
