Lisa Donovan is a celebrated southern pastry chef, James Beard award-winning essayist, and now author of a new memoir. The book, called Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger, follows her life in and out of kitchens, documenting her journey to the restaurant industry she loved — and later left. On Second Thought spoke with Donovan to discuss the pains, obstacles and joys of finding her voice as a woman and a southerner, and learning to use it in the male-dominated culinary world.

Taking stock of the U.S. Postal Service's ability to process parcels — and ballots — amid financial struggles; renowned Southern pastry chef Lisa Donovan on her new memoir, "Our Lady of Perpetual Hunger"; author Lara Prescott on her debut novel, "The Secrets We Kept"

Toobin's new book, True Crimes and Misdemeanors, examines how Trump and his team outmaneuvered special counsel Robert Mueller. Mueller, he says, gave Trump "a free pass" on obstruction of justice.

Lauren Beukes' new novel is set in a near future where a virus has killed off most of the men on Earth, and one woman is racing to free her young, immune son from the government and get him to safety.

In Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist examines the laws and practices that created a bipolar caste system in the U.S. — and how the Nazis borrowed from it.

You know what's going to happen in Akwaeke Emezi's new book — it's right there in the title: The Death of Vivek Oji. But this novel about a death is full of gender-bending, boundary crossing life.

More than 2,000 newspapers have shut down in recent years, and some regions have become news deserts. Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan says the collapse of local news undermines democracy.

NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro speaks with author Edward Ball about his new book, Life of a Klansman, revolving around a man his family called "our Klansman."

White Too Long author Robert P. Jones says churches should be more in vocal on issues of social justice: "White Christians have been largely silent ... and have hardly begun these conversations."

Forests "are restless things," writes Zach St. George in his new book The Journeys of Trees. He explains how, over millennia, forests creep inch by inch to more hospitable places.

When Natasha Trethewey was 19, her stepfather killed her mother. Tretheway says she aimed to "forge a new life for myself that didn't include that past." Her new memoir is Memorial Drive.

In a new book, A Case for the American People, the Judiciary Committee special counsel during impeachment traces the process. Of Trump, he tells NPR: "He understands what he's doing. It is a pattern."

In the memoir, The New One, comic Birbiglia and his wife, Jen Stein, open up about his ambivalence about fatherhood and the strain it had on their marriage.

Kelli Jo Ford's novel follows three generations of Cherokee women trying to forge a future in the harsh environment of the 1980s oil boom in Texas — and learning just how difficult that can be.

NPR's Michel Martin speaks with Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan about his new book Still Standing: Surviving Cancer, Riots, a Global Pandemic, and the Toxic Politics That Divide America.