April always brings some of the years' biggest poetry collections. So as it wraps up, we wanted to bring you two favorites — retrospective collections from Marie Howe and Jean Valentine.
Trees communicate. They migrate. They protect. They heal. We climbed into the NPR archives to find some of our favorite arboreal fiction, nonfiction, and kids' lit — get ready to branch out.
The Letters of Emily Dickinson collects 1,304 letters, starting with one she wrote at age 11. Her singular voice comes into its own in the letters of the 1860s, which often blur into poems.
Walters was the first woman to co-anchor a national news show on prime time television. "The path she cut is one that many of us have followed," says biographer Susan Page, author of The Rulebreaker.
PEN America has cancelled its annual Literary Awards ceremony after nearly half of the authors nominated withdrew in protest over the organization's response to the Israeli-Hamas war in Gaza.
Novelist Amy Tan's The Backyard Bird Chronicles centers on an array of birds that visit her yard, as Trish O'Kane's Birding to Change the World recalls lessons from birds that galvanized her teaching.
Journalist Ari Berman says the founding fathers created a system that concentrated power in the hands of an elite minority — and that their decisions continue to impact American democracy today.
When actor George Takei was 4 years old, he was labeled an "enemy" by the U.S. government and sent to a string of incarceration camps. His new children's book about that time is My Lost Freedom.
Myah Ariel's debut is like a fizzy, angsty mash-up of Bolu Babalola and Kennedy Ryan as the challenges of doing meaningful work in Hollywood threaten two young lovers' romantic reunion.
Salman Rushdie is probably most closely associated with his 1988 novel The Satanic Verses, a book inspired by the life of the prophet Muhummad. The book was notorious not just for its contents but because of the intense backlash, and the threat it posed to his safety and wellbeing.
While Rushdie saw it as an exploration of Islamic culture, some Muslims saw it as blasphemous. The year after it published, Iran's supreme leader issued a fatwa, ordering Muslims to kill Rushdie.
Rushdie moved to New York in 2000, and was able to resume the public life of a popular author, but that all changed on August 12th, 2022 when a young man charged at Rushdie while he was on stage at an event, stabbing him at least a dozen times.
After two years, he has chronicled his brush with death, and the aftermath in his new memoir 'KNIFE'.
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Alua Arthur helps people plan for death. A big part of her work is helping them reconcile the lives they lived with the lives they might have wanted. Her memoir is called Briefly Perfectly Human.
Rushdie was onstage at a literary event in 2022 when he was attacked by a man in the audience: "Dying in the company of strangers — that was what was going through my mind." His new book is Knife.
