Writer Margaret Renkl's sense of joyful belonging to the South co-exists with her intense desire for Southerners who face prejudice or poverty finally to be embraced and supported.
Journalist Peter Bergen talks about bin Laden's path to mass murder and reflects on the consequences of the recent U.S. military withdrawal from Afghanistan. Originally broadcast Aug. 4, 2021.
When Bethany Morrow was asked to write a new take on the beloved classic, she agreed on one condition: The new March family would look nothing like the old.
Cassandra Khaw's new novel follows a rag-tag band of criminals who have to pull together for one last heist — but in their hands, what could be an ordinary tale becomes visionary sci-fi adventure.
Atticus Lish's book opens a disturbing window into a teenager's battle to save his mother, our broken healthcare system — and the power that humans have to inflict harm on one another.
On 9/11, it was impossible to connect the dots for adults, nevermind children. Here are some books that can help kids try to understand that fateful date 20 years later.
These books provide a detailed accounting of events that have defined the U.S. role in the world in the first part of the 21st century. None makes for cheery reading, but all offer sobering lessons.
Shruti Swamy has won awards for her short fiction; The Archer, her debut novel, is a coming-of-age tale inspired by the graceful, precise storytelling of India's ancient Kathak dance form.
Laurent Binet seems to genuinely want to know to what extent conquest and the cruelty it inevitably produces are reducible, redeemable, or escapable. He also plainly wants to play around.
In On Freedom's allusive, blunt, funny essays, the author of The Argonauts and The Art of Cruelty tries to imagine freedom as it exists in the contemporary contexts of art, sex, drugs, and climate.
Ashley M. Jones is Alabama's youngest and first Black poet laureate. Her new book Reparations Now! discusses America's history of Black oppression, and asks for more than monetary repairs.
More than an autobiography following a strict chronological path and detailing all major events, this book focuses on the role of art in the U.S. poet laureate's life and her development as an artist.
The nation's first Native American poet laureate has a new memoir in which she tells her own story — as well as the story of her sixth-generation grandfather, who was forced from his ancestral land.
While the story of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising is well-documented, pockets of Jewish resistance surfaced in smaller ghettos across Nazi-occupied central-eastern Europe too. Zhetel is one such place.
Ye Chun's new story collection Hao takes its name from a Chinese word meaning "good," or "everything's OK" — but the characters in these stories are sick, afraid, out of time, and anything but OK.