As a child, Smith watched helplessly as his father beat his mother. The experience shaped him: "The mental anguish that I had to overcome was a big part of me growing into the person I am today."
MacDowell grew up with a mother who was mentally ill and addicted to alcohol. "Understanding the complexity of mental illness was something that I'm versed in," she says.
Set in a haunted Minneapolis bookshop over the course of one very momentous year, The Sentence is an ambitious novel, featuring a sinister ghost, a country in tumult and Erdrich's own shifting style.
The forthcoming documentary Get Back revisits The Beatles' final days together. McCartney says he took the band's breakup hard: "It was quite difficult, because I didn't know what to do at all."
The title novella of Jocelyn Nicole Johnson's debut is set in the near future in Charlottesville, Va., where descendants of Sally Hemings' take shelter from a racist mob in Thomas Jefferson's manor.
Our Country Friends is about the trysts and betrayals that occur within a group of friends during the pandemic. It's an exaggerated version of Shteyngart's own COVID experience.
Wright's new movie centers on a young woman who is transported in her dreams into the swinging '60s of London: "The film is sort of about having nostalgia for a decade that you never lived in."
Filmmaker Joanna Hogg conceived her 2019 semi-autobiographical drama The Souvenir as a two-part work. The second installment is a wonderfully generous movie, sardonic in tone but rich in emotion.
Robert Costa's book Peril, which he co-wrote with Bob Woodward, goes inside Trump's war room on the eve of the Jan. 6 insurrection. Costa says the 2024 election could trigger a constitutional crisis.
A new documentary goes behind the walls of the deadly 1971 uprising. Attica filmmaker Stanley Nelson and former prisoner Arthur Harrison reflect on the five-day revolt, and its lasting legacy.
The former Today co-host recently bought a T-shirt that says, "I'm not for everyone." Her new memoir, Going There, is a candid look at the successes and setbacks she's experienced as a journalist.
Co-written by Hillary Rodham Clinton and Louise Penny, State of Terror centers on a female secretary of state as sheraces against time to out-maneuver international terrorists and homegrown traitors.
Denis Villeneuve's adaptation of Frank Herbert's novel is undeniably staggering. But his Dune also feels rudimentary, as if he's managed his source material without fully mastering it.
Kravitz's memoir follows his childhood and early career. Still touring in his 50s, Kravitz says, "I'm going to continue doing this as long as I can." Originally broadcast Oct. 6, 2020.
Isaac says the bonds he makes on set are both meaningful and transient: "You have these really intense months ... and then it goes away." He stars in Dune, The Card Counter and Scenes from a Marriage.
