Arts

NPR is drawing up a list of the best beach books ever, and we need you to help by nominating your favorite summer reads.

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Prepare to be enchanted by a masterful writer who knows how to tell a story. Michael Malone's skills derive partly from his work writing for a popular daytime soap and partly from his affection for good literature.

Jane Hamilton's constantly entertaining novel centers around a Midwestern couple who become involved with a radio star.

Yoko Ogawa's poignant new story reminds us that the heart remembers what the mind forgets, and people can find order and solace in unexpected places.

Iain Pears knows how to deliver a complex historical mystery. Stone's Fall is one of those gloriously long books that is never long enough.

Without an excess of sentimentality, this novel updates and explores the changeling myth.

Kao Kalia Yang's memoir is both a family chronicle and a history of the Hmong people.

Whether you love to cook or not, you will be charmed by The School of Essential Ingredients. You need to be warned, though... you will want to eat your way through it.

D.D. Guttenplan's biography of iconic investigative reporter I.F. Stone is well-researched and gracefully written. American Radical gets inside the head and heart of this anti-establishment journalist who became a Washington insider.