As the year draws to a close, critic John Powers singles out seven revelatory people or things that made 2021 a little brighter. At the top of his list? Basketball star Steph Curry.
The podcast "On Eyre" asks the question: Does 'Jane Eyre' still have something to impart to modern readers? NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with the podcast's hosts, Vanessa Zoltan and Lauren Sandler.
Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Nair were under lockdown in Paris only miles apart from each other. A Different Distance compiles the almost daily poems they wrote from March 2020 to March 2021.
A thousand pages is a lot. But there's Ken Liu's voice to hold onto in this third installment of his epic — beautifully deployed and fully in command of the language of his imaginary universe.
Most readers spend a lot of time happily immersed in words. But for a change of pace, these gorgeous art books provide hours of blissful visual diversion.
Brooks wrote countless edgy jokes over the years, but he doesn't regret any of them. He calls comedy his "delicious refuge" from the world. "I hide in humor," he says. His new memoir is All About Me!
Tate was a longtime staff writer at The Village Voice, where he documented Black art and culture. He eventually became a leading figure in cultural criticism.
NPR is celebrating Books We Love from 2021. Ailsa Chang shares one of her favorite reads from the year: Patrick Radden Keefe's deep dive into the Sackler dynasty, Empire of Pain.
A group of sixth, seventh and eighth grade students realized there was no children's book about the composer Florence Price. So they wrote, illustrated and published their own.