In 1875, Mark Twain wrote a letter to his 3-year-old daughter from Santa Claus. NPR's Scott Simon reflects on a father's love for his daughter at Christmas time.
NPR's Scott Simon notes that one of the best selling books in France this holiday season is by a man who begged on the streets of Paris for 27 years: Jean-Marie Roughol.
The book's outside cover boasted poems by a disgraced writer. But inside was page after page of handwritten recipes for alcohol — the secretly preserved know-how of a Prohibition-era doctor.
Jarrett J. Krosoczka is a successful author and illustrator. But, he says, his life could have gone in a completely different direction, if he hadn't had a long line of mentors.
Thomas Laqueur, author of The Work of the Dead, discusses the ways people have dealt with human remains over the course of history. Modern cemeteries, he says, are byproducts of the French Revolution.
A British fruit historian convincingly argues in a new book that the pear is "the most exciting of the tree fruits." And she says it's time to revive pear culture and explore the fruit's diversity.
Twenty-five years after he initially created Sandman, Gaiman returns to one of his most enduring characters. Gaiman says writing The Sandman: Overture was "the most intense period of my life."
James Patterson has donated hundreds of thousands of books and millions of dollars to promote reading. In partnership with Scholastic, this year he is giving nearly $2 million to school libraries.