Author Interviews

Going into Town includes a section on New York City's infamous water bugs, which are even bigger than cockroaches.

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Arts

Cartoonist Roz Chast Draws A 'Love Letter' To New York City, Cockroaches And All

3:00pm October 02, 2017

by Terry Gross

The New Yorker cartoonist channels her affection for the city into a new tongue-in-cheek guidebook, Going Into Town. "It's just fun," Chast says of New York. "Everything seems to suggest stories."

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How An Epic Poem Helped Transform A Difficult Father-Son Relationship

2:34pm October 02, 2017

Author David Mendelsohn says having his 81-year-old father in the college seminar he was teaching on Homer's Odyssey led to an unexpected bonding.

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Fitting Memphis Into The Southern Narrative

8:09am October 01, 2017

NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks to writer and sociologist Zandria Robinson about the racial tensions that still exist in Memphis.

Pussy Riot's Masha Alyokhina Recounts Time In Prison In 'Riot Days'

8:09am October 01, 2017

Lulu Garcia-Navarro talks with Masha Alyokhina, a member of the band Pussy Riot, who was sentenced to two years in prison after playing a protest song in a Moscow cathedral in 2012.

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Arts

Jeffrey Eugenides Calls Short Stories 'Maddening' — And Now He Has A Collection

8:09am October 01, 2017

by Lulu Garcia-Navarro

"You get it going and then you have to shut it down," Eugenides says. "And I am a novelist by inclination." His new short story collection is called Fresh Complaint.

In Russia, 'The Future Is History'

5:40pm September 30, 2017

Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen talks with Scott Simon about how Russia went from communism back to authoritarianism without a stop at democracy in her new book, The Future Is History.

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Charity Tillemann-Dick is an opera singer who, in 2009, received a double lung transplant. She tells this story in her new memoir, The Encore.

Singing With New Lungs In 'The Encore'

9:47am September 30, 2017

by Scott Simon

NPR's Scott Simon talks with opera singer Charity Tillemann-Dick, whose new memoir chronicles her double lung transplant, her recovery and how it feels to sing with someone else's lungs.

Books

Brevity Is The Soul Of Wit: Shakespeare As A Pop-Up Book

8:08am September 30, 2017

Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor of the Reduced Shakespeare Company tell NPR's Scott Simon about their book, Pop-Up Shakespeare, and how Shakespeare's plays are kind of like Looney Tunes.

Sleeping Beauties by Stephen and Owen King.

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Arts

Stephen And Owen King On The Horror Of A World Without Women In 'Sleeping Beauties'

7:35am September 29, 2017

by Mary Louise Kelly

What if every woman on earth went to sleep and never woke up, leaving only men to run things? That's the horror at the center of Sleeping Beauties, the new novel from Stephen King and his son Owen.

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The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine is based on notes for a story Mark Twain told his young daughters, about magical seeds and talking animals.

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Arts

A Modern Collaboration With Mark Twain In 'Prince Oleomargarine'

1:13pm September 28, 2017

by Mary Louise Kelly

Authors Philip and Erin Stead have turned 16 pages of Mark Twain's notes — on a serial bedtime story he wove for his daughters — into a new children's book, The Purloining of Prince Oleomargarine.

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