Author Interviews

The Victoria Square shopping center's observation deck offers a panoramic of Belfast's skyline.

Books
Arts

In Neville's Thrillers, Belfast's Violent Past Still Burns

1:13pm June 17, 2013

by Noah Adams

The capital of Northern Ireland is no longer the city of snipers that it was before the Good Friday Agreement, but novelist Stuart Neville still draws inspiration from the decades of violence. In The Ghosts of Belfast, he examines the shattered life of an IRA killer in the aftermath of The Troubles.

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Dr. Brazelton On Guiding Parents And Learning To Listen

6:17pm June 16, 2013

by NPR Staff

Dr. T. Berry Brazelton has been studying babies for the better part of the last century. Now 95 years old, the renowned pediatrician is the author of more than 30 books on child development. He talks about his latest book, and how babies themselves can teach us how to be better parents.

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Firearms designer John Browning submitted this design for the M1911 pistol to the U.S. Patent Office in September 1910.

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Arts

A Posthumous Tribute To Guns From A Sniper Shot To Death

6:17pm June 16, 2013

by NPR Staff

Considered by many to be the most deadly sniper in American military history, Chris Kyle was killed on a Texas gun range in February. He was an outspoken advocate for both veterans and gun rights, and his book, American Gun, has just been published.

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Telling Stories About Ourselves In 'The Faraway Nearby'

6:19pm June 15, 2013

by NPR Staff

"Stories are compasses and architecture," says author Rebecca Solnit. "We navigate by them, we build our sanctuaries and prisons out of them, and to be without a story is to be lost in the vastness of the world."

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Stephen King delves into the seedy underworld of carnies for his latest novel, Joyland.

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Stephen King On Growing Up, Believing In God And Getting Scared

2:29pm June 14, 2013

"The more carny it got, the better I liked it," King says of his new thriller, Joyland. The book, set in a North Carolina amusement park in 1973, is part horror novel and part supernatural thriller. King talks with Fresh Air's Terry Gross about his career writing horror, and about what scares him now.

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Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall won both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. The sequel, Bring Up the Bodies, won this year's Man Booker Prize.

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Arts

Mantel Takes Up Betrayal, Beheadings In 'Bodies'

1:26pm June 14, 2013

Hilary Mantel is the first woman to win the Man Booker Prize twice, first for her 2009 novel, Wolf Hall, and then for that book's 2012 sequel, Bring Up the Bodies. The novels are part of a historical fiction trilogy about Tudor England and the events surrounding the reign of King Henry VIII.

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Meet 'Ivan': The Gorilla Who Lived In A Shopping Mall

7:00pm June 13, 2013

by NPR Staff

Katherine Applegate's The One and Only Ivan was inspired by a real-life gorilla who lived in a mall in Tacoma, Wash. The author says humans have "a real obligation" to care responsibly for animals in captivity.

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As with many of his novels, Hiaasen sets his latest — Bad Monkey — in his home state of Florida.

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Arts

Florida-Grown Fiction: Hiaasen Satirizes The Sunshine State

4:45pm June 13, 2013

Novelist and Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen writes with passion and purpose about the state he loves. His latest book, Bad Monkey, is an offbeat murder mystery set in Key West.

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In One and Only, Lauren Sandler debunks popular myths about only children.

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'One And Only': The Joys And Myths Of Raising Just One

1:54pm June 13, 2013

by NPR Staff

In 1907, the first president of the American Psychological Association called only children "sickly, selfish, strange, and stupid." In her book One and Only, journalist Lauren Sandler, an only child and mother of one, takes on these stereotypes and explains the joys of raising just one.

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Colum McCann won the National Book Award in 2009 for Let the Great World Spin.

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Arts

McCann's 'TransAtlantic' Crosses Fiction And Fact, Ireland And U.S.

11:25am June 12, 2013

by Lynn Neary

Novelist Colum McCann decided to write about the ties that bind his homeland, Ireland, with the United States, where he now lives. But he wanted to stay far away from cliches about being Irish-American. The result? His new novel, featuring historical figures searching for freedom, adventure and peace.

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