Books

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Arts

'The Blizzard' May Leave You Cold

7:03am December 05, 2015

by Carmen Maria Machado

Vladimir Sorokin's surreal road trip novel follows a doctor rushing through a blizzard to deliver a vaccine to a zombie-plagued village — but that rich premise is let down by clunky, uneven prose.

Sweden Gives 'We Should All Be Feminists' To Every 16-Year-Old Student

9:26pm December 04, 2015

by Laura Wagner

The Swedish Women's Lobby has distributed author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's feminist manifesto, hoping to spark dialogue about feminism in one of the most gender-equal countries in the world.

Set in New Orleans in the 1960s, the comedic masterpiece A Confederacy of Dunces centers around Ignatius J. Reilly, a glutton in a city known for its legendary cuisine. A new cookbook looks at the food culture that helps define the characters in the book.

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'A Confederacy Of Dunces Cookbook': A Classic Revisited In Recipes

3:17pm December 04, 2015

by NPR Staff

Set in 1960s New Orleans, A Confederacy of Dunces centers around Ignatius J. Reilly, a glutton in a city known for its cuisine. A new cookbook looks at the food central to the heralded comedic novel.

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'New Yorker' Cartoon Editor Explores What Makes Us Get It

2:12pm December 04, 2015

Humor is both a creative and a cognitive process, says Bob Mankoff, who has contributed cartoons to The New Yorker since 1977. Originally broadcast March 24, 2014.

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As part of the spectacle of the packinghouses, a worker shackled the leg of a hog onto a revolving wheel known as a Hurford Wheel. The animal was then lifted into the air to begin the slaughtering process.

How Chicago's Slaughterhouse Spectacles Paved The Way For Big Meat

5:03pm December 03, 2015

by Anne Bramley

Opened in 1865, Chicago's Union Stock Yard was the greatest livestock market the world had seen. Tourists watched masses of animals move through kill floors, a sight hailed as a miracle of modernity.

German nudist August Engelhardt sits in front of his thatched tent-like hut on the island of Kabakon (in what is now Papua New Guinea) with the books that he brought with him from Germany. In 1902, he moved to the South Pacific to start a utopian cult tha

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Death By Coconut: A Story Of Food Obsession Gone Too Far

3:51pm December 03, 2015

by Nina Martyris

August Engelhardt believed coconuts were a nutritional and spiritual panacea. So in 1902, he sailed to the South Pacific to start a utopian cult that survived only on the fruit. It ended calamitously.

'Triumph Of William McKinley' Speaks To The Ages, Karl Rove Says

2:57pm December 03, 2015

Steve Inskeep talks to Republican strategist Karl Rove about his book of history that he believes sheds light on politics today: the 1896 presidential election of William McKinley.

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'Like Family' Rewards The Patient Reader

7:03am December 03, 2015

by Heller McAlpin

Physicist-turned-author Paolo Giordano's new novel follows a couple adrift after their beloved housekeeper dies. Critic Heller McAlpin says the book is melancholy, but offers a subtle hope.

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Gloria Steinem Shares What She Learned 'On The Road'

6:20pm December 02, 2015

by Ina Jaffe

At 81, Gloria Steinem is still going strong. The noted feminist has been on tour promoting a new book, My Life On The Road, which she insists is not a memoir.

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Books
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Classic Sci-Fi Comic 'Eternaut' Fights The Power

9:28am December 02, 2015

by Etelka Lehoczky

What should science fiction look like? That's a question that absorbed the creators of The Eternaut, an iconic comic about an alien invasion, first serialized in a Buenos Aires newspaper in the 1950s.