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Novel Examines Afghanistan War From A Pakistani Perspective

8:43am May 29, 2013

by NPR Staff

Nadeem Aslam's The Blind Man's Garden explores the consequences of Sept. 11 through the story of two young brothers who go to Afghanistan in late 2001 to help wounded civilians. Aslam says he wrote the book over four and a half years, part of which was spent in total isolation.

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Marking The Moment With A Meaningful 'Exit'

2:14pm May 27, 2013

Exits are ubiquitous; grand or modest, we've all left something, from resigning from a job to waving goodbye to a friend. In Exit: The Endings That Set Us Free, author Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot explores goodbyes through the stories of people in transition. (Originally broadcast June 11, 2012.)

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Three-Minute Fiction Readings: 'Compromise' And 'The F'

5:25pm May 26, 2013

NPR's Bob Mondello and Susan Stamberg read excerpts of two of the best submissions for Round 11 of our short story contest. They read The Art of Compromise by Lindsey Appleford of Boerne, Texas, and Claudia Who Found the F by Sean Enfield of Denton, Texas.

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Chongqing Municipality Communist Party Secretary Bo Xilai attends the opening ceremony of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference at the Great Hall of the People on March 3, 2012, in Beijing, China.

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From A 'Death' To A Crisis, Tracing China's Bo Xilai Scandal

5:25pm May 26, 2013

by NPR Staff

Murder, corruption and political intrigue all feature heavily in A Death in the Lucky Holiday Hotel, by Pin Ho and Wenguang Huang. It chronicles an episode that's still reverberating through China's Communist Party.

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Russian soldiers take their position near the village of Shatoy, Chechnya.

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Transcending Hardships By Saving Others In 'Constellation'

12:05pm May 26, 2013

by NPR Staff

In his debut novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Anthony Marra takes readers to the war-torn republic of Chechnya. People disappear, informers betray and those with humanity endure great hardships.

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Pearl Buck was born in West Virginia but spent much of her childhood in China, where her parents worked as missionaries.

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A Lost And Found 'Wonder': Pearl S. Buck's Final Novel

6:15pm May 25, 2013

by NPR Staff

Before her death in 1973, Pearl S. Buck wrote one final novel. But The Eternal Wonder languished in a Texas storage unit for decades until its discovery last fall.

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Three-Minute Fiction Readings: 'Geometry' And 'Snowflake'

5:39pm May 25, 2013

NPR's Bob Mondello and Susan Stamberg read excerpts of two of the best submissions for Round 11 of our short story contest. They read Snowflake by Winona Wendth of Lancaster, Mass., and Geometry by Eugenie Montague of Los Angeles.

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'Steal The Menu': A Chronicle Of A Career In Food Coverage

1:19pm May 25, 2013

When Raymond Sokolov began writing about food, it was considered a specialty portfolio. Today, celebrity chefs abound in the U.S. and Britain, with cookbooks, TV shows and groupies. Host Scott Simon speaks with Sokolov about his new book, Steal the Menu: A Memoir of Forty Years in Food.

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Arthur Fiala, shown here in 1918 and 2005, was a private in the 26th Company of the 20th Engineers Regiment during World War I.

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A Race Against Time To Find WWI's Last 'Doughboys'

6:27am May 25, 2013

by NPR Staff

In 2003, Richard Rubin set out to talk to every American veteran of World War I he could find. With help from the French, he tracked down dozens of centenarian vets and recorded their stories in a new book called The Last of the Doughboys.

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Patricia Volk is an essayist, novelist and memoirist. She grew up in a restaurant-owning family in New York City.

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Beauty Marks: Patricia Volk's Lessons In Womanhood

12:12pm May 23, 2013

by Maureen Corrigan

In her new memoir, Shocked, Volk examines the two women who had a lasting impact on her as she began to parse who she was as a woman: her beautiful, critical mother, Audrey Morgen Volk; and the famous — and unconventional — haute couture designer Elsa Schiaparelli.

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