Search results for

Driving his Chevrolet Nova up and down Highway 61 in Mississippi, William Ferris stopped at churches and juke joints and penitentiaries to record the music he found. In his new book, Give My Poor Heart Ease, Ferris explores the legacy of the "The Blues Highway."

Literature is full of reminders that houses have souls, a fact characters forget at their own peril. In some novels, the house is as much a force as any of the people in the story. When that happens, the human characters had better beware.

In the early 1960s, writer Norton Juster and illustrator Jules Feiffer created The Phantom Tollbooth, which quickly became a kid-lit classic. Now, 50 years later, the two have finally collaborated once more — this time, on a picture book called The Odious Ogre. They speak to NPR's Liane Hansen about their partnership and their new project.

When Joshua Braff was an M.F.A. student, his classmates smirked when he announced that John Irving was one of his favorite authors. But he's proud of his love for The World According to Garp; Braff says Irving's characters live and breathe before, during and after the story ends.

Henry Clay was a leading 19th century representative, senator, presidential candidate — and slaveholder who condemned slavery. In Henry Clay: The Essential American, David and Jeanne Heidler try to make sense of the statesman's great contradiction.

Author Karen Russell talks to All Things Considered co-host Melissa Block about her eclectic literary tastes, life in the Everglades and other influences for her debut novel, Swamplandia! — about a gator-wrestling, theme-park-owning family

How can we understand the experiences of those who have lived through war? What do they have to teach us? Author Hilary Thayer Hamann's favorite book attempts to answer these questions, and reinforces just how beautifully implausible life during conflict can be. It's The War by Marguerite Duras.

Eleanor Brown speaks with Weekend Edition Sunday host Liane Hansen about her new novel, The Weird Sisters, which imagines the lives of three sisters and their obsessive Shakespearean scholar father who prefers iambic pentameter to normal, everyday conversation.

Teju Cole's debut novel, Open City, follows Julius, a half-Nigerian and half-German doctor, as he wanders the streets of New York. Julius struggles to understand his identity as an immigrant, an experience the author himself is familiar with.

The city of Odessa, on the Black Sea, has packed a lot of history into its few centuries of existence. Author Charles King traces the city's ups and downs in a new book, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams.