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Crime writer Chelsea Cain sees danger lurking in the most pastoral corners of the polite Northwest city she calls home. Ketzel Levine dares to search for skeletons with the writer.

Growing up, the only authors Walter Dean Myers read in school were white and British. But when he discovered Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, he realized that he, too, could be a writer. Now, Myers works to encourage the next generation.

The British journalist talks with Steve Inskeep about his tenure as editor of the Sunday Times in London and his crusade to maintain journalism's commitment to public good. Evans has a new memoir called My Paper Chase: True Stories of Vanished Times.

When it comes to Hollywood films, the drama behind the scenes is often juicier than the plots on screen. Author Rebecca Chace suggests three books that will take you inside the most brilliant — and the most disastrous film — projects in Hollywood.

Claude Monet, William Butler Yeats, Giuseppe Verdi and Georgia O'Keeffe created some of their great work late in life. In his new book, Lastingness, Nicholas Delbanco explores the work of creative artists who worked into or past their 70s.

In the new collection Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays, author Zadie Smith explores her writing process and the people who have influenced her. Smith tells NPR she doesn't write every day, though she wishes she did — and that she used writing as a way to mourn her father.

Pilot Chesley Sullenberger's wild ride started this year when he landed a US Airways jet plop-solid perfect onto the icy surface of the Hudson River on Jan. 15, saving all 155 passengers on board. He's a hero to the nation, but Sullenberger says his story is really more about a nation in need of a hero.

During the summer of 1896, a 10-day heat wave killed nearly 1,500 people across New York City — many of them tenement-dwellers. In Hot Time in the Old Town, historian Ed Kohn describes the disaster — and how a little-known police commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt championed the efforts to help New Yorkers survive the heat.

Writer Lev Grossman was raised on a strict diet of literary classics — until he discovered T.H. White's masterful retelling of the King Arthur tale. In The Once and Future King, what was once as stiff and two-dimensional as a medieval tapestry becomes rich and real and devastatingly sad.

David Lipsky says that his favorite comic, Runaways, is both a brilliant reading experience — and an embarrassment festival. The tiny digests by Brian K. Vaughan have been a fount of guilt, awkwardness and grave personal doubts, but he still pulls them out on the subway, because they are just that good.