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The writer once said about his fellow Americans, "It is astonishing that in a country so devoted to the individual, so many people should be afraid to speak." Baldwin was African-American and openly gay — but he was not afraid to speak, and his writings challenged black and white readers alike.

The fictional Chinese detective Charlie Chan, who starred in a series of novels and movies between the 1920s and the 1950s, is often dismissed as a "Yellow Uncle Tom." But in the fascinating, sometimes maddening history Charlie Chan, Yunte Huang argues that Charlie is much more than a stereotype.

Jonathan Franzen's new novel, Freedom, doesn't come out until Tuesday but The New York Times has already declared it a "masterpiece" and Time magazine has dubbed Franzen a "Great American Novelist." The book has gotten so much attention in the media that it's led to accusations of both gender and genre bias among the literary elite.

Nine months after the quake in Haiti, Haitian-born author Edwidge Danticat is sharing the earthquake story with an audience that was largely shielded from it — children. Eight Days is a book about a boy who gets buried in the rubble and is not rescued until eight days later.

English is definitely changing, but whether it's declining or evolving depends on who — ahem, whom — you ask. Writer Robert Lane Greene recommends three books about what it means to speak and write "well" — when the definition of "well" is a moving target.

Ten years ago Friday, 43 drivers lined up to race NASCAR's Daytona 500. One of them was Dale Earnhardt, who died in a crash in the last lap. Fellow racer Michael Waltrip, who won that race, details the day's events in a new book: In the Blink of an Eye: Dale, Daytona, and the Day that Changed Everything.

At the core of everything lies a binary on-off switch, says James Gleick, the author of a new book called The Information. Small bits of information, Gleick says, make up our DNA, our brains and our ideas.

An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination is much more than a memoir about a stillborn child. Elizabeth McCracken's story of stunning loss and grief is also a moving and affirming story of love.

In his new novel, Sunset Park, Brooklyn novelist Paul Auster confronts the modern-day problems of foreclosure, eviction and familial estrangement. NPR's Lynn Neary visited him in his brownstone to discuss the long journey to find one's sense of home.

Debut author Siobhan Fallon writes about the lives of soldiers and their families in her new short story collection, You Know When the Men Are Gone. Families, she says, take the strangeness of deployment and learn how to create a new normal.