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Polish countertenor and breakdancer Jakub Józef Orliński talks about his new album with Il Pomo d'Oro orchestra.

Artis Henderson was just 26 when her husband, Miles, died in Iraq. Marrying him meant leaving behind the life she had planned for herself — and his death redefined her life all over again. Henderson's debut memoir is called Unremarried Widow.

Did you know that the average Brit says "sorry" eight times per day? Sorry! The English and Their Manners traces the roots of polite behavior from the medieval "Which orifice can I stick my finger into?" — answer: none of them -- to today's "Can I throw a temper tantrum at a tennis match?"

On Sept. 1, 1944, a B-24 bomber went down in the South Pacific. The wreckage, and the airmen, seemed to disappear. Almost 50 years later, a scientist on vacation in Palau found an airplane wing and went on an obsessive, decade-long quest to find what happened to the plane. Author Wil S. Hylton joins NPR to discuss his new book on the mystery.

In Who Could That Be at This Hour?, a prequel to A Series of Unfortunate Events, Daniel Handler satirizes pulp mysteries and uncovers the parallels between detective fiction and childhood. In both, he says, an outsider is trying to make his way in a mysteriously corrupt world.

Biologist and Harvard professor Edward O. Wilson has spent his lifetime making scientific discoveries and writing award-winning, best-selling books on science. His new book, inspired by Rainer Maria Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, gives advice gleaned from his career in science.

More bodice unbuttoner than bodice ripper, The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, by Anton DiSclafani, is nonetheless an ode to a young girl's sexual awakening. The novel follows Thea, a 1930s teen whose family banishes her to an equestrian boarding school after a mysterious transgression.

At 19, the heroine of Isabel Allende's florid, frenzied Maya's Notebook is in a tailspin of drugs, prostitution and crime. Sent by her grandmother to hide out with an old friend on an island off Chile, she finds love and redemption. Reviewer Mary Pols doesn't buy it.

More and more writers are setting their novels and short stories in worlds, not unlike our own, where the Earth's systems are noticeably off-kilter. The genre has come to be called climate fiction — "cli-fi," for short.

Despite pro football's sky-high profits, taxpayers subsidize the industry with $1 billion each year. In The King of Sports, Gregg Easterbrook argues for some serious reforms, including incentives for college graduation rates and a new approach to youth football leagues.