The Week's Best Stories From NPR Books : NPR

Review

These Aren't Your Geek's Graphic Novels

November 29, 2009 • You don't have to be crazy about comic-book heroes, fantasy worlds or galactic adventures to fall in love with these three magnificent graphic novels — but it helps if you're a girl. Author Harriet Reisen shares what makes these girl-power reads so colorful.

Brendan Bourke

WTC Provides Back Story For Colum McCann's 'Spin'

November 27, 2009 • McCann's novel, Let the Great World Spin, won the National Book Award. He tells Steve Inskeep that his book — set in New York on the day a man walked on a tight-rope between the towers of the World Trade Center — is an attempt to reconstruct an event to find moments of grace and understanding in history.

WTC Provides Back Story For Colum McCann's 'Spin'

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Raymond Carver's 'Writer's Life' Poignantly Exposed

November 27, 2009 • When writer Raymond Carver died in 1988, the Times of London christened him "The American Chekov." The epitaph has stuck. Author Susan Jane Gilman has the review of a new, 578-page biography entitled "Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life."

Raymond Carver's 'Writer's Life' Poignantly Exposed

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The 10 Best Cookbooks Of 2009

November 25, 2009 • If you're the kind of person who's always believed that a book can teach you to do anything, this year's crop of cookbooks will prove you right. Cooks lacking confidence will find comfort in detailed instructions and comprehensive how-tos.

The 10 Best Cookbooks Of 2009

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John McAlley

Big And Beautiful: Best Gift Books of 2009

November 24, 2009 • Reviewer John McAlley selects gems from the worlds of fine art, fashion, photography, science, lit-crit and cartoons. These luxe volumes will be gracing coffee tables long after the lights and wrapping paper are gone.

Callie Neylan/NPR

What We're Reading: Nov. 24 - 30, 2009

November 24, 2009 • This week, Michael Crichton's last book, ever, sails the seas of pirate adventure. In story collections: Alice Munro's strong and subtly mysterious women; Ha Jin's immigrants caught between two worlds. And a space-program history finds surprising drama in the unmanned voyages.

Alan Cheuse's Book Picks To Warm A Winter's Night

November 23, 2009 • Book reviewer Alan Cheuse selects the highlights of this holiday season: futuristic dystopias; things that go bump in the night; portraits from Norman Rockwell's America; gay New York; a celebration of our immigrant adventures; one writer's journey to manhood; and, of course, Long John Silver.

Alan Cheuse's Book Picks To Warm A Winter's Night

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Review

Damned 'From Here To Eternity'

November 23, 2009 • Author James Ellroy was 12 when From Here To Eternity showed him a new, damned world: Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, in the months before the Pearl Harbor attack. Ellroy had already come to see the world as a harsh place, but the book gave him characters at the outset of America's most perilous moment and ultimate ascent. He says you must read it.

The National Book Award Winners for 2009 include (from left) Phillip Hoose (young people's literature); T.J. Stiles (nonfiction); Colum McCann (fiction); and Keith Waldrop (poetry). Associated Press hide caption

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Books

McCann, Stiles Win National Book Awards

November 19, 2009 • The 60th annual National Book Awards were handed out Wednesday night in New York. Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin, a novel about daring, luck and mortality in 1970s New York, won the fiction prize. T.J. Stiles' biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, The First Tycoon, was the nonfiction winner, and Keith Waldrop's Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy won for poetry.

McCann, Stiles Win National Book Awards

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Review

Book Reviews

A Conservative Read On Palin's 'Going Rogue'

November 17, 2009 • Sarah Palin may be the Republican party's next big hope, but commentator Rod Dreher says her new book, Going Rogue, does little to bolster her image. She may be the perkiest small-town American in the spotlight, but Palin is selling her personality, not a platform.

A Conservative Read On Palin's 'Going Rogue'

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Callie Neylan/NPR

What We're Reading

What We're Reading, Nov. 17 - 23, 2009

November 17, 2009 • This week's staff picks: Biographies from bad-boy Andre Agassi and 'Rogue' politician Sarah Palin. Stephen King returns to form in a new novel, Zadie Smith fascinates in collected essays, and science writer Nicholas Wade argues that God is just an evolutionary adaptation.

Books

A Haunting American Dream Set In 'Luna Park'

November 16, 2009 • Writer Kevin Baker says he never thought he'd be "hip enough" to venture into graphic novels. But with illustrator Danijel Zezelj, he has created Luna Park — a ghostly graphic novel set in the decaying amusement parks of Coney Island. It profiles a Russian immigrant plagued by nightmares of the Chechen War.

A Haunting American Dream Set In 'Luna Park'

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Author Interviews

'Mad Scientists,' Building The Future For 50 Years

November 15, 2009 • If you've used a GPS system — or if you happen to be using the Internet to read this — you can thank DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. For 50 years, the smallish, somewhat secretive division of the Pentagon has been mostly off-limits to reporters. Now author Michael Belfiore has profiled the agency in a new book.

'Mad Scientists,' Building The Future For 50 Years

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Author Interviews

In Essays, Author Zadie Smith Reveals Her Process

November 11, 2009 • 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.

In Essays, Author Zadie Smith Reveals Her Process

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'The Red Book': A Window Into Jung's Dreams

Foundation of the Works of C.G. Jung

Books

'The Red Book': A Window Into Jung's Dreams

November 11, 2009 • The journal,16 years in the making, in which psychoanalyst Carl Jung documented his inner life was long hidden. After a painstaking translation and reproduction, it is finally available to the public.

'The Red Book': A Window Into Jung's Dreams

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