NPR Books

  • A Family of Charm, Wolves, and Turnips

    Folk tales are a shared genealogy. To read them is to recognize where one story descends from another, to learn the preoccupations of the storytellers and their communities, to make note of universal tales whose concerns are eternal, and to…

  • The New New Testament

    For NPR Books, Craig Morgan Teicher finds a fantastic reimagining of the black, Southern, gay experience in his review of Jericho Brown’s The New Testament. Drawing from the gospels, as well as the poet’s own rich landscape of rhythm and…

  • The Hashtag That Changed BookCon’s Lineup

    The inaugural BookCon event just took place in New York City in conjunction with the publishing industry’s annual trade convention. When the event’s entirely white lineup was first announced, the #WeNeedDiverseBooks Twitter campaign drew attention to the problem and led…

  • How to Keep Writing That First Novel

    The odds that your first novel will ever be published may not be great, but some new writers do manage to get published. NPR Books asks Chad Harbach and Tara Conklin about the process of writing and selling their first…

  • Migraines, Music, and Drugs: Oliver Sacks on Hallucinations

    NPR Books has a fascinating interview with Oliver Sacks on his new book Hallucinations. An excerpt on hallucinations during migraines: …At least on two occasions, I’ve had a smell — in particular a smell of hot buttered toast — with…

  • Humiliation is for Everybody

    NPR Books is dissecting humiliation in this author interview with Wayne Koestenbaum (whose has a very recent book aptly titled “Humiliation”). Humiliation is the only way to describe certain life experiences—it’s both familiar and completely unavoidable—but it turns out it’s…