Books

Colson Whitehead's harrowing new novel is based on a true story about a brutally abusive reform school in Florida where the grounds were pocked with the unmarked graves of the boys who died there.

Chuck Klosterman's new collection of "fictional nonfiction" is full of people who subvert expectations and find ways around the systems that rule our lives. Also, there's a puma in an airplane toilet.

Rather than the time travel or war, the thrill of Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone's book becomes the connection between two lonely professional killers with the ability to inscribe letters on lava.

The work, previously published only in Russian, was discovered by Professor Steven Hoelscher. The encounter occurred in 1927, when Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston went on a road trip through the South.

Libraries have never been just about books; they're also crucial hubs of community support. Some are even expanding that role, and supporting their librarians, by bringing in trained social workers.

Through his graphic memoir, the Star Trek actor-turned-author shows that while it may be too late to undo the WWII incarceration of Japanese Americans, it's not too late to learn from it.

After a cancer diagnosis, author and noted mountaineer David Roberts sets out on the trail of Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, remaining dutiful to the route some 240 years later.

NPR's Ari Shapiro talks with former U.S. counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke about his new book, The Fifth Domain, co-written with Robert Knake.

Colson Whitehead's deeply affecting new novel is based on the true story of a segregated reform school in Florida where African American boys were brutalized and possibly murdered.

Whitehead's new novel is based on a notorious Florida reform school where boys were beaten and sexually abused. "If there's one place like this, there are many," he says.

Mark Stryker covered jazz and its people for the Detroit Free Press for decades. He uses his reporter's eye and critic's ear to chronicle the musicians from the city who made their mark on the world.

New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum won't appear on panels pitting TV against movies or books. "Everything is valuable in its own way and they don't need to be in tension with one another," she says.