Books

Juan Felipe Herrera is the 21st Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. NPR met with Herrera on World Poetry Day, March 21, 2017, to talk about the role of poetry in society.

John A. Farrell's new biography of Richard Nixon contains a bombshell about Nixon's interference in a Vietnam peace deal — and that's just one of the book's many extensively-researched revelations.

Max Winter's bleak, powerful debut novel is haunted by missing people — and those who feel their absence. It centers around a man trying to piece together his estranged brother's last years.

In Cathy Malkasian's gorgeous, melancholic graphic novel, a woman travels to a distant city to learn why its residents have stopped dreaming.

Set in a real Florida town with a real history of devastating fires, Cherie Priest's Brimstone is a deeply loving story about a witch and a grieving veteran with a strange connection to the fires.

In Where the Water Goes, David Owen uses the history of the Colorado River to lay out the immense complexity of America's water situation, reminding us that both water and time are finite resources.

Among the winners were Colson Whitehead's The Underground Railroad for fiction, The Washington Post's David Fahrenthold for national reporting and The East Bay Times for breaking news reporting.

Unlike food — which gives us sensory cues like crunchy and hot, as well as tasting, say, salty — with wine, it's all about tiny differences in taste and smell. The danger is in getting too poetic.