The Smithsonian show isn't about the words of the Quran so much as the people who laboriously copied it, letter by letter. When they made a mistake, they fixed it with flourish — and sometimes gold.
Before modern fan fiction, there were the Whitman Authorized Editions — a series of mystery novels from the 1940s and 50s that "starred" real movie stars, like Ginger Rogers and Gene Tierney.
In 1962, Peter — an African-American boy exploring his neighborhood after a snowstorm — broke the color barrier in mainstream children's publishing. A new book pays tribute to author Ezra Jack Keats.
Critic John Powers discusses the Italian documentary, Fire at Sea, and the novel, These Are the Names. The works take very different — but nonetheless poignant — approaches to the refugee situation.
Matt Fraction and Christian Ward's splendidly trippy, genderbent retelling of the Odyssey sets the story in space, as warlike Odyssia, "witchjack and wanderer" winds her way home to far Ithicaa.
Jones became an activist after Harvey Milk's assassination, and he lost countless friends to the AIDS epidemic. He says, "There are some days when it is so painful that I really can barely function."
Jason Diamond tried to write a biography of John Hughes, director of classic '80s teen movies, but along the way, the story became more about his search for Hughes than the elusive filmmaker himself.
In her new memoir, The Princess Diarist, Fisher looks back on playing Princess Leia when she was 19 and reflects on her romantic involvement with her older, married co-star, Harrison Ford.
Steve Inskeep talks to the BBC's Andrew Harding about his book: The Mayor of Mogadishu. It's a look at Somalia's modern history through the life story of one of its most controversial politicians.