A Brooklyn hipster, old blues music, cultural appropriation, a ghost story: these are ingredients in Hari Kunzru's new novel, White Tears. He talks with NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro.
Tom Nealon's new book searches through patchy historical records to trace subjects like how chocolate helped lead to war in the Caribbean, or the role a grain fungus played in the Crusades.
Author Kanishk Tharoor's first book, Swimmer Among the Stars, is a compilation of short stories. He tells Scott Simon the format requires intensity and offers an opportunity to be playful.
After moving away, Ask Amy columnist Amy Dickinson returned to her hometown of Freeville, N.Y. There, she married a man she first met at age 12, and cared for her mother in her final days.
Adam Hochschild says American involvement in the Spanish Civil War resulted in Americans being bombed by Nazis years before the U.S. entered World War II. Originally published March 28, 2018.
Keggie Carew grew up with her father's stories of parachuting into the jungle and working as a spy in Burma. She wasn't sure how much to believe until she started researching her new book, Dadland.
"All of us who are writers are doing something that actually matters," Hamid says. His latest novel, Exit West, follows a couple who have to decide whether to flee their homeland.
Author Norman Ohler says that Adolf Hitler's drug abuse increased "significantly" from the fall of 1941 until winter of 1944: "Hitler needed those highs to substitute [for] his natural charisma."
NPR's Robert Siegel talks with historian Timothy Snyder about his new book, On Tyranny, which explores the new threats faced by our political order and how we can look back to the 20th century for lessons on how to overcome them.