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To some, Detroit may be a symbol of urban decay; but to journalist Charlie LeDuff, it's home. In Detroit: An American Autopsy, he says the city's heart beats on. "We're still here trying to reconstruct the great thing we once had," he tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies.

It's the entrepreneurs' dream: tapping into China's market of 1.3 billion people. That dream fueled the efforts of two Chinese-American MBAs to take the soft-pretzel franchise — a staple of U.S. shopping malls — to China. Cultural and financial barriers, however, led to a far more challenging reality.

In her new book, The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things, author Paula Byrne shows how everyday objects helped shape Austen's life and literature. One example, a topaz cross, a cherished gift to Austen from her brother, plays an important role in Mansfield Park.

In 1963 Betty Friedan published a groundbreaking work that empowered a generation of women. With World War II over, women who had been working were told to find fulfillment at home. "The moment was so pregnant and ready for an explosion," says New York Times columnist Gail Collins.

The road tour is a well-known backdrop in American novels and one Teddy Wayne explores in his new novel, The Love Song of Jonny Valentine. Along the way, Jonny, a teen heartthrob, explores the pressures of celebrity at a young age.

Swamplandia! author Karen Russell is back with a new collection of short stories, Vampires in the Lemon Grove. The title story features two elderly vampires, married for more than a century, who wonder what "till death do us part" means when you can't die.

Mississippi would have been the only Republican-led state in the South with a health insurance exchange not run by the federal government. Now Mississippi has another distinction: It's the only state to have its exchange plan turned down by the federal government.

In a new memoir, Sampson Davis describes what it was like to return to the hospital where he was born to become an emergency physician. He says his mother taught him that "once you make it, you have to come back and help other people."

"Mister hit Josephine with the palm of his hand across her left cheek and it was then she knew she would run." So begins Tara Conklin's debut novel, The House Girl, which links the stories of an artistically talented 19th-century slave and an ambitious 21st-century lawyer.

Author Rosie Schaap's new memoir, Drinking With Men, chronicles her life in bars. Schaap writes the 'Drink' column for The New York Times Magazine, and she says goes to bars not for the alcohol but for the sense of community she finds there.