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Fawzia Koofi almost died on the day she was born, but survived against all odds and became the first female deputy speaker of Afghanistan's parliament. Koofi plans to run for president in two years, and in a new memoir, describes her hopes for the country's future.

How much do we read into ourselves when we write a diary? Author Patrick DeWitt recommends the dark, deep journal of a man suffering from a nervous breakdown.

Through his many New Yorker covers, Barry Blitt has become one of the pre-eminent satirical cartoonists of America's recent presidents. Now Blitt has trained his eye and pen upon our first president in a new children's book, George Washington's Birthday.

Hollywood is forever going back to the well of literature for ideas. Author Tessa Harris says, if it's books Hollywood wants, there are still plenty of gems out there waiting to be discovered. She points to three books that should be movies — and you can recommend others in the comments section.

Do-it-yourselfers have made everything from bamboo bicycles to 3-D printers, but nothing as ambitious as the Open Source Ecology project. On a farm in northwest Missouri, tractors and other industrial machines are made from scratch, with detailed plans on how to do it yourself shared online.

The seemingly accidental death of a troubled starlet is the catalyst for events in a new thriller that takes the reader from Dublin to New York to the Congo. "It's an exploration ... of the power dynamics that go on" between executive boardrooms and warlords, author Alan Glynn says.

The Chinese dissident and Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo may be imprisoned, but his voice will not be silenced. His recent writings and poems have been collected in No Enemies, No Hatred.

Greece has pushed itself to the edge of chaos with austerity measures, and Europeans officials say it's still not enough. The Greeks need more European help — $170 billion to avoid default next month.

You'll never suffer from writer's block as long as you've got a copy of Plotto: The Master Book of All Plots. Prolific pulp novelist William Wallace Cook turned his fiction production methods into a wacky manual for aspiring writers. Originally published in 1928, it has just been reissued.

In What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, Nathan Englander writes about his own faith — and what it means to be Jewish — in stories that explore religious tension, Israeli-American relations and the Holocaust.