Search results for

When Joshua Braff was an M.F.A. student, his classmates smirked when he announced that John Irving was one of his favorite authors. But he's proud of his love for The World According to Garp; Braff says Irving's characters live and breathe before, during and after the story ends.

Tweens and teens go through developmental changes that can be exasperating for parents and can make them feel ineffective. Experts talk about those trying teen years and how parents can learn to cope more effectively while their child moves toward adulthood.

Book reviews can be pretty liberal about comparing authors to Jane Austen, but here's a writer who actually lives up to that association. Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector stars two sisters struggling to decide between wealth and virtue in dot-com-era California.

From Bach on the accordion to a full-length symphony housed on a one-bit microchip, NPR Music's Tom Huizenga and Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz spin an eclectic assortment of new music.

Eunice Chapman won the first legal divorce in New York State in 1818. Her scandalous case pitted Mrs. Chapman against her abusive husband, who took their three children and joined the radical Shaker sect. NPR's Guy Raz talks to Ilyon Woo, author of a new book about the case, called The Great Divorce.

In Crude World, journalist Peter Maass argues that our relentless pursuit of oil has created a host of problems in the world — particularly in the countries that hold the most deposits. He explains why our dependence on the fossil fuel is not without social and environmental costs.

The Vidocq Society is a Philadelphia-based group of criminologists and forensic experts; they gather together once a month to solve cold cases. Writer Michael Capuzzo explains what it was like to shadow the crime-fighters in The Murder Room.

In these stories — three novels and two works of nonfiction — a history teacher, a wry angst-filled teen, a budding celebrity chef, an intrepid spice hunter, and Ernest Hemingway himself whisk you to vacation spots around the world.

The protagonist of Naomi Hirahara's novels isn't a seasoned police detective or a private investigator — he's a gruff, 72-year-old gardener who lives in the hills above Pasadena, Calif. The Mas Arai character was inspired by Hirahara's father and guides readers into the hidden corners of L.A.'s Japanese-American communities.

During the summer of 1896, a 10-day heat wave killed nearly 1,500 people across New York City — many of them tenement-dwellers. In Hot Time in the Old Town, historian Ed Kohn describes the disaster — and how a little-known police commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt championed the efforts to help New Yorkers survive the heat.