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The summer sun may be shining, but vampires don't seem to be going anywhere. NPR's Margot Adler has read more than 100 vampire books this year, and gives a heads-up on two bloodsucking books expected to be summer blockbusters: Christopher Farnsworth's Blood Oath and Justin Cronin's The Passage.

Pawnshops, payday lenders, check cashers and rent-to-own companies take in $33 billion a year. In writing his new book, Broke, USA, Gary Rivlin discovered how the businesses justified making huge profits off the working poor.

In A Mosque in Munich, Pulitzer Prize winner Ian Johnson explains how Western spy-masters recruited ex-Soviet Muslims to be operatives in the propaganda war against the Soviet Union. These Muslims, in turn, created a community where radical Islam could gain a foothold in the heart of Europe.

From the mercurial twists in CPE Bach's keyboard sonatas to the sprawling, nearly empty canvas of Morton Feldman's Trio, NPR Music's Tom Huizenga and Weekend All Things Considered host Guy Raz spin an extra-wide variety of new classical CDs.

Author Ayelet Waldman, the author of Bad Mother, recommends three books about motherhood that offer a break from brutal "motherhood is hell" horror stories as well as cloying sentimentality.

Five years ago, novelist Ayelet Waldman sparked a controversy — and wound up on Oprah to defend herself — when she wrote in an essay that she loved her husband more than her children. Her memoir about that experience, Bad Mother has just been released in paperback.

In Theodore Boone: Kid Lawyer, the best-selling author writes about a 13-year-old amateur attorney. Grisham says writing his first book for young readers was a challenge because he didn't want to talk down to his audience. He tells NPR's Michele Norris that kids are "a tougher crowd" than adults.

English rose from humble beginnings to become a language that's spoken by people from every corner of the Earth. In Globish, Robert McCrum tells the story of how a mongrel language slowly took the world by storm.

The writer and filmmaker known for the cult classics Pink Flamingos, Cry-Baby and Hairspray reflects on the many people who have inspired him throughout his life — from playwright Tennessee Williams to the crazed martyr Saint Catherine of Siena — in a new memoir, Role Models.

Maureen Corrigan has booked an armchair getaway this summer with four books that will send her traveling through time. From turn-of-the-last-century New York tenements, to the 1939 World's Fair, to literary romance on the shores of Lake Geneva, these books will take you to places even the most luxurious vacations can't go.