In A.M. Homes' suburbia, yawning sinkholes will suddenly open up in front lawns, swallowing cliched plotlines and opening portals to other dimensions. In her latest novel, she serves up an old-fashioned American story that's more Norman Bates than Norman Rockwell.
New York Times business reporter Charles Duhigg says that consumers and innovation are the big losers in the patent wars. "Patents have become a toll gate on the road of innovation," he says.
Statistical analyst Nate Silver says humility is key to making accurate predictions. Silver, who writes the New York Times' FiveThirtyEight blog, has just written a new book called The Signal and the Noise.
Counselor Judith Schwarz says that for terminally ill patients who are suffering, prolonging death can seem like a worse fate than death itself. Schwarz is a patient supporter with the nonprofit organization Compassion & Choices
Linguist Geoff Nunberg has been puzzling over President Obama's performance in the presidential debate last week. Looking at who the candidates were addressing their answers to shows that Romney was doing something unusual, he says.
Tig Notaro walked onstage hours after finding out she was diagnosed with cancer, and talked about it in a standup comedy set that Louis C.K. described in a tweet as masterful. Notaro talks with Fresh Air's Terry Gross about the set, titled Tig Notaro: Live.
Louis C.K. decided to offer Tig Notaro: Live exclusively on his website when he saw the comedian perform a set just hours after receiving her cancer diagnosis.
Junot Diaz's electric new collection of short stories centers around Yunior, a macho yet mournful Dominican-American man. In these stories about love, lust and infidelity, a good man is hard to find — and when he is found, he's always in bed with someone else.
Stephen Colbert has a new book called America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't. It explores the dichotomy between thinking America is perfect — and feeling the urge to save the country from disaster at every moment.
Since the 1961 publication of the Third International Dictionary, people have debated the merits of dictionaries that describe language as it is and those that explain how it should be. Today the debate continues, but it doesn't hold the same cultural significance as before, writes Geoff Nunberg.
He's appeared in over 100 films and TV shows, but you still might not know his name. In his memoir, The Dangerous Animals Club, actor Stephen Tobolowsky talks about falling in love with comedy — and playing characters who are always on the story's fringes.
The director of Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood talks to Fresh Air's Terry Gross about his new film, The Master, a tense drama with indelible performances from Philip Seymour Hoffman, Joaquin Phoenix and Amy Adams.
Waging Heavy Peace is about his music, raising two sons with special needs, and his own medical conditions, which have included polio, epilepsy and a brain aneurysm.
John Powers reviews the author's memoir of his time in hiding — the result of a fatwah calling for his murder after the publication of The Satanic Verses.
Showtime's Homeland, which swept this year's Emmy Awards, returns this weekend -- as does another Showtime drama, Dexter. Critic David Bianculli says there's a rich bounty of returning series -- and Homeland is the "most topical and meaningful drama on television."
The Oscar-nominated actress plays the forbidding wife of a cult leader in Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master. She tells Fresh Air it was an opportunity to play a character type she'd never played before.
