In a new memoir, James Lasdun describes how a former-student-turned-friend stalked and slandered him online. Give Me Everything You Have is a meditation on what it means to control your reputation on the Internet -- and the book is Lasdun's attempt to fight back.

Journalist Andres Oppenheimer is the senior foreign correspondent for The Miami Herald. He spent more than five months in Cuba researching his new book, "Castro's Final Hour," which looks into how the country has been affected by the collapse of Soviet Union, which had provided ample material support to Castro's government.

Novelist, essayist, and reporter Barbara Grizutti Harrison. Her new book is called "Italian Days." It's a chronicle of her travels through Italy, but it's also more introspective, influenced by her parents Italian heritage and her conversion to Catholicism after a childhood spent in the Jehovah's Witnesses.

This week, we're listening back to some favorite Fresh Air interviews from the past decade. The Nobel Prize winner, who died in 2019, spoke about aging and regret in this 2015 interview.

Dave Brubeck's quartet released the groundbreaking record Time Out, which introduced odd-time signature jazz music to a mainstream audience. He was recently commissioned to compose a Catholic mass.

TV critic David Bianculli review the original pilot of "Gilligan's Island," which will be broadcast for the first time. He says it might be worse than the original.

Jo Ann Kay McNamara talks with Terry Gross about her book "Sisters In Arms: Catholic Nuns Through Two Millennia." It is published by Harvard University Press. McNamara is a Professor of History at Hunter College and at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

This month Woody Harrelson stars in a powerful new movie about the costs of war. He plays Capt. Tony Stone, a veteran of the Army's Casualty Notification service, charged with the task of notifying the families of fallen soldiers. The film opens Nov. 13, but Harrelson's performance is already generating Oscar chatter.

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 the 1950s, Gelbart he was part of a team of television writers that included Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Neil Simon, and others who wrote for Sid Caesar's "Your Show of Shows" and "Caesar's Hour." Gelbart went on to develop and write for the television version of "M*A*S*H. Also, he wrote the screenplays for "Oh, God!" and "Tootsie," and the stage play for "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum" There's a new PBS special about Sid Caesar's comedy team, "Caesar's Writers."

Journalist John Allen has a book about the new pope, The Rise of Benedict XVI: The Inside Story of How the Pope Was Elected, and Where He Will Take the Catholic Church.

Our guest, Father John Barkemeyer, left a parish on Chicago's South Side to become an Army chaplain in 2003, the year U.S. and coalition forces invaded Iraq. There's a shortage of Catholic priests in the Army, and for much of his current tour in Iraq, Barkemeyer has been the service's only Catholic chaplain in the province of Anbar.

Neurologist and writer Oliver Sacks, whose book of case studies, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, has been made into a music theater production. Sacks is also the author of Awakenings, a work about victims of sleeping sickness, to whom he administered the experimental drug L-dopa.

Commentator Maureen Corrigan reviews "Ordinary Time: Cycles in Faith, Marriage, and Renewal" the new autobiography by Nancy Mairs, who is dying of multiple sclerosis.

Temple Grandin is one of the nation’s top designers of livestock facilities. She is also autistic. In her book, Thinking in Pictures: and other reports from my life with Autism she describes how her inner-autistic world has led her to develop animal empathy. She is currently an assistant professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Her new book is published by Doubleday 1995. Grandin was the subject of Oliver Sack’s 1993 New Yorker article An Anthropologist on Mars.

Mike Hudson is a contributing editor for "Southern Exposure," a public policy magazine. He recently wrote a series of stories on the "poverty industry" -- how pawn shops, finance companies, and rent-to-own stores charge high interest rates, sometimes as high as 35%, to people who can almost never pay them back.

Durang is best-known for his controversial play, "Sister Mary Ignatius Explains It All For You." A new collection of six of his plays has just come out called "Christopher Durang Explains It All For You." He joins Fresh Air to talk about some of his successes and failures, and his frustrations with New York theater.

Cuban-born poet Heberto Padilla (air-BARE-toe puh-DEE-uh). He was a friend of Castro and an early supporter of the revolution in Cuba. But later he became disillusioned and was imprisoned by Castro as a counter-revolutionary in 1971. He left Cuba in 1980 and has been living and teaching in the U.S. He has a new memoir, "Self Portrait of the Other," published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Poet, writer, and teacher Nancy Mairs. She's a Catholic feminist, who started out Protestant, and who late in life became a feminist. She calls herself, "the connoisseur of catastrophe." She's known for writing honestly about her struggles with multiple sclerosis, depression, and the life-threatening illness of her husband, also about being a woman, a mother, and a wife. Her newest book of personal essays is "Ordinary Time," (Beacon). One reviewer calls it "a small miracle of honesty mediated by dignity and humor."