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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
Frances Ashcroft's new book details how electricity in the body fuels everything we thing, feel or do. She tells Fresh Air about discover a new protein, how scientists are like novelists and how she wanted to be a farmer's wife.
Rian Johnson's action-thriller can't dodge the frustrating elements of most time-travel tales, but the film's characters, performances and stylization add up to an experience that critic David Edelstein believes is the right amount of happy and tragic.
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.
In his first novel, J.R. Moehringer writes from the point of view of Willie Sutton, whom he calls the "greatest American robber." Moehringer says writing historical fiction helped him deal with the anger he felt toward banks after the global financial crisis in 2008.
The freewheeling saxophonist and his small group from the 1970s came together for a live concert in 2007 -- their first together in more than two decades. Now, a recording has been posthumously released on CD, and critic Kevin Whitehead says it's like they never went away.
The actress played Kelly Kapoor on The Office, a role she also wrote and produced. Now she runs a new Fox comedy, The Mindy Project, in which she stars as an obstetrician whose personal life is a mess. Kaling tells Fresh Air that her late mother inspired her character's career.
Charles Rowan Beye has been married three times -- to two women and a man. Now, over age 80, he looks back on his life and asks, "What was that all about?" Critic Maureen Corrigan says Beye's memoir, subtitled "A Gay Man's Odyssey," is a complex, poignant addition to the sexual canon.
