Books & Literature

By by 1920, the British Empire covered 24% of the Earth's land mass. Historian Caroline Elkins says British rulers portrayed themselves as benevolent, but used systematic violence to maintain control.

The Poet's House is a closely observed, droll, coming-of-age story about an insecure young woman drawn into a shimmering clique of poets;

Novelist Mat Johnson believes that America has its own unique "flavor" of apocalypse. "It's hard not seeing the possible end of things in a variety of different ways," he says. Johnson's new satirical novel, Invisible Things, serves up one of those apocalyptic flavors.

"Really, the heart of the story is about misplaced loyalty and what we can do with memory and how fluid and malleable memory can be when we ... use it to fit the narrative that we've created in our mind," says novelist John Vercher.

Maureen Corrigan says Ottessa Moshfegh's just-published novel, Lapvona, serves up plenty of sadism and stink, cannibalism and self-flagellation set in the Middle Ages.

Writer Candice Millard tells the dramatic story of two 19th-century British explorers who spent years trekking through East Africa, enduring injury and illness in a search for the source of the Nile.

In his debut novel, Greenland, David Santos Donaldson takes this crucial but necessarily closeted relationship of E.M. Forster's and runs with it, all the way from a basement room in Brooklyn to the icy white expanses of the Greenland of the novel's title.

In her new memoir, Rough Draft, Tur looks back on her childhood, and reflects on her difficult relationship with her father — Zoey Tur, who came out as a trans woman in 2013 — a person she describes in her memoir as talented and charismatic, but also volatile and, at times, abusive.

The Sound of Music star will soon be honored with the AFI's Life Achievement Award. In 2008 and 2019, she spoke to Fresh Air about growing up during WWII and performing in her parents' vaudeville.

Critic at large JOHN POWERS reviews the Library of America’s new collection of Maxine Hong Kingston’s major works.

Neda Toloui-Semnani shares the story of her parents, two Iranian students who met at Berkeley in 1969 and later, in Iran, worked to build a more democratic nation. Her father was executed in 1983.

David Sedaris writes in his new collection of essays, Happy-Go-Lucky, about his father Lou and their complicated relationship.

In her new memoir, This Body I Wore, she writes about coming of age and into adulthood in an earlier era, when she didn't have the language or knowledge to understand what it meant to be trans.

Straub's new novel is a time-travel fantasy about a 40-year-old woman who's tending to her ailing father — until, that is, the day she's transported to her childhood home on her 16th birthday.

Book critic MAUREEN CORRIGAN has some suggests for light summer reading.

In New York City, in the 20th century, tens of thousands of women and transmasculine people were incarcerated at the so-called House of D, a brutal women's prison that opened in Greenwich Village in 1932. Author Hugh Ryan says that in many cases, the prisoners were charged with crimes related to gender-nonconforming behavior.

Merchant co-created the British Office and Extras with Ricky Gervais. His new show, The Outlaws, is about people court-ordered to do community service for low-level crimes. He spoke with producer Sam Briger about what inspired the new series, his best writing advice, and how being very tall (6'7") has informed his personality.

Raised in a convent for abandoned kids, The Flight Attendant co-star used to dream of stability and a loving home. Now that she has it, Perez says, "It's priceless." We talk with Perez about overcoming the trauma of her childhood, how a fight with Spike Lee helped land her breakthrough role in Do the Right Thing, and her brief — but impactful — time dancing on Soul Train.

How do we prevent the next mass shooting before it happens? That's the question Mother Jones national affairs editor Mark Follman has been researching since 2012, when a gunman killed 12 people at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo.

Klein was the head writer of Inside Amy Schumer and is one of the lead voices in the animated Netflix series Big Mouth. She has a new book of essays about motherhood called I'll Show Myself Out. Klein talks about how having a baby made her feel like a stranger in her own body and life. "There's just no way to comprehend how completely your old identity vanishes," Klein says.