Books & Literature

Mystery writer P.D. James, now 91, has written a suspenseful sequel to Jane Austen's classic. Death Comes to Pemberley picks up six years after Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy have wed. Maureen Corrigan says the story is "a glorious plum pudding of a whodunit."

In 1962, 11-year-old Carlos Eire was one of thousands of children airlifted out of Cuba and sent to Florida to escape Fidel Castro's regime. His parents thought he'd return when Castro was deposed — but he never went home again. Eire recounts the experience in a new memoir.

Songwriter Hugh Martin co-wrote the Christmas tune that Judy Garland made famous in the 1944 classic Meet Me in St. Louis. Martin, who recently released a memoir, explains how he came up with his famous lyrics.

The Roosevelts' unorthodox marriage was equitable, sexually open — and spanned four decades. Hazel Rowley profiles the uncommon union of a four-term president and his first lady in Franklin And Eleanor: An Extraordinary Marriage.

The year is 1622, and a tormented English Puritan strikes out for the Plymouth Plantation in Hugh Nissenson's moody, intelligent novel. Critic Maureen Corrigan say The Pilgrim is a work of straightforward historical fiction -- of the sort ta you don't see so much anymore.

On Friday, Regis Philbin will step down from his hosting duties on the talk show Live with Regis and Kelly. But that doesn't mean he's retiring. In his new memoir, How I Got This Way, Philbin chronicles the twists and turns of his career and explains where he plans to go next.

Lerner captures the sense of everyday life with an unusual focus on thoughts rather than incident, betting on the premise that these thoughts are the events, rather than the stuff in between them.

The Vanity Fair critic was an aspiring writer when he arrived in a turbulen Manhattan in 1972. In his memoir, Lucking Out, he writes about the crime and culture (and pornography) he discovered there.

In 14 years on Saturday Night Live, Darrell Hammond did many impressions, including Bill Clinton and Al Gore. But few of his cast members knew that Hammond struggled with drugs, alcohol and self-cutting as a result of systematic childhood abuse.

American film critic Pauline Kael was a brash, exuberant female writer at a time when most of her colleagues were buttoned up -- and male. The Age of Movies, a new collection of selected essays and movie reviews from Kael, showcases the gutsy and passionate style that made her a household name.

Two years after the death of her husband, Joan Didion suffered the untimely loss of her only daughter. She pieces together her memories of Quintana Roo in her new memoir, Blue Nights.

The lives of writers drive two films opening this week: The Rum Diary, starring Johnny Depp, dramatizes a Hunter S. Thompson novel. Roland Emmerich's Anonymous, meanwhile, examines who wrote Shakespeare's plays. Critic David Edelstein says both films show how hard it is to write about writers.

After Steve Jobs was diagnosed with cancer, he asked Walter Isaacson to write his biography. The new book tells the personal story of the man behind the personal computer — from his childhood in California to his thoughts on family, friends, death and religion.

"Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we're going to die," poet Marie Howe tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. One of Howe's most famous poems, "What the Living Do," was recently included in The Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry.

After 35 years as a Supreme Court justice, John Paul Stevens retired last year. His newly released memoir is about his time on the bench and the five Supreme Court chief justices he personally knew. He details his views of those justices and how his viewpoints on various issues evolved over the years.

Colson Whitehead's new novel Zone One is a post-apocalyptic tale of a Manhattan crippled by a plague and overrun with zombies. He explains that he created the novel, in part, to pay homage to the grimy 1970s New York of his childhood.

Russell Banks' latest is an uneven effort to excavate and redeem the dregs of modern society. Critic Maureen Corrigan says the novel — about porn addiction and sexual predators — is compelling in a low-grade, nightmarish sort of way.

Jeffrey Eugenides' third novel, The Marriage Plot, charts the lives of three young adults as they finish college, fall in love and navigate the real world after graduating from Brown University in 1982. Eugenides, also a Brown alum, based some of the novel on his own experiences directly after college.

Dana Spiotta's third novel, Stone Arabia, is about an aging musician who never achieved the type of success he'd have liked. Rather than giving up, he chronicles an imaginary version of his life — as a successful rock star recording his career in a series of journals.

Roger Ebert tackles lowbrow and highbrow topics alike in his memoir; critic John Powers says the chronicle is sunny and hopeful — just like Ebert himself.