Health & Medicine

Pamela Eren's incisive new book Eleven Hours features only two main characters and is an incisive novel about birth.

How genetics is profoundly changing our definition of disease and the way we treat disease, but is also raising new ethical questions. A talk with oncologist Siddhartha Mukherjee about his new book The Gene.

The Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Empire Falls says his characters are inspired by his parents' working-class World War II generation. Russo's new novel is set in a small town in upstate New York.

He's helped many people through painful passages in their lives. And he's faced his own: Since a near-fatal auto accident in 1979, he's been paralyzed from the chest down. Gottlieb has had nearly three decades to come to terms with the changed circumstances of his body — but now, he fears, that body may be growing tired.

Journalist and author T.R. Reid, a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, set out on a global tour of hospitals and doctors' offices, all in the hopes of understanding how other industrialized nations provide affordable, effective universal health care. The result: his book The Healing of America.

Seventy-four-year-old author Arlene Heyman discusses her debut short-story collection, which focuses on the sex lives and intimate relationships of characters in their 60s and 70s.

Point-of-view is passed like a baton among the tortured main characters in Joachim Trier's new film. Critic David Edelstein says Louder than Bombs is intimate, touching and "insistently alive."

Arnaud Desplechin's new film centers on the memories of a middle-aged Frenchman who returns to Paris after years of living abroad. Critic John Powers says My Golden Days is "achingly romantic."

Writer-director Trey Edward Shults cast his own family in his home-for-Thanksgiving psychodrama. Reviewer David Edelstein says Krisha "marks the arrival of a truly adventurous, humanist filmmaker."

Oncologist Theodora Ross discusses the hereditary nature of cancer and her own predisposition to breast and ovarian cancer, which led her to have a double mastectomy and to have her ovaries removed.

At the height of her addiction to heroin, Tracey Helton Mitchell lived in an alley and sold her body. Now she works as an addiction specialist helping others. Her new memoir is The Big Fix.

Comic Louie Anderson has had a hugely successful stand-up career for the last 30 years, but he admits he wasn't a very good actor early on. "I didn't know who I was or how to do it," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

In her new book, Pandemic: Tracking Contagions from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond, Shah discusses the history and science of contagious diseases. She notes that humans put themselves at risk by encroaching on wildlife habitats. "About 60 percent of our new pathogens come from the bodies of animals," she says.

Rick Famuyiwa's new film is about a black high-school student who's into 90s hip hop and Japanese comic books. He calls Dope a celebration of kids whose interests don't fit into pop-culture norms.

Astronomer Chris Impey discusses the future of space travel, sex in space and the connection between science and Buddhism. Impey is the author of Beyond: Our Future in Space.

Noah Baumbach's new comedy is about a couple in their 40s who befriend 20-something hipsters and go wild. It gets off to a fun start, but two-thirds of the way through takes a surprising turn.

Daniel Genis, son of Soviet emigre writer Alexander Genis, served 10 years for armed robbery. The crimes fueled his heroin addiction. "It was so obvious I didn't fit in," he says.

n the 1800s, the Thames River was thick with human sewage and the streets were covered with horse dung, the removal of which, according to Lee Jackson, presented an "impossible challenge."

In Abigail Thomas' What Comes Next and How to Like It, the aging process robs the 70-something of beauty and energy. In H Is for Hawk, Helen Macdonald trains a goshawk after her father dies.

Offutt's late father went from running a small insurance agency to writing more than 400 books, mostly pornography. The writer tells Fresh Air his dad believed he would be "extremely famous" for it.