Books

A new book follows an American basketball veteran as he coaches a struggling Chinese pro basketball team. Pulitzer Prize winner Jim Yardley has a courtside seat from which to observe China's frantic capitalist expansion and its ambivalent fascination with all things American.

The book publisher who championed the works of beat poets and Samuel Beckett, and who defied censors with the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover and Tropic of Cancer, died Tuesday at age 89. Fresh Air remembers Rosset with excerpts from a 1991 interview.

This interview was originally broadcast on Apr. 9, 1991.

Advertisers collect information with every digital move people make. They then target ads based on that information. Communications scholar Joseph Turow worries that advertisers will use such data to discriminate against people and put them into "reputation silos."

Helen Simpson once said that when it comes to short stories, "Something's got to happen, but not too much." Her latest short story collection, In-Flight Entertainment, may seem bleak and mundane — with subjects like mortality, infidelity and climate change — but it's also bursting with British wit.

Tupelo Hassman's debut novel stars Rory, a resilient, if ragged, life force raised in a Reno trailer park who adopts a tattered copy of The Girl Scout Handbook as her Bible. Rory endures sexual abuse, the death of loved ones, and everyday invisibility — all without playing for our sympathy.

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo spent more than three years in Mumbai's Annawadi slum. In her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers, she profiles people living in extreme poverty — right in the shadow of luxury hotels.

Unlike the Great Depression, our current recession hasn't yet produced much memorable literature, but book critic Maureen Corrigan says that situation, like the economy, seems to be changing.

Hilma Wolitzer's finely observed comedy of manners follows the romantic misadventures of recently widowed 62-year-old Edward Schuyler as he re-enters the dating pool with a splash.

Shalom Auslander's Hope: A Tragedy takes on genocide, identity politics and Anne frank (now elderly and squatting in a farmhouse in upstate New York) with grim humor and daring irreverence.

In New York Diaries, editor Teresa Carpenter presents 400 years of diary excerpts written by people who've lived in or just passed through one of the greatest cities in the world.