Literary Figures: Novelists

Novelist Junot Diaz's first novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao explores the complexities of living in two cultures at once. Set in both the United States and in the Dominican Republic, the novel follows the story of Oscar Wao in prose that frequently mixes Spanish and English in the same sentence.

Author Alice Sebold has produced difficult books before: Her novel The Lovely Bones, soon to be filmed by director Peter Jackson, centers on a 14-year-old looking down from heaven after her own rape and murder.

Now comes Sebold's latest fiction, The Almost Moon: Its narrative involves a middle-aged woman who murders her ailing elderly mother.

Philip Roth's newest novel, Exit Ghost, is his ninth and final Nathan Zuckerman book.

The series began in 1979 with The Ghost Writer; a compendium, Zuckerman Bound, is now available.

Roth won a Pulitzer Prize in 1997 for American Pastoral; his 28 novels have won him numerous other awards, including the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Gold Medal for Fiction.

Fresh Air's critic-at-large tells us about the wartime aviation novels of British writer Derek Robinson, who served in the Royal Air Force. His books include Goshawk Squadron, Damned Good Show, A Good, Clean Fight, and Piece of Cake.

Novelist Bill Flanagan wrote the comedy A&R about the smooth operators and the scatty artists who make the music business so entertaining. Now he's lampooning the cable-TV industry in his novel New Bedlam. The source for his send-ups? His day job as an MTV networks exec.

Michael Harvey created the A&E cable show Cold Case Files, a documentary series that follows forensic experts and detectives as they investigate long-unsolved murder cases. Harvey has also written a novel, The Chicago Way.

Alan Furst's best-selling spy thrillers (Kingdom of Shadows, Night Shadows, The Polish Officer) play out in the brooding, tumultuous Europe of the pre-World War II years, offering an intimate, insider portrait of an escalating crisis in which the players can't always see the implications of the game. Critic-at-large John Powers explains why he's a fan.

Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, has written a new novel that Publishers Weekly describes as a "murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller."

The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a private-eye novel that takes place in a fictional community of Jewish exiles — "the frozen chosen" — displaced to a temporary settlement in Alaska by World War II.

Novelist Joshua Ferris makes his debut with Then We Came to the End, a satire about life in a Chicago advertising agency just as the dot-com boom went bust.

Writer Kurt Vonnegut died Wednesday at the age of 84. His most famous book was the anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five; based on Vonnegut's own experiences in World War II, the book became a cultural touchstone at the height of popular protest against the war in Vietnam. In this archived interview, he talks to Terry Gross about writing, censorship, and the experience of war. Rebroadcast from May 13, 1986