Former U.S. poet laureate Ted Kooser talks about his new love letter to a passing heartland America.

He was “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” Author Edna O’Brien reads into the poetry and many lovers of the great Lord Byron.

“Death be not proud.” “My love is a fever.” We look at 500 years of poets making sonnets.

We talk with Toni Morrison, novelist and Nobel laureate, about censorship and the power of the free word.

Who needs an iPod if you’ve got poetry in your head? We’ll talk about the powerful pleasures of learning poems by heart.

Iconic feminist Germaine Greer joins us with her re-imagined life of Shakespeare’s wife, Anne Hathaway.

Elie Wiesel has a new novel, and a few choice words for Bernard Madoff. We’ll listen.

American horror master Edgar Allan Poe, at 200. We’ll look at how his stories still chill us.

Biographer Jeffrey Meyers on how one of history’s great idlers became one of literature’s greatest wits.

Bad-boy poet Rimbaud lived hard, died young, and inspired generations — for better and worse. Novelist and biographer Edmund White tells the tale.

Two and a half thousand years ago, he wandered the ancient world, trying to make sense of the great war that had shaped his times.

Our coverage continues from Denver. We’ll talk with Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Ishmael Reed about how they’re seeing this historic moment.

A conversation with Nobel Prize-winning author Doris Lessing about the lives her parents might have lived, and the truth of who they became.

Every book lover knows the thrill. A hot summer day. A porch swing, a hammock, a long curve in the beach — and a great, transporting read.
Maybe it’s lords and ladies that first took you there. Or Spanish romance. High plains gunfire. Down and dirty spies. High-blown history. Distant lands.
This hour we’re asking top book [...]

Donald Ray Pollock grew up in a town called Knockemstiff, Ohio. Now he’s out with a debut collection of short stories called “Knockemstiff” that makes Lake Wobegon look like a candy-apple dream.
Here is a ragged, dark, downside vision of American small town life, where runaways and drunks set the tone and the smell through an [...]

Sunshine State humorist and novelist Carl Hiaasen knows a lot about Florida and human nature. What he didn’t know was just how ugly his own nature could get when he put it back on the golf course.
Decades after Hiaasen laid down his golf clubs as a young father, he picked them up again at fifty-something. [...]

The Sean Bell case in New York has thrown a big spotlight on American big-city police and policing. An unarmed man on the morning of his wedding day — no crime, no offense –cut down in a hail of 50 police bullets, and last week all officers cleared in the case.
Peter Moskos is watching closely. [...]

Perfumes are more than a scent. They are a state of mind — at least that what all the ads tell us.
A little dab here and you’re picnicking in fields of wild flowers, or experiencing the blush of first love. A spritz there and you’re rolling in satin sheets, and feeling oh so Hollywood. Dab [...]

Marcel Proust may have said it best. “I believe,” said the great French novelist, “that reading, in its original essence, is that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.”
Now, neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf says yes, but it’s more than that. The human brain, she says, is endlessly pliable. A generation of research that [...]

Man walks into a restaurant and asks: “How do you prepare your chickens?” And the cook responds: “Nothing special really. We just tell them they’re gonna die.” Bada boom. The human condition in a two-line joke about chickens.
Thomas Cathcart and Daniel Klein see philosophy today all over the world of humor. A world where Woody [...]