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 [...]

Frederick Hitz got out of college, taught in Africa for a year, practiced some law, didn’t like it. Joined the CIA. Became a spy. Now, decades later, he’s hoping other bright young Americans will do the same.
But the world has changed since James Bond was the fantasy and Tom Clancy wrote his tales. It’s tougher [...]

The world is too much with us, goes the sonnet. And in fourteen lines we’re off, into the “jewel box” of poetic form. How do I love thee? Death, be not proud. My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun.
For five hundred years and more, from Petrarch and Shakespeare to Ginsburg and Seamus Heaney, the [...]

Before Elvis jolted the tranquilized ’50s, shocking parents and preachers throughout the land, there were comic books. Years before they rocked to “Hound Dog,” kids ogled the lurid pages of “Chamber of Chills,” “Tomb of Terror” and “My Secret Affair.”
Comics were a booming business — millions of copies sold every week — but they scared [...]

Arthur C. Clarke, the author of “2001: A Space Odyssey” — and widely acclaimed as the 20th century’s greatest science fiction writer — died early Wednesday in Sri Lanka. He was 90 years old. He wrote nearly 100 books.
With his scientific knowledge and his novelist talent he “helped usher in the space age,” as The [...]

Telling the story of war is an art, and a jumble. Today, we see television images of shock and awe, bloody children’s slippers, troops at dangerous work, and the sad toll of suicide bombers.
In the heart of the 20th century, it was World War II that gripped the planet. And among its most artful chroniclers [...]

Novelist Anne Rice made her name, fame and fortune on dark tales of vampires and illicit love. Her Vampire Chronicles, starting with “Interview with the Vampire” and her dark, blood-drawn hero Lestat, blossomed into a cultural phenomenon — and sold millions of books.
In 2002, after a religious conversion, Anne Rice vowed to devote her work [...]

It was an amazing story — Margaret B. Jones, half white, half Native American, growing up criminal and loved in South Central LA, dealing drugs at twelve, getting a gun for her birthday when she was fourteen, running with Bloods and Crips and the gang life.
Incredible. And a complete fraud.
The news this week: the Margaret [...]

UPDATE, 3/4/08: MARGARET B. JONES REVEALED AS FRAUD.: As reported today in The New York Times, Margaret Seltzer, the author of “Love and Consequences” (under the pseudonym Margaret B. Jones) has admitted that she fabricated the memoir. She was interviewed here on Friday, Feb. 29.
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Eight people were hit by [...]

Jimmy Breslin is as New York as New York gets. Reporter, famed columnist, newspaper guy, novelist — for decades he’s worked the streets of the Big Apple. The pols, the teams, the wise guys.
Now, at 77, Breslin is going deep on the mob, with a lifetime of Mafia reporting and the story of one man [...]

In 1909, an associate professor of English at the University of Nebraska was wading through legal documents in London when he came upon an incredible prize: a deposition, in long hand, about a messy family dispute, signed by one William Shakespeare more than 400 years ago.
It was the key to an era, and William Shakespeare’s [...]

In the mid-1990s, writer James McBride scored a bestseller with “The Color of Water,” his memoir of growing up the black son of a white mother in America.
Now a black son of a white mother may be on his way to the White House, and James McBride is out with a hot new novel set [...]

Almost 1300 years ago, when Europe was still deep in the Dark Ages, a tidal wave of Islamic vitality and military might swept over Spain and pressed toward the heart of the West. Islam was young and vibrant and rich, and the culture it built on the Iberian Peninsula was, for a time, dazzling.
Historian David [...]

Debut novelist Charles Bock grew up the son of pawn brokers in Las Vegas. Sounds like a novel. Now, it almost is.
In his new, fresh-out-of-the-gate first offering, Bock takes a heart-breaking tour of the dark side of Vegas, the wasteland beyond the glittering Strip and within the glittering Strip.
Bocks diggs deep into the bleak underworld [...]

Two and a half thousand years ago, a man named Herodotus wandered the ancient world, trying to make sense of the great war between the Greeks and Persians that had shaped his times.
He gathered wild tales of fabulous creatures and arrogant kings and queens. He also heard of the very real clash of the armies [...]

The day after President Bush’s final State of the Union address, it’s hard not to think about this man’s legacy.
With grinding wars underway and the economy in trouble, the Republicans who would succeed Bush in the White House barely mention his name.
But they do talk about Ronald Reagan — almost ceaselessly. There was a time [...]

We’re looking at the amazing story through history of the American stomach and the extremes of consumption and digestion.
-Tom Ashbrook
Guest:
Frederick Kaufman, author of the new book “A Short History of the American Stomach.” He’s a contributing editor at Harper’s magazine and wrote the article “Wasteland: A Journey Through the American Cloaca” for the February issue.

Mike Huckabee may not believe in evolution, but Neil Shubin does. He’s been there and seen it in the fossil record of hundreds of millions of years, from the Arctic to rural Pennsylvania.
Now the University of Chicago paleontologist wants to introduce you to the ancestors: worms and reptiles, and, above all, the fish whose prehistoric [...]

Novelist Sue Miller gets very intimate, very quickly, and stays there. Her best-sellers have captivated readers since “The Good Mother.” Now, she’s pushing into the complex heart of marriage and, in this election year, political marriage — one of the most fraught kinds.
“The Senator’s Wife” is a novel that goes at the deep compromises that [...]

Son of the Dominican Republic and New Jersey, Junot Diaz made a huge splash a decade ago with a tough, vivid collection of short stories on Latino ghetto life called “Drown.” Now, Diaz is back with a debut novel that is knocking the socks off critics.
“The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” tracks one heart-torn [...]

Southern-raised humorist Roy Blount Jr. took the midnight train out of Georgia a long time ago, to make a life well north of the Mason-Dixon line.
But you cannot take the South out of the Southern boy, and definitely not out of Blount’s lifetime of humorous essays and exasperation over America’s North-South incomprehension.
In a new collection, [...]

Daniel Mendelsohn’s grandfather told him stories, in his rich Yiddish accent, about all kinds of things — life in the old country, life in America, stories of rabbis and high holidays and Jewish tradition.
The one thing Mendelsohn’s grandfather never told stories about was his brother Shmiel, Shmiel’s wife and their four beautiful daughters, and how [...]

In May 1941, when his towering masterpiece “Citizen Kane” hit the theaters, actor, director, writer, producer Orson Welles was just 25 years old. “Citizen Kane” would be called the best American film ever made. Generations of Americans would intone “Rosebud” as a totem of life’s deep mysteries.
Orson Welles — dazzling young American genius — appeared [...]

For centuries Istanbul has been one of the great cities of the world and in its Ottoman heyday a bridge between Christendom and Islam: a unique melting pot of Muslims, Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Turks, Russians and more.
In the 1800s, the Ottoman Sultans, whose lavish palaces dominate the city to this day, let their empire slip [...]

More than any other artist, Picasso left his mark on the 20th century. In his long life — 92 years of it — he enjoyed gargantuan fame, glittering friends, and a lavish lifestyle. And he created an immense output of art, which he described as his “diary.”
Now Picasso’s biographer, John Richardson, is out with the [...]

Michael Thomas debuts with a novel that gets compared to “Invisible Man,” while Denis Johnson lands us back in Vietnam. Jeffrey Toobin pulls back the curtain on the Supreme Court’s inner sanctum, as Alex Ross turns 20th-century “Noise” into musical prose.
We’re talking about the books of 2007: the critics’ choices, the blockbusters, the surprise gems, [...]

Ever read a passage in a book, or hear a bit of music, and think, “how did they do that? How did the author or composer get inside my head?”
Well, science writer Jonah Lehrer says that artists have a pretty good track record understanding the subtleties of our minds — often well ahead of scientists.
Whitman, [...]

In Alan Lightman’s new novel, “Ghost,” you’re never quite sure what to believe.
But Lightman, a theoretical physicist who a decade ago gave us the bestselling novel “Einstein’s Dreams,” knows what he’s up to. He wants to explore the edges of belief — both religious and scientific.
David, his protagonist, works at a funeral home, and one [...]

Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charlie LeDuff lays it down rough, in the gonzo journalism tradition of Hunter S. Thompson and Jack Kerouac.
He’s crossed the desert with Mexican immigrants, worked in cannery and hog factory, gone deep with New York fireman after 9/11.
Now, Charlie LeDuff brings us the stories of a year on the road, going deep [...]

Bill Geist grew up deep in the Midwest, went to work in New York, then turned his eye back on the nooks and crannies and marvels of the American back road.
For twenty years now, he’s trolled the country’s narrowest highways and byways for CBS, for great tales of small town America.
And he’s found some doosies. [...]

E-read all about it. On Monday, Amazon debuted its much-anticipated e-book reader — the Kindle — and set the book world abuzz.
The goals of the electronic reading device are simple: to replace bound paper, and to change the way we read and buy books. Lofty, but maybe not impossible goals, for our wired, jacked up, [...]

While the fast food nation has revolutionized America’s eating habits, another, quieter revolution has taken place at the other end of the culinary spectrum. And today, if you’re a “foodie” — as devotees of good food and cooking are called — you may have Judith Jones to thank.
When Julia Child’s first manuscript, for “Mastering the [...]

Savant, novelist, philosopher, Umberto Eco — best known as the author of the international best-seller “The Name of the Rose” — is also a public intellectual, a fount of opinion on politics and society.
His latest book, “Turning Back the Clock: Hot Wars and Media Populism,” is a collection of columns written for Italian newspapers since [...]

Novelist, new journalist, and celebrity American thinker and brawler Norman Mailer died last Saturday in New York. He was 84 and, nearly to the end, a provocative, combative, relentless aspirant to literary greatness.
A kid from Brooklyn, he wrote his celebrated World War II novel “The Naked and the Dead” when he was just twenty-five. An [...]

Acclaimed novelist and poet Ha Jin started life deep in Maoist China, got shoved into studying English almost by accident, came to the USA — and, astonishingly, within a decade was winning the very top prizes in American literature.
His early works, “Waiting” and “War Trash” and others, were about life and longing in China. Now, [...]