Books We Love, formerly known as NPR's Book Concierge, is back for 2021. Here are a handful of romance novels that NPR staffers and independent critics named as some of their favorites of the year.
A groundbreaking feminist thinker, writer and activist, bell hooks was clearly uninterested in being safe, respectable or acceptable, and charted a career on her own terms.
Each week, the guests and hosts on NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour share what's bringing them joy. This week: Jackie Kashian's new comedy album, music of Yasmin Williams and more!
The prolific author, poet, cultural critic, feminist and professor, who wrote more than three dozen wide-ranging books, died Wednesday at her home in Berea, Ky.
The 10-episode adaptation of the best-selling novel about a virus that wipes out most of humanity softens the book's harder edges and features soulful performances that make it profoundly moving.
The Joint Commission on Public Ethics says the disgraced former governor violated the terms of its conditional approval to write the book and it wants him give to the state the money.
Cho was a teenager when her mother began to exhibit signs of mental illness. Later, as an adult, she learned more about the trauma her mom experienced, both during and after the Korean War.
Journalist Anne Helen Petersen says the notion that employees should be in the office for certain hours every day is an arbitrary one: "You don't need to be in an office to answer emails."
Fresh Air book critic Maureen Corrigan says 2021 was a spectacular year for literary fiction. As such, her annual Best Books list is exclusively composed of novels and short story collections.
In Erin and Philip Stead's follow-up to 2010's A Sick Day for Amos McGee, the fastidious zookeeper gets help from his animal friends to finish his chores, so they can go on an exciting outing.
As the year draws to a close, critic John Powers singles out seven revelatory people or things that made 2021 a little brighter. At the top of his list? Basketball star Steph Curry.
Marilyn Hacker and Karthika Nair were under lockdown in Paris only miles apart from each other. A Different Distance compiles the almost daily poems they wrote from March 2020 to March 2021.
The podcast "On Eyre" asks the question: Does 'Jane Eyre' still have something to impart to modern readers? NPR's Mary Louise Kelly talks with the podcast's hosts, Vanessa Zoltan and Lauren Sandler.
A thousand pages is a lot. But there's Ken Liu's voice to hold onto in this third installment of his epic — beautifully deployed and fully in command of the language of his imaginary universe.
