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'Adventures in the Louvre' will teach you how to fall in love with the famous museum
Elaine Sciolino has one mantra: "Never go to the Louvre on an empty stomach or with a full bladder." The former Paris bureau chief of The New York Times has written a guide filled with her best advic…
Published on 8 months ago
An obituary writer makes a grave error in John Kenney's 'I See You've Called in Dead'
John Kenney's I See You've Called in Dead is about an obituary writer named Bud Stanely. One late night after a particularly bad date and too many glasses of Scotch, Bud drunkenly writes his own reme…
Published on 8 months, 1 week ago
Two new novels explore a world where technology has even greater access to our minds
Two new novels explore technology's increasing access to our most intimate thoughts. First, the protagonist in The Mechanics of Memory can't remember her last year. Hope has found herself in a too-pe…
Published on 8 months, 1 week ago
A new oral history of Lollapalooza recalls the alt-rock music festival's wildest days
Lollapalooza is a popular music festival that takes place in Chicago's Grant Park each year. But it was conceived as a farewell tour for the band Jane's Addiction, kicking off with a series of chaoti…
Published on 8 months, 1 week ago
Emma Pattee's 'Tilt' imagines the aftermath of a life-changing earthquake
Annie is 37 weeks pregnant. She's shopping at IKEA in Portland, Oregon, when everything around her begins to shake. It's an earthquake – the big one. Unable to get in touch with her husband or anyone…
Published on 8 months, 1 week ago
In the wake of a sexual assault, astronaut Amanda Nguyen turned to activism
In 2013, Amanda Nguyen was a Harvard senior interested in pursuing a career at NASA or the CIA. But she says those plans were temporarily derailed when she was raped just a few months before graduati…
Published on 8 months, 1 week ago
In 'Everything Is Tuberculosis,' John Green turns his attention to a deadly disease
Tuberculosis is one of the oldest diseases in human history – and it still kills more than a million people every year. In a new book, The Fault in Our Stars author John Green argues the infection pe…
Published on 8 months, 2 weeks ago
Authors of two new novels draw inspiration from history in wildly different ways
Today on the show, we hear from authors who were inspired by history in wildly different ways. First, when Emma Donoghue encountered a famous photo of the 1895 Montparnasse derailment, she says she c…
Published on 8 months, 2 weeks ago
To confront radical change, 'Slate' writer Scaachi Koul wrote a new book of essays
Three years ago, Scaachi Koul went through a divorce, a process that she says was "disorienting." But divorce, the Slate writer says, also offered a framework for rethinking everything: her relations…
Published on 8 months, 2 weeks ago
A new book from Emily Feng asks what it means to be Chinese in Xi Jinping's China
NPR reporter Emily Feng lived in, and reported from, Beijing for years. But in 2022, the Chinese government told Feng, who was born in the United States to Chinese parents, that she couldn't return t…
Published on 8 months, 2 weeks ago