NPR's Book of the Day

It's been 28 years since Apartheid ended in South Africa, but the country's people are still wrestling with the aftermath of segregationist policies. In her book, The Inheritors , journalist Eve Fairbanks shows – through the stories of three people – how decades of institutionalized racism etched themselves into the country's psyche. In an interview with Ayesha Rascoe on Weekend Edition Saturday,...

This episode features baseball diaries with Scott Simon. First up, CC Sabathia details his personal struggles with alcoholism and fame in his memoir Til The End . And then, a conversation with Ron Shelton about the story and legacy of the classic film Bull Durham in his new memoir, The Church of Baseball. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsor...

Doreen Cunningham felt worn down by financial limitations as a single parent trying to, as she says, make life work. She tells Scott Simon that society's unfair treatment toward single-parent households led her to escape to follow the gray whale migration with her 2-year-old son, which she documents in her memoir Soundings. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of person...

Displacement, identity and the aftermath of warfare are themes running through today's episode on 'The Haunting of Hajji Hotak.' Author Jamil Jan Kochai talks with Ari Shapiro about why he used elements of science fiction like video games and magical realism to tell a largely autobiographical story of his family's life in Afghanistan before and after the Soviet invasion. See pcm.adswizz.com for in...

The setting for today's book could be an "alternate version of right now," according to author Davey Davis. They spoke with Anna Sale in an interview for It's Been a Minute about how their book 'X' looks into a dystopian reality where sex workers, immigrants and trans people are exported out of the U.S. And the book tells the story of what life is like for those in hiding. See pcm.adswizz.com for...

Today's book evaluates the price of assimilation when representation, identity and belonging are erased. In Why Didn't You Tell Me? , author Carmen Rita Wong recounts how she discovered her origin story was all but true. She talks with Ailsa Chang about navigating her life after that discovery – and the impact of colonialism. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of pers...

Today's episode features two books that reach deep into the animal world. First, E.O. Wilson sits down with Robert Seigel to discuss how the narrative of war is used in his story featuring ants, called Anthill . Then writer Ed Yong talks with Ayesha Roscoe about trying to show the experience of life through a different perspective – animals – in An Immense World. See pcm.adswizz.com for informatio...

Today's fictional book is set in very non-fictional circumstances. Novelist Ann Leary was trying to learn about her grandmother's history as an orphan and found that she worked at a eugenics asylum in Pennsylvania in the early 1900s. This became the basis of her story in the book 'The Foundling' which explores the state of women's rights, the relationship between it and eugenics, and a commentary...

Today's Book of the Day spans across two places: Hawaii and the Korean Peninsula. The story, though, goes beyond the two realities. In Joseph Han's debut novel Nuclear Family, a Korean family goes through hurdles when one of them is haunted by a long lost family member, crosses a dangerous border, and questions the blurred history of their past. Han shares with B.A. Parker how his own background a...

Today's Book of the Day is a little bit of everything: punk rock music, high school dynamics, some horror tropes, and pointing out the dangers of nostalgia. Author Paul Tremblay discusses with Shannon Bond why that is, and explains the influence his own high school experience and Stephen King brought to his book The Pallbearers Club. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use...

As the House's committee hearings on Jan. 6 continue, today's episode offers some context from The Atlantic reporter Mark Leibovich, who has a new book out this month titled Thank You For Your Servitude: Donald Trump's Washington and the Price of Submission . He sits down with Juana Summers to talk about the price of blind loyalty under the Trump administration, and how that affected the insurrect...

Today, two books from indigenous authors who make a similar, wry argument: it's a miracle there are any Indigenous people in the Americas alive at all. First, Stephen Graham Jones talks about his horror novel The Only Good Indians , a reworking of an old, hostile phrase attributed to Theodore Roosevelt; plus the literary reasons why he chose to make it a horror story. Then, author Lisa Bird-Wilson...

In this episode, we're going back in time to 1722 to examine the different approaches to justice between Native Americans and Pennsylvania colonists in the Pulitzer Prize-winning book Covered with Night: A Story of Murder and Indigenous Justice in Early America by historian Nicole Eustace. In an interview with Here & Now's Scott Tong, Eustace discusses how reparative justice has deep roots in Amer...

In celebration of the new U.S. poet laureate this year, Ada Limón, today's episode revisits another poet laureate's conversation with Michel Martin about how poetry has been used to deal with pain and healing. Joy Harjo, who has been the U.S. poet laureate since 2019 says she has always been drawn to healing ever since she was little. She even studied pre-med in college. But it wasn't until Harjo...

According to Jessica Hernandez, "as long as we protect nature, nature will protect us." Hernandez, from the Maya Ch'ortí and Zapotec nations, is a University of Washington postdoctoral fellow. In her new book, Fresh Banana Leaves, she makes a plea for the climate conversation to include indigenous expertise, and highlights practices she believes should be more widespread. In an interview with Cele...

Nailing the balance between humor and heavy, dark topics is a difficult feat. Night of the Living Rez by author Morgan Talty meets the mark. His collection of interconnected short stories tell the story of a Native American woman and her son who return to their reservation island in Maine. The two start living with a volatile alcoholic and the stories chronicle what that life looks like as the son...

Today we have two nonfiction books that touch on a bygone era of Hollywood some refer to as its "Golden Age." First, George Stevens, Jr., talks to Scott Simon about his book My Place in the Sun , a memoir about growing up as the son of a movie director, learning the family's craft, and striving for his dad's respect. Then, author Mark Rozzo speaks to Ailsa Chang about the untold story of Brooke Ha...

Hiroo Onoda was a Japanese intelligence officer during World War II, stationed on a small island in the Philippines. When the Japanese army evacuated, Onoda stayed and fought for 29 more years, living in the jungle and resisting all attempts to convince him the war was over. Renowned filmmaker Werner Herzog tells a fictionalized account of this story in his first novel, The Twilight World. In an i...

Life expectancy in the U.S. has always been different for people of color. And since the pandemic, that gap has widened. In her new book, Under the Skin , journalist Linda Villarosa uncovers the hidden toll of racism in America and how racial disparities impact all aspects of healthcare. In an interview with Karen Grisby Bates on the podcast Code Switch, Villarosa talks about the biases that lead...

In Sudhir Venkatesh's The Tomorrow Game, two teenagers on Chicago's South Side face each other in a story that conveys the pressures and motivations boys face when buying guns. Venkatesh, a professor of sociology and African American studies at Columbia University, tells a true story (with names changed to protect privacy). In an interview with Weekend Edition Saturday, Venkatesh tells Susan Davis...

Beach resorts are a favorite when it comes to travel destinations. But behind the infinity pools and the all-inclusive deals, these massive resorts are taking a toll on the environment and on local communities, says Sarah Stodola, author of The Last Resort . On one hand, they've proven to raise the standard of living for local communities, help create jobs and grow the economy. On the other hand,...

Today, two takes on stories we tell to make ourselves feel better and the consequences of believing them. First, author Danielle Evans' short story collection, The Office of Historical Corrections . The title story is about a fictional agency that fact checks in real time but, as she told former NPR host Noel King, it's less powerful than you might think. Then, the story of a Black woman's decisio...

Author Charmaine Wilkerson's new novel, Black Cake , is all about identity; who we are and how we fit into this world. Estranged siblings, Benny and Byron are left a recording by their late mother after she dies. The recording is full of secrets about their family that force Benny and Byron to reevaluate everything about their lives. Wilkerson told NPR's Kelsey Snell that even though Benny and Byr...

Patriarch Leo Chao is murdered at his restaurant at the beginning of Lan Samantha Chang's new novel The Family Chao . Eventually family secrets and bitterness reveal themselves — much like a Dostoyevsky novel, from whom Chao took a lot of inspiration. But NPR's Scott Simon points out that even though this novel is about a murder, it's quite funny. Chang told Simon that she just enjoyed writing it...

Author of the wildly popular and, at times, controversial A Little Life , Hanya Yanagihara, is out with a new novel. To Paradise is an epic – in three parts – sprawling over 700 pages and 200 years about a make-believe New York City. Yanagihara was mostly through writing her story, which features pandemics prominently, when COVID-19 first hit in early 2020. But Yanagihara told NPR's Scott Simon th...