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NPR books

  • Books We Love is back early this year; for 2022, we're launching the first-ever summer edition, complete with 160+ recommendations from NPR staff and trusted critics.
  • Insert $2 into the Biblio-Mat, and customers get a mystery, a biography, historical fiction — or a dud. The owner of a bookstore in Toronto came up with the machine as a way to clear his shelves of more ill-favored reads.
  • In 2009, New York Post reporter Susannah Cahalan was hospitalized for one horrific month because of a rare disorder. After recovering, she remembered almost nothing about the ordeal, so she decided to find out what happened. Her new book provides a remarkable reconstruction of the events of her sickness.
  • The author and poet is known for his perspective on being a Native American in contemporary culture. Alexie shares his recommendations for YouTube videos, movies and TV shows, including iconic Olympic moments, raunchy British teens and an Eastwood Western.
  • The new trove of recordings covers everything from the Cold War to civil rights to Vietnam to the U.S. ice hockey team. Listening In, a new book and CD set, includes more than 260 hours of transcribed conversations and 2.5 hours of audio from inside the Kennedy White House.
  • In Why Did Jesus, Moses, the Buddha, and Mohammed Cross the Road?, Pastor Brian McLaren explores the tension between religions and attempts to imagine a conversation between the most important figures in Western theology.
  • William McCleery wrote his first draft of Wolf Story during bedtimes and afternoon outings with his 5-year-old son. In 1947, it became a hit children's book, but it's been out of print for more than 20 years.
  • More than 10 years since a new generation of Americans went into combat, the soldiers themselves are starting to write the story of war. Three recent releases show how their experiences give them the authority to describe the war, fictionalize it, and even satirize it.
  • Women have fought tirelessly to establish equal footing for themselves in relationships, politics and the workplace — and according to writer Hanna Rosin, they've finally arrived. "We have to redefine what we mean by 'head of the household,'" she says.