Aug 9th, 2004 · Lisa Scottoline's Killer Smile was inspired by a secret in her family's past: Her immigrant-Italian grandparents were listed as "enemy aliens" during World War II, and the FBI raided their house. But her grandparents did nothing wrong and were never accused of anything.
Jul 29th, 2004 · Slate book reviewer Aleksandar Hemon reviews what he calls the worst book he ever read voluntarily -- A Movie...and a Book, by first-time novelist Daniel Wagner. Hemon talks to NPR's Madeleine Brand about how the book reveals unfortunate trends in publishing.
Jul 24th, 2004 · NPR's Scott Simon takes note of this year's Faux Faulkner contest. The winning entry, "As I Lay Kvetching," imagines an episode of The Three Stooges as it might have been written by the great Mississippi novelist William Faulkner.
Jul 24th, 2004 · The latest novel by Ward Just, An Unfinished Season, is set in 1950s suburban Chicago and its hero is a copy boy working for a tabloid newspaper in the city. Just talks with NPR's Scott Simon about the book and how he came to write fiction after a successful career in journalism.
Jul 6th, 2004 · A new book by punk rock musician-turned-novelist Jesse Sublett draws from bitter personal experience following the 1976 murder of his girlfriend in Austin, Texas. It's called Never the Same Again. Steven Cuevas reports.
Jun 18th, 2004 · Frank Browning reports on the bi-annual Haarlem Comics Festival in The Netherlands, which features the work of comic strip artists and graphic novelists from around the world.
Jun 6th, 2004 · British novelist Lee Child takes his maverick hero Jack Reacher back to 1990 in The Enemy, the eighth book in his best-selling series. Child talks to NPR's Linda Wertheimer in the second of a three-part series on mystery writers.
Jun 2nd, 2004 · Historian Mark Perry's new book, Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship That Changed America, details a 15-month period in the mid-1880s when President Ulysses S. Grant and novelist Mark Twain were writing two American masterpieces. Perry believes Grant's Personal Memoirs and Twain's Huckleberry Finn reveal a fixation the two men shared: the legacy of the Civil War and slavery. NPR's Robert Siegel talks with Perry.