Books & Literature

Wolfe tells Fresh Air's Dave Davies that what makes Miami exceptional is the story of how an immigrant community rose to dominate its political landscape in just over a generation. His new novel deals with racial and ethnic conflict among the city's diverse inhabitants.

In A.M. Homes' suburbia, yawning sinkholes will suddenly open up in front lawns, swallowing cliched plotlines and opening portals to other dimensions. In her latest novel, she serves up an old-fashioned American story that's more Norman Bates than Norman Rockwell.

Stephen Colbert has a new book called America Again: Re-becoming the Greatness We Never Weren't. It explores the dichotomy between thinking America is perfect — and feeling the urge to save the country from disaster at every moment.

Junot Diaz's electric new collection of short stories centers around Yunior, a macho yet mournful Dominican-American man. In these stories about love, lust and infidelity, a good man is hard to find — and when he is found, he's always in bed with someone else.

He's appeared in over 100 films and TV shows, but you still might not know his name. In his memoir, The Dangerous Animals Club, actor Stephen Tobolowsky talks about falling in love with comedy — and playing characters who are always on the story's fringes.

John Powers reviews the author's memoir of his time in hiding — the result of a fatwah calling for his murder after the publication of The Satanic Verses.

Waging Heavy Peace is about his music, raising two sons with special needs, and his own medical conditions, which have included polio, epilepsy and a brain aneurysm.

In his first novel, J.R. Moehringer writes from the point of view of Willie Sutton, whom he calls the "greatest American robber." Moehringer says writing historical fiction helped him deal with the anger he felt toward banks after the global financial crisis in 2008.

Charles Rowan Beye has been married three times -- to two women and a man. Now, over age 80, he looks back on his life and asks, "What was that all about?" Critic Maureen Corrigan says Beye's memoir, subtitled "A Gay Man's Odyssey," is a complex, poignant addition to the sexual canon.

Susanna Moore tells the sage of an ambitious girl, a family's artistic fortune and a world at war. Young heroine Beatrice Palmer is whisked off to Berlin where she is put to work packing up priceless artwork in a wealthy family's mansion.

Marco Roth grew up on New York's Upper West Side in the 1980s, where a liberal Jewish culture infused with European tastes was breathing its last gasps. In his memoir, Roth describes how he learned -- years after his father died from AIDS -- that his father was probably gay.

Zadie Smith wrote her last novel On Beauty seven years ago — a long time in the anxious world of publishing. Her new novel NW was released in the U.S. on Monday. Critic Maureen Corrigan asks: Was it worth the wait?

In the author's latest novel, The Devil in Silver, a man is mistakenly committed to a mental hospital where a buffalo-headed monster stalks patients at night. LaValle tells Fresh Air why he picked monsters, about his family history of mental illness and how he had his own brush with psychological problems.

In his new book, Ascent of the A-Word, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg looks at how the term took root among griping World War II GIs — and how its meaning evolved in the '60s and '70s. He tells Fresh Air that crude words are "wonderfully revealing."

Michael Kranish and Scott Helman's biography of Mitt Romney — The Real Romney — is now out in paperback with a new afterword. The authors discuss Romney's shift to the right, his faith and his recent comment that no one's ever asked to see his birth certificate.

Juliet Barker has released a new edition of her landmark 1994 biography, The Brontes. Critic Maureen Corrigan says that even the 136 pages of footnotes are "thrilling," as readers are taken "deeper into the everyday realities" of the Brontes' "strange world."

The author's new memoir, Winter Journal, is a history of his body — scars, panic attacks and near-death experiences. He tells Fresh Air how he got a reputation as a dirty fighter, why he doesn't drive and how hard it was to see his mother's dead body.

Journalist Seth Rosenfeld spent three decades pursuing government documents about the FBI's undercover operation in Berkeley, Calif., during the student protest movements in the '60s. His new book details how the FBI "used dirty tricks to stifle dissent on campus" and influenced Ronald Reagan's politics.

In Peter Heller's debut novel, The Dog Stars, a man named Hig survives a superflu that kills most of humanity. Heller, a travel and adventure writer, says that when his novel took a post-apocalyptic turn, he found himself relying on his real-life scrapes and survival skills.

Writer and humorist David Rakoff, who died Thursday at the age of 47, wrote with a perfect balance of wit and gravity about the cancer that would ultimately take his life. Fresh Air remembers Rakoff with excerpts from two interviews in 2001 and 2010.