Books & Literature

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews A Changed Man, the new novel by Francine Prose.

Former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer gave daily briefings to the press from 2001 to 2003. He acted as the Bush administration's primary spokesperson during both 9/11 and the beginning of the Iraq War.

Bill "Spaceman" Lee's new memoir is Have Glove, Will Travel: The Adventures of a Baseball Vagabond. The book picks up where Lee's previous memoir, The Wrong Stuff, left off in 1984.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews two new books: the short story collection Nice Big American Baby by Judy Budnitz and the novel Baker Towers by Jennifer Haigh.

Miller died Thursday night at the age of 89 at his home in Roxbury, Connecticut. Miller was the author of many plays, including the legendary Death of a Salesman, for which he won a Pulitzer. He was married briefly to Marilyn Monroe. This interview was originally broadcast on November, 25, 1987.

Housekeeping, the first novel from Marilynne Robinson, won a PEN/Hemingway Award. Now 23 years later, she's written a second novel, Gilead. Gilead is written as a letter from a 76-year-old Congregationalist Preacher to his seven-year-old son. Robinson is a Congregationalist, and has served as a deacon in the church.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves by Adam Hochschild. It's about the 18th century anti-slavery movement in the British Empire.

Essie Mae Washington-Williams is the daughter of the late Sen. Strom Thurmond. While her mother, who was black, served as the maid for the Thurmonds, she had an affair with the future senator, at the age of 15. Thurmond was a long-time senator from South Carolina and an opponent of integration. Washington-Williams did not reveal her true identity as Thurmond's daughter until after his death at 100 a little more than a year ago. Now 78, she has written a new memoir, Dear Senator: A Memoir by the Daughter of Strom Thurmond.

Novelist Mary Gordon's new book, Pearl, is about a mother's struggle to understand her daughter's public act of martyrdom. Gordon is the author of seven novels, including Final Payments and The Company of Women), and four nonfiction works.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Downtown: My Manhattan, by Pete Hamill.

After being introduced at the age of 12 to a set of religious rules, Jennifer Traig developed a hyper-religious form of obsessive-compulsive disorder known as "scrupulosity." She chronicles her disorder in the memoir Devil in the Details: Scenes from an Obsessive Girlhood.

Sharad Devarajan is the CEO of Gotham Entertainment Group, which has licensed the Marvel Comics characters to be distributed in South Asia. Their first publication is Spider-Man India, featuring Pavitr Prabhakar as Peter Parker.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Rammer Jammer Yellowhammer: A Journey into the Heart of Fan Mania, by Warren St. John, a reporter for The New York Times. The book is about sports mania and the fan mania surrounding the University of Alabama's football team, The Crimson Tide.

Miriam Toews has written her third book, A Complicated Kindness. One reviewer called it "a kind of Catcher in the Rye for Mennonite girls."

Writer Susan Sontag died Wednesday at age 71 of leukemia. We listen back to two interviews with her: a 1989 conversation about her book AIDS and Its Metaphors; and 1993 interview conducted shortly after Sontag returned from Sarajevo, where she directed a performance of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot in Serbo-Croatian.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews I Am Charlotte Simmons by Tom Wolfe.

Rock historian Ed Ward reviews Bob Dylan's new autobiography, Chronicles, Vol. I.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg talks about the phrase "curling up with a good book," and what it says about the way we read.

Also we remember mystery novelist Joseph Hansen, who we just learned died last month at the age of 81. He created one of the genre's first gay protagonists, the private eye Dave Brandstetter.