Parenting & Families

Writer Claire Hoffman describes her childhood living in a community devoted to Transcendental Meditation. She was meditating at the age of 3.

Susan Silverman, on her sister comic Sarah Silverman, growing up secular Jewish and becoming a rabbi, adopting two Ethiopian boys, and how she was affected by the death of a sibling when she was very young.

In Rebecca Miller's comedy, an affair leads to divorce and remarriage — until the new wife decides she wants out. Critic David Edelstein says that Maggie's Plan doesn't quite come together.

Graphic novelist Daniel Clowes, best known for his graphic novel Ghost World, has a new book, Patience, a love story that was five years in the making. In it, Clowes uses time travel to explore themes like tragedy and regret.

The Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Empire Falls says his characters are inspired by his parents' working-class World War II generation. Russo's new novel is set in a small town in upstate New York.

He's helped many people through painful passages in their lives. And he's faced his own: Since a near-fatal auto accident in 1979, he's been paralyzed from the chest down. Gottlieb has had nearly three decades to come to terms with the changed circumstances of his body — but now, he fears, that body may be growing tired.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new memoir The Bridge Ladies by middle-aged baby boomer Betsy Lerner who invites herself into her mother's long-running bridge game as a way of trying to understand a generation that still seems to play its cards too close to its chest.

In an interview recorded onstage, Amir Questlove Thompson the cofounder and drummer of the Roots, the houseband for The Tonight Show talks with Terry Gross about music, his father doo wop singer Lee Andrews who died last month, and about Prince.

Actor Tom Hanks talks about his new film A Hologram for the King, his production company Playtone, playing courageous, tested men in Captain Phillips, Saving Private Ryan and Apollo 13, and growing up in a fractuous family.

The co-star of the X-Files discusses his novel, Bucky F*cking Dent, about a son reuniting with his absentee father. Duchovny earned a master's degree in literature before starting his TV career.

Point-of-view is passed like a baton among the tortured main characters in Joachim Trier's new film. Critic David Edelstein says Louder than Bombs is intimate, touching and "insistently alive."

Jacob Bernstein named his documentary about his mother after an Ephron family saying — "everything is copy," meaning that anything and everything that happens to you is fair game to write about.

"When I'm acting, I always imagine myself as looking totally different than the person that appears onscreen," Black says. The comedian writes about family, masculinity and vanity in his new memoir.

When his mother was turning 90, music critic Lloyd Schwartz wrote poems that put her memories into verse. Composer Mohammed Fairouz set three of the poems to music on the new recording, No Orpheus.

Writer-director Trey Edward Shults cast his own family in his home-for-Thanksgiving psychodrama. Reviewer David Edelstein says Krisha "marks the arrival of a truly adventurous, humanist filmmaker."

Comic Louie Anderson has had a hugely successful stand-up career for the last 30 years, but he admits he wasn't a very good actor early on. "I didn't know who I was or how to do it," he tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross.

Joe R. Lansdale grew up poor in east Texas and worked as a janitor and in a potato field before finding success as a writer. Honky Tonk Samurai is the latest book in his mystery series.

Known for her recent work in Downton Abbey and the Harry Potter films, the Oscar-winning actress now stars in The Lady in the Van, a film about an elderly woman who lived in a van for 15 years.

Ethan Canin traces the complicated lives of two generations of mathematical geniuses in his new novel A Doubter's Almanac. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls it an "elegant and devastating novel."