NPR's Book of the Day Folgen

In a small North Carolina town in 1976, three siblings are shot to death. That's the mystery at the center of De'Shawn Charles Winslow's new book, Decent People – and it's one the segregated town's white police officers aren't paying much attention to. In today's episode, Winslow tells NPR's Scott Simon about the heroine who takes it upon herself to solve the case, and why - the author feels a need to paint a nuanced portrait of even the antagonists in his books.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Author Azar Nafisi has written a love letter to literature and reading in Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times. She does this in a series of letters to her late father who passed on in 2004. Nafisi says that reading can help us really live and also help us, and has helped her, survive challenging times. Nafisi told NPR's Scott Simon that literature's purpose is to let us experience new worlds: "to come out of yourself, and join the other."Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

From Notting Hill to the real-life relationships of several SNL writers with Hollywood starlets – to even the new Barbie movie tagline ("She's everything. He's just Ken.") – there's a recurring storyline in pop culture of ordinary guys dating up, falling in love with glamorous women who are seemingly out of their league. In her new book, Romantic Comedy, Curtis Sittenfeld shakes up these gender dynamics. She tells NPR's Juana Summers why she wanted her career-focused heroine – a comedy writer – to stumble into a romance with a global pop star.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy