One classic reinvention fantasy goes like this: you leave a square, respectable job and write a best-selling book. Elizabeth Wurtzel did just that — but in reverse. She was in her twenties when Prozac Nation made her famous overnight. She became a rock critic and ...

The novelist William Styron has a string of best-sellers to his name – Lie Down in Darkness, published when he was only 26, The Confessions of Nat Turner (which won the Pulitzer), and Sophie’s Choice. But Styron's later years ...

For his novel, The Tragedy of Arthur, Arthur Philips wrote an entire play that was a forgery of Shakespeare. (He described the creative process in his interview with Kurt Andersen last week.) We asked our listeners to get in on the act, and take a stab at a fake Shakespearean...

Outstanding Forgeries: Listen to the winning sonnets

Arthur Phillips set a formidable goal for himself with his new novel, The Tragedy of Arthur. In it, a man named “Arthur Phillips” is given a lost Shakespeare play by his dying father. All the experts think it’s real, except Arthur, who is certain it’s another of his father’s...

Listener Challenge: Fakespeare

David Leavitt agreed to write an original short story for Studio 360’s Science & Creativity series, and said he wanted to write about book codes, a venerable, low-tech way of encrypting secrets using any printed book. We put him in touch with cryptographer Steve Bellovin, a professor at Columbia...

Bonus Track: David Leavitt's Original Story, The Cheese Pastries of Sintra

Anne Lamott started out as a novelist, but it was her bestselling 1994 nonfiction work Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life that catapulted her to fame as a guru. The book became touchstone and "life-changer" to writers and non-writers looking for practical advice ...

It's been quite a year for Jennifer Egan. Her best-selling novel A Visit from The Goon Squad won the National Book Critics Circle Award last month — and yesterday, the book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

When the first shells exploded over Charleston’s Fort Sumter on the night of April 12, 1861, the news reached New York in a matter of hours. Journalist and historian Adam Goodheart describes the reaction of one New Yorker, a poet named Walt Whitman. Goodheart’s new book on the ...

One out of every 25 American men died during the Civil War, and sometimes it seems the country is still fighting its battles. Kurt talks with Adam Goodheart, a historian and journalist, about how the mapmaker’s divide between red states and blue echoes the gray and blue... 

Bonus Track: The War Between the Beards

A highly anticipated biography of Malcolm X was published today, with new research that will likely challenge many of our existing notions about the still-controversial black leader.  Sadly, the book’s author won’t be able to engage in the fresh debates it’s certain to generate.  Columbia University historian and civil rights scholar Manning Marable died on Friday at the age of 60, after ten years of work on Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, and just three days before the book was published.

Bonus Track: One of the last recorded interviews with Manning Marable

For chemists, the periodic table of the elements is a hugely coveted piece of real estate. Writer Sam Kean explains the origins of the periodic table and its enduring brilliance. Produced by KJHK’s Becky Sullivan.

Last week, we took a look at how independent bookstores are trying to stay profitable in the age of the eBook. We asked where you buy books, and whether you’ve made the leap to e-books. And we must have touched a nerve, because we got hundreds of responses. Among them, Anthony Mirabile of Philadelphia, who prefers...

Just over 30 years ago, an Englishman named Christopher Alexander tried to revolutionize architecture. In A Pattern Language, Alexander told architects and planners to design homes on emotional and spiritual principles – not on traffic flow. The revolution didn’t quite come. But the book had a ...

In the 1990s, independent bookstores were being put out of business by mega-chains. Now the chain bookstores are struggling: Borders filed for bankruptcy, and Barnes & Noble stock dropped 50% in the last month. With Amazon selling more Kindle books than any other format, the age of the eBook is finally upon us, and no brick and mortar bookstore is really safe.

Survey: Where do you buy your books?

We aired a story last week about John Steinbeck and Monterey, California. After returning to Monterey as an older man, Steinbeck wrote, "What we knew is dead…what's out there is new, and perhaps good, but it's nothing we know." Kind of a downer. We asked what your ...

In the behind-the-scenes realm of music producers, Daniel Lanois is a legend. He's the guy you call to juice up your career if you’re U2, Emmylou Harris, or Bob Dylan. Lanois recently published an autobiography, Soul Mining. Pejk ...

Jennifer Egan's novel, A Visit from The Goon Squad, follows a group of music industry types — sleazeball executives, aging rock stars, kleptomanical assistants — jumping forward, backward and sideways in time. Innovative (one chapter, narrated by a child, is written entirely as a PowerPoint presentation) and poignant, ...

John Steinbeck was nearing 60 when he decided to go on a road trip around the country with his poodle. That trip turned into his last major book, Travels with Charley. Fifty years later, we've been revisiting Steinbeck's stops to see how life in America has changed. We ...

As Congress holds hearings this week on the radicalization of American Muslims, a Pakistani-American playwright is trying to flip the script. Wajahat Ali, who earned raves for his post-9/11 family drama The Domestic Crusaders, told Kurt Andersen, "It would be similar to ...

In Washington State, on the western edge of the Rocky Mountains, John Steinbeck met a young man passionate about theater and hairdressing — and the kid’s furious father. Steinbeck wrote about the encounter in Travels with Charley. Fifty years later, in Spokane, we meet a proudly gay hairdresser and theater director. And we hear his father's side of the story.