Books & Literature

For most of his life, music critic Tim Page felt like an outsider. Restless and isolated, he was uneasy around others. Finally, when he was 45, Page was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome.

Set in various fantastic and creepy landscapes, Dan Chaon's latest book, Await Your Reply, weaves together three separate narratives in what reviewer Maureen Corrigan calls a "spinning nebula of a novel."

The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist opens up about his experiences as a father to four children and husband to writer Ayelet Waldman in his new book of personal essays, Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son.

Max Cleland served in Vietnam — where he lost both legs and his right arm — before being elected to the U.S. Senate. His new memoir is Heart of a Patriot: How I Found the Courage to Survive Vietnam, Walter Reed and Karl Rove.

Author and screenwriter Nick Hornby joins Fresh Air host Terry Gross to discuss his new novel, Juliet, Naked, and his screenplay for the new movie An Education.

Novelist and playwright Dan Fante writes about alcoholism, drug addiction and failed attempts at literary success — all of which he has experienced himself. He discusses the process of reliving his past on paper.

Unitarian minister Forrest Church believed that the knowledge that we must die makes us question what life means. Church, who died Sept. 24, 2009 after a long battle with cancer of the esophagus, was the author of Love and Death: My Journey through the Valley of the Shadow.

Morris Dickstein's dazzling new cultural history of the Great Depression, called Dancing in the Dark, is one of those "everything but the kitchen sink" kind of books — that really works.

Comedy writer Steve Hely details the journey of a young writer's effort to create the greatest best seller of all time in his new novel How I Became a Famous Novelist.

Book editor Jonathan Karp worked closely with Sen. Edward M. Kennedy in the final year of the senator's life, getting to know the man behind the public persona, sifting through a half century of papers and finding out Kennedy's deepest feelings about family controversies, successes and tragedies

Maureen Corrigan reviews Lorrie Moore's most recent novel.

Richard Russo turns a satiric eye toward matrimony and middle age in his new novel, That Old Cape Magic. Book critic Maureen Corrigan calls the book a "glistening ... chambered nautilus of a novel."

Rafael Yglesias' novel is inspired by his wife, Margaret, who died in 2004. A Happy Marriage spans their three-decade relationship, from their courtship to her battle with cancer.

Thomas Pynchon's latest novel, Inherent Vice, is a detective romp set at the end of the 1960s psychedelic era. Critic-at-large John Powers has a review.

Jennifer Weiner's latest novel, Best Friends Forever, is much sharper than its dopey title would suggest. With a nod to Thelma and Louise, Weiner's Addie and Valerie rekindle a friendship that fizzled decades ago.

Leidy Bonanno had just graduated nursing school when she was killed by an ex-boyfriend in 2003. Slamming Open the Door is Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno's way of remembering.

Critic Milo Miles reviews The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics. It's Dennis Kitchen and Paul Buhle's illustrated biography of influential artist and writer Harvey Kurtzman, the inventor of MAD Magazine.

Gertrude Ederle was the first woman to swim the English Channel, finishing faster than any of the five men who had done it before. Young Woman and the Sea shows how Ederle's fame grew, then evaporated.

The Mad Ones is the tale of real-life gangsters Larry, Albert "Kid Blast" and "Crazy" Joe Gallo — a Mafia clan that inspired Bob Dylan's "Joey" and were a major inspiration for The Godfather.