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Jan. 18, 2013
Dark, subversive, compassionate, hilarious. Those are just some of the adjectives used to describe the work of George Saunders. Jeffrey Brown talks to George Saunders, about his new book "Tenth of December," a collection 10 short stories of biting social satire and deeply felt takes on contemporary American life.
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Jan. 2, 2013
When Claudia Kolker began reporting about recent immigrants to the U.S., she found a wealth of wisdom to be shared with all Americans. Kolker talks to Ray Suarez about her new book, "The Immigrant Advantage: What We Can Learn from Newcomers to America about Health, Happiness and Hope."
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Dec. 31, 2012
When the Obama campaign decided to spend big on ads early in the presidential race, it was a risky strategy. And it helped lead to Obama's re-election. Margaret Warner talks to Politico's Jonathan Martin and Glenn Thrush about their latest e-book, "The End of the Line": Romney vs. Obama: The 34 Days That Decided the Election."
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Dec. 7, 2012
David Denby writes about the immediate moment in his role as film critic for The New Yorker. He also looks at the much bigger picture in his latest book, "Do the Movies Have a Future?"
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Nov. 30, 2012
What is a great short story and what does it take to write one? The Paris Review posed those questions to 20 contemporary authors and asked them to pick a story they love in the almost 60-year-old archives of the Review. The result is a new collection titled "Object Lessons: The Art of the Short Story."
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Nov. 22, 2012
Backed by Theodore Roosevelt, Edward Curtis set out in 1900 to document the lives of Native Americans. Over the next 30 years, he took more than 40,000 pictures and 10,000 audio recordings. Jeffrey Brown talks to Pulitzer Prize winner Timothy Egan about his new biography about Curtis, "Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher."
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Nov. 12, 2012
Kevin Powers served in the U.S. Army in Iraq in 2004 and 2005. When he returned to the U.S. he turned initially to poetry to work through his own questions about his experience, but found he needed "a larger canvas." Jeffrey Brown talks to Powers about his novel, "Yellow Birds," which is nominated for the National Book Award.
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Nov. 12, 2012
Extended interview and reading with Kevin Powers, author of the novel "The Yellow Birds."
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Nov. 9, 2012
The play "War Horse" is the story of friendship, war, love and one remarkable steed named Joey. To get an idea of what it's like to control Joey from his expressive ears to his hooves, Jeffrey Brown sat down with "War Horse" actor Danny Yoerges, who handles the head of Joey.
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Nov. 2, 2012
Mary Jo Bang's new translation of Dante's "Inferno" is true to the moral and emotional intensity of the original, but she infuses the text with her own voice and modern allusions to Stephen Colbert and "South Park."
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Oct. 31, 2012
Zadie Smith's latest novel, "NW," is an exploration into the joys and problems of a modern friendship between two women in North London. Decidedly less radiant than some of her earlier works, "NW" delivers the reader some harsh truths about urban living and growing older.
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Oct. 29, 2012
Bill Ivey, former National Endowment for the Arts chair, says he sees a crisis in our culture where public discourse no longer includes argument over values or why we do what we do as Americans. Jeffrey Brown talks to Ivey about his call for a revived progressive vision, outlined in his new book, "Handmaking America."
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Oct. 29, 2012
More of Jeffrey Brown's conversation with Bill Ivey, former chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts and author of "Handmaking America: A Back-to-Basics Pathway to a Revitalized American Democracy."
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Oct. 26, 2012
Novelist Louise Erdrich examines what happens when crimes are committed on Native American reservations, a decidedly non-fictional problem, through the eyes of her fictional protagonist, a 13-year-old boy named Joe. Jeff Brown talks to Erdrich about her novel "The Round House," set on the N.D. reservation of the Ojibwe tribe.
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Oct. 24, 2012
Joyce Johnson's latest book, "The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac," draws heavily from Kerouac's own journals, letters and other source material, which are now archived at the New York Public Library.
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Oct. 19, 2012
Throughout the height of the financial crisis in 2008, Sheila Bair was known for being an outspoken regulator willing to confront her peers head-on. Her new book "Bull by the Horns" is an insider account of that turbulent time.
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Oct. 19, 2012
Jeffrey Brown talks to Louise Erdrich, author of the novel "The Round House," which has been nominated for a National Book Award.
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Oct. 8, 2012
In his new memoir, Salman Rushdie recounts, in the third person, his upbringing as a secular muslim trying to understand his religion, as well as living under fatwa, a period when he says he discovered his own resilience. Jeffrey Brown talks to the author about recent clashes over free speech and Islamic ideology.
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Oct. 8, 2012
More of Jeffrey Brown's interview with writer Salman Rushdie, author of the new book "Joseph Conrad: A Memoir."
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Oct. 4, 2012
Jeffrey Brown talks to Kevin Powers, author of the novel "The Yellow Birds" and who served in the U.S. Army in Iraq in 2004 and 2005.
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Oct. 3, 2012
In his new book, "Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates, from Kennedy-Nixon to Obama-McCain," NewsHour Executive Editor Jim Lehrer looks back at more than 40 years of televised political debates in America. Jeffrey Brown and Lehrer discuss his unique front-row seat to history as a 10-time presidential debate moderator.
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Sept. 28, 2012
The writer Junot Diaz is back with a new collection of stories titled "This Is How You Lose Her." They feature several characters from his first novel, "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2008.
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Sept. 21, 2012
The new official face of American poetry is one familiar to NewsHour viewers. Natasha Trethewey has just taken on the job of poet laureate of the United States, appointed by the Librarian of Congress. She's the author of four books of verse, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning "Native Guard" and her latest, "Thrall."
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Aug. 22, 2012
When writing his new book 'Canada' about a boy whose parents rob a bank, Richard Ford blended the persuasive voice of a teenager with his own, that of a 65-year-old man with a lifetime of experiences. Jeffrey Brown talks to the Pulitzer Prize-winning author about his novel about morality, murder and coming of age.
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Aug. 17, 2012
Marjane Satrapi's "Persepolis" won international acclaim as an autobiographical tale, told first in the form of a graphic novel, later turned into a film, of a young girl coming of age amid the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran. Now comes the film version of "Chicken With Plums," another story based on her family's history.
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Aug. 3, 2012
Ray Suarez talks to celebrity chef and restaurateur Marcus Samuelsson, whose new memoir, the New York Times bestseller "Yes, Chef," traces his life and career, beginning with his birth in Ethiopia and adoption to a Swedish family, a move that eventually led him to cooking.
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June 22, 2012
"Diamond in the Rough" is the name of a 1989 hit song from Grammy-winning singer-songwriter Shawn Colvin's first album, "Steady On." Now, it's the name of a new memoir she's just released. Jeffrey Brown talks to the musician.
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June 13, 2012
In his new book, "The Storytelling Animal," Jonathan Gottschall explores the art of telling tales and the science behind what's at work in our minds when we hear things like, "Once upon a time."
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June 8, 2012
They began as status updates on Facebook, but Lou Beach came to see something more in the short pieces he was writing -- a new form of short story, in fact. And it's an interesting and compelling approach, indeed, in an age when books, blogs, tweets and more all coexist and tell stories in different ways.
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Jan. 6, 2012
Mortality is a subject Joan Didion has grappled with in recent years, both in life and on the page. In the span of roughly two years, her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and their only child, Quintana Roo, both died. Her new book is "Blue Nights."