Every year, Fresh Air critic John Powers is haunted by all the terrific things he didn't get a chance to talk about on air. As 2016 winds down, he "un-haunts" himself with these six recommendations.
(Image credit: Courtesy of Turner)
In a new book, journalist and author John Pomfret tackles a relationship that stretches back to America's earliest years and is now more important — and challenging — than ever.
This new anthology of science fiction and fantasy, edited by Hassan Blasim, imagines Iraq 100 years after the invasion of 2003. Harrowing, necessary, often beautiful, it resists comfort and catharsis.
Book critic Maureen Corrigan says that if there's one word that characterizes her list this year, it's "serious." These books certainly aren't grim or dull, but they take on big, difficult subjects.
Dava Sobel's new book is a history of the unheralded women — called computers, rather than astronomers — who worked at the Harvard College Observatory, studying, cataloging and classifying stars.
Critic John Powers discusses the Italian documentary, Fire at Sea, and the novel, These Are the Names. The works take very different — but nonetheless poignant — approaches to the refugee situation.
Matt Fraction and Christian Ward's splendidly trippy, genderbent retelling of the Odyssey sets the story in space, as warlike Odyssia, "witchjack and wanderer" winds her way home to far Ithicaa.
Jason Diamond tried to write a biography of John Hughes, director of classic '80s teen movies, but along the way, the story became more about his search for Hughes than the elusive filmmaker himself.
Marianne Kirby's new novel is set in an America overrun by zombies — and also an America in which no one is judged on their appearance; her protagonist is fat and queer, and never hindered by that.
Chabon's new novel is a collection of stories in which a dying grandfather tells the secrets of his life to his grandson. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls Moonglow "violent and very funny."
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
 |
 |
