J.R. Thornton was once a serious tennis player on the junior circuit. Then he moved to China and spent a year training with the Beijing National Team, where he discovered just how different the life of an aspiring champion could be. His novel "Beautiful Country" reveals the incredibly difficult demands on young athletes in China.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Ruth Reichl draws on her career as a high-profile food writer and editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine in her first novel -- "Delicious". It's the story of a magazine writer with a superhuman sense of taste, who discovers a secret cache of letters from the legendary chef and cookbook writer James Beard.
Poltergeists, ghosts, telepathy and other psychic phenomena used to be considered legitimate subjects for scientific research. Historian Jeffrey Kripal recounts the intellectual history of the paranormal.
Sarah Lewis talks about her book, "The Rise: Creativity, The Gift of Failure, and the Search for Mastery."
One of the most horrific episodes in American history occurred on December 29, 1890. The U.S. Cavalry surrounded an encampment of Lakota on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota and massacred some 300 people. The details of the carnage of the Wounded Knee Massacre are almost unbearable. As Black Elk, the Lakota medicine man who witnessed the massacre, put it, “Something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died." This tragedy is the bleak backdrop for Jonis Agee's new novel, "The Bones of Paradise." Set 10 years after the Wounded Knee Massacre, all the characters in her novel - from white cattle ranchers to the Lakota - are wrestling with the ghosts of the massacre. Agee tells Steve Paulson about the origins of her novel.
When the last of the infamous Chicago Public Housing buildings were demolished Audrey Petty asked herself a few questions, “Where did everybody go?” And, “what are their memories?”
Tom Wolfe reads the opening to "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and explains why it's his favorite.
Sherman Alexie wrote a novel in response to 9/11. He thinks the fanaticism of flying planes into buildings is the end game of tribalism and he wanted to teach his sons something else.
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