Books & Literature

The lives of writers drive two films opening this week: The Rum Diary, starring Johnny Depp, dramatizes a Hunter S. Thompson novel. Roland Emmerich's Anonymous, meanwhile, examines who wrote Shakespeare's plays. Critic David Edelstein says both films show how hard it is to write about writers.

"Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we're going to die," poet Marie Howe tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. One of Howe's most famous poems, "What the Living Do," was recently included in The Penguin Anthology of 20th-Century American Poetry.

Colson Whitehead's new novel Zone One is a post-apocalyptic tale of a Manhattan crippled by a plague and overrun with zombies. He explains that he created the novel, in part, to pay homage to the grimy 1970s New York of his childhood.

After 35 years as a Supreme Court justice, John Paul Stevens retired last year. His newly released memoir is about his time on the bench and the five Supreme Court chief justices he personally knew. He details his views of those justices and how his viewpoints on various issues evolved over the years.

Russell Banks' latest is an uneven effort to excavate and redeem the dregs of modern society. Critic Maureen Corrigan says the novel — about porn addiction and sexual predators — is compelling in a low-grade, nightmarish sort of way.

Jeffrey Eugenides' third novel, The Marriage Plot, charts the lives of three young adults as they finish college, fall in love and navigate the real world after graduating from Brown University in 1982. Eugenides, also a Brown alum, based some of the novel on his own experiences directly after college.

Dana Spiotta's third novel, Stone Arabia, is about an aging musician who never achieved the type of success he'd have liked. Rather than giving up, he chronicles an imaginary version of his life — as a successful rock star recording his career in a series of journals.

Roger Ebert tackles lowbrow and highbrow topics alike in his memoir; critic John Powers says the chronicle is sunny and hopeful — just like Ebert himself.

Bumble-ardy is a deeply imaginative tale about an orphaned pig who longs for a birthday party. Sendak, who is 83, wrote and illustrated the book while caring for his longtime partner, who died of cancer in 2007. "I did Bumble-ardy to save myself," Sendak says. "I did not want to die with him."

Stephen Greenblatt chronicles the unlikely discovery of Lucretius' poem "On the Nature of Things" — by a 15th-century Italian book hunter. The Swerve is a masterfully written meditation on the fragile inheritance of ideas.

What if the rapture actually occurred? That's the plot of Tom Perrotta's new novel Te Leftovers, which examines the aftermath of an unexplained rapture like even in which millions of people around the globe inexplicably disappear into thin air.

In Kevin Wilson's first novel, husband-and-wife conceptual artists stage elaborate public acts of "choreographed spontaneity" -- to the embarrassment of their children. Wilson's inventive energy makes The Family Fang a strange, wonderful and refreshing read in the summer heat.

Landesman, a songwriter and poet who wrote the words to the jazz standard "Spring Can Really Hang You Up the Most," died on July 23. She was 83. Fresh Air remembers the iconoclastic lyricist with highlights from a 1988 interview.

Historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. looks at the cultural legacy of African slaves brought to Latin America.

Donald Ray Pollock worked in a paper mill and meatpacking plant for 32 years before becoming a writer. His second book The Devil All the Time is set in his hometown of Knockemstiff, Ohio, where he says "nearly everyone was connected by blood through one godforsaken calamity or another."

Nik Worth is a failed musician who painstakingly documents his life and non-existent career, leaving his sister to worry about practical things like paying his rent. Dana Spiotta's new novel investigates the long-term costs of an artist's passion.

In December 2009, an al-Qaida mole believed to be a CIA informant detonated a suicide bomb inside a fortified military base in Pakistan, killing seven CIA employees. Reporter Joby Warrick writes about the man who pulled off the attack — and explains how he did it — in The Triple Agent.

Neuroscientist Dean Buonomano explains why our brains make mistakes when we try to remember long lists of information or add large numbers in our heads. Humans live "in a time and place we didn't evolve to live in," he says.