Books & Literature

Also we remember mystery novelist Joseph Hansen, who we just learned died last month at the age of 81. He created one of the genre's first gay protagonists, the private eye Dave Brandstetter.

Suketu Mehta's new book is Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found. It's an exploration of Mehta's hometown, where he returned after a 21-year absence. Born in Bombay, one of the world's most populous areas, Mehta still believes it's the city of the future.

Mehta now lives in New York. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper's, Conde Nast Traveler and The Village Voice. He co-wrote a Bollywood movie called Mission Kashmir.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Wodehouse: A Life, by Robert McCrum.

The latest book by Israeli author Amos Oz is A Tale Of Love And Darkness, a memoir of growing up in Jerusalem in the turbulent 1940s and '50s, when a war-torn Israel was achieving statehood. Oz's home life was as intense as the world outside.

The book follows Oz through his mother's suicide to a growing interest in politics and writing. Along the way, he chooses a new name for himself — Oz, the Hebrew word for strength — over his family's name, Klausner.

We remember fireman turned writer Larry Brown. He died last week. He was 53. At the age of 29, Brown decided to become an author, and taught himself fiction writing. He moved from short stories for motorcycle magazines to critically acclaimed works in literary journals to a novel, Dirty Work.

After a chart-topping and occasionally controversial music career, she is now turning out children's books, publishing four in just over a year. Her latest is The Adventures of Abdi. The others are The English Roses, Mr. Peabody's Apples and Yakov and the Seven Thieves. Her fifth, Lotsa de Casha, is due out in April 2005.

Writer Augusten Burroughs is the author of two best-selling, often bitingly funny memoirs. In his first, Running With Scissors, he recalled his mentally ill mother, who gave him away to her equally mentally ill shrink — who then adopted him. Of that experience, Burroughs wrote, "I then lived a life of squalor, pedophiles, no schools and free pills." His second memoir, Dry, was about getting sober in a 28-day stay at a gay alcoholism-rehab center. Burroughs' new book is a collection of stories, Magical Thinking.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age by Kevin Boyle.

Pickett's novel Sideways has been made into a critically acclaimed film starring Thomas Paul Giamatti and Haden Church (left). It's about two ex-college roommates, now middle-aged, who set off on a week's trip through California wine country.

Edmund White has been writing about gay culture in fiction and nonfiction since the 1970s. His new book is a collection of his essays, Arts and Letters. White is director of the creative writing program at Princeton University.

In his last season with the Los Angeles Lakers, Jackson was as much diplomat as basketball coach. He resigned at the end of the season. His new book is The Last Season.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt.

Novelist Russell banks is the author of many works of fiction, Continental Drift, Rule of the Bone, Cloudsplitter, and Affliction and The Sweet Hereafter, both of which have been made into films. He speaks with Terry Gross about his latest novel, Darling.

Former President Jimmy Carter has 18 books to his credit — including memoirs and non-fiction — reflecting on his work as a mediator, his life in the White House, his childhood and his spiritual life. His first book of fiction, The Hornet's Nest, is now out in paperback.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Toast: The Story of a Boy's Hunger, by Nigel Slater, and Lilla's Feat: A Story of Food, Love and War in the Orient, by Frances Osbourne.

The new documentary Tarnation chronicles writer and director Jonathan Caouette's turbulent childhood with a mentally ill mother. He made the film on his home computer for just a few hundred dollars. Critic David Edelstein has a review.

His new memoir is Courting Justice: From New York Yankees v. Major League Baseball to Bush v. Gore.. The New York Times once called him "the lawyer everybody wants." Some of his high profile cases include Bush v. Gore and the anti-trust case against Microsoft.

His new book The Plot Against America imagines a world in which Franklin D. Roosevelt loses the presidency to America's biggest hero and celebrity, Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh then forms alliances with Germany and Japan.

Dangerfield died Tuesday at the age of 82. He recently published a book about his life, Rodney Dangerfield: It's Not Easy Bein' Me. This interview was originally broadcast on July 6, 2004.

Spiegelman won a Pulitzer prize for his two-part graphic novels about his father in Nazi Germany and the holocaust Maus: A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds and Maus: A Survivor's Tale: Here My Troubles Began. His new graphic nonfiction novel is about his family's experience on Sept. 11, In the Shadow of No Towers.