NPR Staff

The British monarch ruled at a time of civil war — and was blamed for much of the bloodshed. In Killers of the King, Charles Spencer tells the story of the men who signed the king's death warrant.

Less than a decade ago, American consumers tended to buy frozen fruit as a dessert topping. But the smoothie craze changed how Americans eat frozen fruit — and pushed sales above $1 billion a year.

In a remote region in Russia, six time zones away from Moscow, lies the coldest city on earth. Rich with natural resources, Yakutsk is home to 270,000 residents brave enough to face the extreme cold.

How do you become a sportscaster when you've never done it before? Adrián García Márquez, now La Voz De Los Lakers, faked a demo tape with the help of a Sega console and FIFA '95.

A veteran of both music and medicine, Henderson got his first trumpet lesson from Louis Armstrong, played in Herbie Hancock's band and once had Thelonious Monk as a patient.

Trigger warnings caution readers to tread carefully and Neil Gaiman encourages those who pick up his latest collection of "short fictions and disturbances" to do the same.

Jack White, formerly of the White Stripes, must hate bananas. Because according to his recently leaked concert rider, he doesn't want to lay eyes on one at his concerts.

A "rider" is the set of unusual contractual demands that some pop stars make of their hosts when they're on ...

More than 15 years ago, Roebuck "Pops" Staples started recording his final album with his daughters, Mavis, Cleotha and Yvonne of the gospel-R&B family act The Staple Singers. Pops was ailing, but his voice was strong.

In time he became too weak to finish the album, ...

Bjorn's new job is not going well. His co-workers are insufferable, his boss is constantly belittling him, and it's all keeping him from getting any work done — or climbing the ladder in his faceless bureaucracy.

But it all changes one day when Bjorn finds a tiny, hidden room where ...

Nearly every male actor in The Grand Budapest Hotel has some kind of facial hair. In charge of each follicle — real or fake — was Oscar-nominated hair and makeup designer Frances Hannon.

The Arrested Development actor makes his directorial debut with the film Hits, which explores how easy it is to become famous in our celebrity-obsessed culture.

Have you heard of Bass Reeves? Richard Potter? Spottswood Rice? "Box" Brown? If not, illustrator-historian Joel Christian Gill says, you're missing out on some of the best stories in American history.

"I end up living a lot of the things I write and sing about, so I'm pretty careful now," says the British singer, whose wish for an "American Boy" turned into a love affair that went sour.

Laura Van Den Berg is one of the most admired short story writers in the country, and readers have been eagerly awaiting her first novel, Find Me. The book opens with a sickness sweeping the country: It obliterates memory, then kills. In the middle of this is Joy, a lonely ...

Hugh Grant is a British fish out of water — again. In The Rewrite he plays Keith Michaels, a screenwriter who won an Oscar 15 years ago, but hasn't done much since. Divorced and nearly broke, he reluctantly takes a one-semester teaching job at Binghamton University in upstate New York.

...

D'aron Davenport feels like a catfish out of his pond when he leaves his Georgia town of about 700 people to go to school in Berkeley, California. But within just a few months, it's his hometown that becomes a little hard to understand in his own, changed eyes.

He brings ...

Here's an astonishing speech by U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves, one of just two African-Americans to have ever served as federal judges in Mississippi. He read it to three young white men before sentencing them for the death of a 48-year-old black man named James Craig Anderson in ...

One of the young students killed in Tuesday's shooting in Chapel Hill, N.C., Yusor Abu-Salha, spoke to StoryCorps last year with her former third grade teacher.

To stand out in a crowd of 7,000, you need something special. NPR's Rachel Martin speaks with Fantastic Negrito, the musician who won judges over with his original song "Lost In A Crowd."

Lynsey Addario was taken captive in 2011 while covering Libya's civil war. With a gun to her head, she says she was thinking, "Will I ever get my cameras back?"