Petra Mayer

The "sad puppies" — a group of disgruntled, mostly white male science fiction authors — struck out at the Hugo Awards over the weekend after trying to stuff the ballot box.

The prestigious Hugo Awards, which honor science fiction and fantasy writing, will be held Saturday. Lately, they have been given to more and more women and writers of color as the wo...

Historical romance is big business — it's the most popular subgenre of a billion-dollar industry. You can read about pirates, knights, Regency rakes and just about anything else. But for a long time, you couldn't read about black history. Until Beverly Jenkins came along.

Jenkins calls herself a "kitchen table ...

Sometimes the hardest part of composing a list is not what you put on it, but what you leave off — and even with 100 slots on our summer romance list, there were going to be a few books that didn't make the cut.

To complicate things, this list wasn't ...

San Diego Comic-Con is the sweet spot for immersive marketing, a form of advertising involving elaborate experiences that let fans feel like they're inside their favorite games, movies and shows.

Nicole Perlman was the first woman to get a screenwriting credit on a Marvel Studios movie, for last year's big hit Guardians of the Galaxy.

Perlman has been tapped to write the upcoming Captain Marvel movie, too, but first she's navigating a slightly less galactic challenge: Writing her first comic ...

This summer, NPR is getting crafty in the kitchen. As part of Weekend Edition's Do Try This At Home series, chefs are sharing their cleverest hacks and tips — taking expensive, exhausting or intimidating recipes and tweaking them to work in any home kitchen.

This week: Making delicious, fall-off-the-bone baby ...

While our intern is diligently tallying up the 18,000 nominations that came in for the Summer of Love reader poll (sorry, Intern Laura!), we thought we'd take the time to introduce you to the expert panel that will help us wrestle this massive list down to 100 finalists.

A ...

We're bringing back our famous summer reader poll this year, and as the days get longer (and the nights get hotter), we think it's the perfect time to celebrate romance.

Whether you love historicals, paranormals, inspirationals, young adult, Amish, romantic suspense, contemporaries (or, like some people around here, you'd be ...

The British mystery writer was known for her Inspector Wexford series and in her later years became active in Labour Party politics. NPR's Petra Mayer has this remembrance.

Updated at 2:30 p.m. ET

The protest over a free speech award to Charlie Hebdo continues to grow.

Earlier this week, six authors withdrew from the PEN American Center's annual gala in response to the organization's decision to give the French satirical magazine its Freedom of Expression Courage Award.

...

Tiny Cooper is your new boyfriend (well, not mine, he doesn't swing that way). Readers met the flamboyant high school football player and would-be musical impresario as a side character in the 2010 novel Will Grayson, Will Grayson and fell in love — about as quickly as Tiny did with ...

The prolific author, who died Thursday at 66, was known for his novels about the fantasy planet Discworld, populated by humans, witches, trolls and dwarves — and a very human, sympathetic Death.

National Book Award-winning author Robert Stone was on the fringes of the utopian counterculture of the 1960s — but he preferred to write about what happened when that dream went sour.

Introducing NPR's Book Concierge, your personal guide to the great books published in 2014. NPR staff and critics selected some 250 of their favorite titles. You can find a list of all our recommended titles below or ...

Open the app now!

---

2014 Book Concierge: The ...

Copies of Shakespeare's first folio are some of the rarest books in the world — only about 230 copies survive. Surprisingly, another copy has been rediscovered in a public library in northern France.

After is an epic, erotic fan fiction loosely based on the British boy band One Direction. It's being republished by Simon & Schuster, which is hoping the story's online fans will buy it in book form.

Australian author Garth Nix anticipated the boom in young adult literature almost 20 years ago with Sabriel, a dark and delightful tale of a young woman from a long line of necromancers tasked with making sure the dead stay dead. Sabriel and its sequels Lirael and Abhorsen were set in ...

This is a story about love. It's a story about bad things happening to good people, about memory and perseverance — and comic books. But most of all, it's a story about a voice. A mellow, smooth voice, just right for late-night jazz.

The voice belonged to David Rector, who ...

The final book in Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy comes out this week — The Magician's Land. It's a literary fantasy, inspired by Narnia and Harry Potter, that tells the story of what happens to brilliant young wizards when they grow up and have to deal with the world.

Grossman was ...