NPR's Book of the Day

It's almost Halloween, which means that we're in peak spooky season. So for today's episode, we bring you two books with two very different kinds of frights: a haunted house and...office politics. That's right: In The Other Black Girl, writer Zakiya Dalila Harris captures the all-too-real horror of being the only Black woman in her office. When another Black woman is hired, the tension gets dialed up even higher. And in There's A Ghost In This House, the author-illustrator Oliver Jeffers uses old photographs to create creepy illustrations that will give both children and adults goosebumps.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

The humor writer Drew Magary was at a karaoke bar when his life changed in a flash: He collapsed and cracked his skull. By most accounts, the resulting traumatic brain injury should have been fatal, but he survived. As he recounts in his book The Night the Lights Went Out, recovering from that injury has been tough. Among other things, he permanently lost some of his senses. As Magary tells NPR's Lulu Garcia Navarro, recovery has required him to figure out who he is now, post injury — a challenge that makes for a good story, he says.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

The bestselling author Louise Penny is a prolific writer of mysteries and thrillers — but for her latest book, she decided to bring a partner into the fold, a novice to the world of mystery-writing: former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Their book, State of Terror, brings readers into a world in which a president picks a former rival to be his secretary of state (sound familiar?) — and she must then contend with what Clinton calls one of her greatest fears: nuclear-armed terrorists. In this interview, Penny and Clinton discuss the messages they hope readers take away from the book.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Back in June 2020, during a summer of protests for racial justice, the New Yorker republished 'Letter from a Region in my Mind," a seminal James Baldwin essay calling out the ignorance of liberal white Americans. In the following months, writer Jelani Cobb put together a collection of essays from the magazine that fit a similar theme: Black writers, including Toni Morrison and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote pieces for the New Yorker about race and racism that still ring true today. In this interview, Cobb reflects on the essays and what it took for those Black writers to break into the magazine.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

If you visited South Nashville today, you might not suspect that, over a century ago, it was home to a zoo and amusement park called the Glendale Zoo. Among other attractions, the zoo had a popular attraction called "horse diving," in which a performer rode a horse off a tall platform into a body of water. In her book, When Two Feathers Fell From The Sky, Verble imagines the life of a young Cherokee girl named Two Feathers, who horse dives for a living at the zoo in the year 1926 — set against the background of the Jim Crow South and widespread mistreatment of Native Americans.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Our relationship to food goes far beyond its nutritional value. What we eat can help us tap into something deeper, whether it brings up treasured memories or allows us to escape our own lives for just a few bites. That duality is captured by two different books in today's episode; while Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner explores how cooking Korean food helped the author grieve her mom's death, Gastro Obscura by Cecily Wong and Dylan Thuras takes readers to each continent to learn about its cuisine. In interviews with NPR's Ari Shapiro, Zauner and Wong talk about how food shapes our worlds.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

The Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard gained an international reputation thanks to his breakout autobiographical series My Struggle -- but he actually made his literary debut in the world of fiction. Now, he's returned to that world with his novel The Morning Star, a dark tale of the uncanny events that unfold after a new star appears in the sky. Unlike his previous series, the book features multiple perspectives and otherworldly incidents that seem ripped from the pages of the Bible. But as the author explains to NPR's Leila Fadel, those acts of God happen alongside the mundanity of everyday life, in true Knausgaardian fashion.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Former Trump press secretary Stephanie Grisham famously held no press briefings during her time in the White House — but now, she's ready to talk. Her memoir, I'll Take Your Questions Now, is the latest tell-all from a former Trump staffer — and Tamara Keith, from NPR's Politics Podcast, hit her with some tough questions about whether the book is simply an image rehab project. "Too many books have been out there to help one person's reputation so they can be rehabilitated ... or to try to rewrite history," Grisham says. "I just want to tell my story and have people take what they want from it."Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

When Colin Powell died on October 18 at the age of 84 from COVID-19 complications, he left behind a long, decorated career in Washington and the U.S. Army. He spent much of his life in the military, eventually rising to the rank of four-star general, and went on to become the first Black Secretary of state and chairman of the Joint Chiefs. But, as he discussed in a 2012 interview with NPR's Robert Siegel about his memoir It Worked For Me, Powell's reputation was tarnished when he used faulty evidence to push for the Iraq War: "I'll never leave it behind."Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Amor Towles' new book is quite the joyride — The Lincoln Highway follows four kids in a 1948 Studebaker who set out along the real-life Lincoln Highway, the first highway to cross the country. Two of them are trying to head for San Francisco to find their mother — the other two want to go the other way, looking for a promised inheritance. Needless to say, things don't go as planned. Towles talked to NPR's Scott Simon about the book — and also about the way the world moves so much faster now than it did in the 1950s, and how that affects the stories kids hear and see and create.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy