Nancy Pearl Writes a Novel, Among Other Things Fair warning: Nancy and I have been friends for 35 years, give or take. If you think that...

A good friend shows her feelings about the insane rise in the number of memoirs coming out each month by calling them “me mores.” I can’t...

I’ve just recently begun pulling together all the various quotations about books and reading that I’ve collected over the years. Here...

Some of my most beloved books are by Georgette Heyer. Most readers discover her in their teens, often because their grandmother or mother...

Every once in a while, I run across a book that has such wide appeal that I can easily imagine giving copies to nearly everyone on my...

The thought of interviewing Tom Hanks in front of an audience of more than 2,000 fans of his had never entered my mind - and believe me,...

Oh my, it’s hard to describe how happy it makes me to find a novel like The Watery Part of the World by Michael Parker (Algonquin, 2011)...

Way back in 2008, Nick Harkaway published his first novel, The Gone-Away World. This coming January his newest novel, Gnomon, will be...

Although Paul Theroux’s The Great Railway Bazaar is one of my all-time favorite books, I stopped reading him when he fell into what...

I've been doing a lot of revisiting old favorites while counting down the days until my novel George & LIzzie comes out, and rereading...

Renee Patrick is the pen name for husband-and-wife team Rosemarie and Vince Keenan. This is their first novel. In 1937, a young woman...

Check out book reviews from Nancy posted on the NPR Books page.

In the fall of 2004, Morning Edition’s Steve Inskeep and I talked about great first lines, and one of the books I cited was Rose...

Ben Fountain ’s Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ecco, 2012) is a brilliantly conceived first novel that takes place over the course of...

In The Color of Lightning, her powerful and moving third novel, Paulette Jiles begins with a real person and, taking the little that is...

Schaffert’s fourth novel, The Coffins of Little Hope (Unbridled Books, 2011) is another triumph of storytelling, featuring quirky...

When I was in Australia a few years ago, a fellow librarian and good friend recommended Peter Temple’s The Broken Shore to me. I got a...

Tim Kreider’s We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons (Free Press, 2012) is a remarkable collection. There were points in every one of them...