Books

As the sun sets in a small town, a family loads up their rusty old car with the spare couch in their yard. When it breaks down in the mountains, what else is there to do but fly it to the moon?

Mick Herron's "Slow Horses" novels center on MI5 operatives who've bungled cases and are demoted to a spooks' purgatory. NPR's Scott Simon talks to Herron about his 9th in the series, "Clown Town."

At Russ & Daughters, it takes three months to learn how to slice salmon. NPR's Scott Simon visits the 100 year-old appetizing store to try his hand at the fine art and talk about their new cookbook.

A U.S. district court is scheduled to consider whether to approve the settlement next week, in a case that marked the first substantive decision on how fair use applies to generative AI systems.

The artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay authors $3,000 per book in a landmark settlement over pirated chatbot training material.

The book centers around two graduate students studying magic at Cambridge University who make a journey to hell to rescue their recently deceased thesis advisor.

Horror master Stephen King's adaptation uses images by the late illustrator Maurice Sendak.

NPR's Leila Fadel speaks with acclaimed author Arundhati Roy about her new book "Mother Mary Comes to Me," her first major work of autobiography.

NPR's Juana Summers speaks to barrier-breaking sports broadcaster Jayne Kennedy about her new memoir.

This week's publishing highlights are a bumper crop of biography, science and fiction — including new reads the from authors of The Sweetness of Water, The God of Small Things, and Deadliest Enemy.