NPR's Book of the Day Folgen

Today's episode covers two very different stories involving personal loss and what comes after. First, author Laura Braitman tells NPR's Sacha Pfeiffer about her memoir, What Looks Like Bravery, and how her father's death earlier in life pushed her to unhealthily lean into academic and professional achievements as a coping mechanism. Then, NPR's Rachel Martin sits down with The Atlantic's Jennifer Senior. Her new book, On Grief, expands on her Pulitzer-Prize winning essay about the diary left behind by a 9/11 victim, and the conflict it created between his family and girlfriend.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

In a small North Carolina town in 1976, three siblings are shot to death. That's the mystery at the center of De'Shawn Charles Winslow's new book, Decent People – and it's one the segregated town's white police officers aren't paying much attention to. In today's episode, Winslow tells NPR's Scott Simon about the heroine who takes it upon herself to solve the case, and why - the author feels a need to paint a nuanced portrait of even the antagonists in his books.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Author Azar Nafisi has written a love letter to literature and reading in Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times. She does this in a series of letters to her late father who passed on in 2004. Nafisi says that reading can help us really live and also help us, and has helped her, survive challenging times. Nafisi told NPR's Scott Simon that literature's purpose is to let us experience new worlds: "to come out of yourself, and join the other."Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy