NPR Staff

Michael Pitre, author of Fives and Twenty-Fives, served two tours in Iraq. He says, "It was not glamorous and it's not SEAL Team 6; it's just work, and I wanted to tell a story about that."

Dr. Tom Frieden, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, has arrived in West Africa to assess the Ebola outbreak. The situation in Liberia, he says, is "absolutely unprecedented."

The restaurant can be a daunting workplace — even more so when you don't know the lingo. Take it from a few vets: The "monkey dish" is a mystery, and the "waitmare" is, well, nacho average nightmare.

David Mitchell's new novel, The Bone Clocks, is a treat for longtime fans and people who've never picked up one of his books before. It's a decades-spanning saga that switches perspective from section to section among a wildly disparate group of people — but the center of it all is ...

The film about a 40-year relationship is "prosaic and quotidian," says John Lithgow, "and that's what's so amazing about it." Alfred Molina agrees: "It is the epic quality of the ordinary."

The 91-year-old former Marine went from borrowing a mask at an Okinawa hospital to umpiring in the Negro League, where he made calls against legends like Satchel Paige, Hank Aaron and Willie Mays.

A new study finds that reality television shows like Jersey Shore and Real Housewives can make some viewers more aggressive in real life.

Before Coe Booth was a writer, she was a caseworker, often tasked with placing kids with foster families. Her latest novel for middle-grade readers looks at two young members of a foster family.

When Darnell Moore was a teenager in the late 1980s, living in Camden, N.J., he didn't know he was gay — but he did know he was an outcast.

"At 13 I was a nerd," Moore tells his friend Bryan Epps, during a visit to StoryCorps OutLoud in New York. ...

The pianist who spent 25 years writing pop hits says he's long been interested in the work of Charles Ives, Arnold Schoenberg and others. Now he's sharing that interest with his audience.

This back-to-school season, it's time to reevaluate a few common assumptions about how best to study. Benedict Carey, the author of How We Learn, says science shows that discipline isn't everything.

A Sacramento man went on a fishing trip in the California mountains, but lost his way as he searched for bait. After days spent stranded and hungry, he spelled out a cry for help with tree branches.

The new album by Jessica Hernandez & the Deltas has it all. Secret Evil offers a softly strummed rootsy ballad one minute, the oom-pah of Balkan-inspired brass the next, or twangy rockabilly guitars followed by the punch of New Orleans-tinged horns. But in song after song, one thing is consistent: ...

By the age of 5, most of us know the work of Richard Scarry. He wrote and illustrated hundreds of books that introduced children to numbers, letters and What Do People Do All Day.

Through the fantastical and detailed world of Busytown, Scarry taught us what it means to have ...

Katy Simpson Smith's novel, set during the American Revolution, was inspired by her research on mothers in the South. "Death was sort of the specter that haunted every aspect of life," she says.

Kris Kalberer and her family lost their house in 2011. Now they live in their car. Kris says she feels guilty for not being able to fix this. But her teenage daughter Erika doesn't blame her mom.

It's not news that the publishing world isn't very diverse. But over on the other side of the industry, how do owners of neighborhood bookstores try to sell books for or about people of color?

Two hundred years ago this week, invading British troops destroyed the White House and the U.S. Capitol. NPR wasn't there, but if we were, our coverage might have sounded something like this ...

Enlisting has been a rite of passage for men in the Pierce family since the Civil War. And as America has changed, Mark Pierce and his son Jeremy explain, what it means to serve has, too.

People were screaming and throwing rocks. The police were firing shots and hitting protesters with their batons. A riot had started in the slum neighborhood of West Point, in the Liberian capital of Monrovia.

"A riot is tough enough without knowing that you're in an Ebola-infected neighborhood," says NPR photographer ...