The violinist, vocalist and composer says that writing a piece like her prize-winning Partita for 8 Voices begins with "having a sound in your head that you really want to hear."

Jack Richmond was a young father when his leg was crushed in a work accident. Though in denial at first that it would need to be amputated, he quickly realized he could share his experience to help other amputees, as he tells his daughter, Reagan, on a visit to StoryCorps.

The Lee bothers, Matt and Ted, have written two cookbooks about Southern cuisine, but now they've turned their attention to a more specific region: Charleston, the city they grew up in. Their new book contains recipes and stories from a seafood-centric community with a rich culinary history.

Writer-director Sebastian Junger remembers his friend and colleague Tim Hetherington, killed in April 2011 by mortar fire in the Libyan city of Misrata.

Fred Hiatt's new young-adult novel, Nine Days, is based on the real-life story of a Chinese dissident's daughter trying to solve the mystery of her father's disappearance. Ti-Anna Wang, the real-life woman who inspired the tale, says her father had been kidnapped by Chinese agents during a trip to Vietnam.

In honor of National Poetry Month, we've reached into our archives and pulled up 10 interviews with Poets Laureate. Hear current laureate Natasha Trethewey on Hurricane Katrina, Ted Kooser on his Valentine's Day poems, Robert Pinsky on the news, and more.

The singer and composer plays more than eight different instruments on her haunting solo debut, The Deserters, which includes a cover of My Bloody Valentine's "To Here Knows When."

In the hours after the Boston Marathon bombings, social media was alight with offers of assistance — from restaurants inviting guests to pay what they could, to Bostonians offering couches and inflatable mattresses to anyone who needed a place to stay.

Granta has published its once-a-decade list of the best young British novelists. It's a hefty volume that's showcased names like Salman Rushdie and David Mitchell in the past. This year's list is impressively diverse — though Granta editor John Freeman says that wasn't intentional.

Before the movies, Broadway musicals and Halloween costumes, L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was a smash hit of a children's book published in 1900. NPR's Backseat Book Club goes back to where the Yellow Brick Road began with children's book historian Michael Patrick Hearn.

Motivated not by God, but by nearly everything else, American author David Downie traveled hundreds of miles on foot across France. He writes about his trek in his new book, Paris to the Pyrenees.

The English folk artist died long before his songs found a wide audience. Joe Boyd, who produced two of Drake's three albums, is releasing an album of live performances culled from a series of Nick Drake tribute concerts.

The melting of ice in the northern latitudes is feeding new industries. Among them: speculating for petroleum products where vast amounts of undiscovered oil and natural gas are believed to be, and hunting for mammoth tusks unearthed in the softening tundra.

Ten years after the trio's debut album, singer Karen O says she and her bandmates are still shy in conversation. But when they perform together, "it's explosive."

Christina Baker Kline's new novel incorporates a true piece of American history. One of the book's protagonists, an Irish orphan, is packed onto a train and sent to the Midwest. In real life, "orphan trains" were intended to save children from the streets, but sometimes resulted in near-slavery.

In celebration of National Poetry Month, Weekend Edition is asking young poets about what poetry means to them. This week, Harmony Holiday describes how poetry helped her "negotiate the language" of having a white mother and an African-American father.

Big Data is considered a tool for finding correlations amid vast amounts of information. But without the ability to unearth causation, Big Data can only reveal so much.

A trip to a California women's prison inspired many of the songs on the folk-rocker's latest album, We the Common.

Matthews joins a diverse cast — including Emmylou Harris, My Morning Jacket and Old Crow Medicine Show — to honor the late singer-songwriter on a new tribute album.

In the 19th century, Bolivar freed six countries from Spanish rule. Almost 200 years later, the warrior statesman is still a widely celebrated Latin American hero, but his story is also little understood. In a new biography, Marie Arana aims to separate fact from fiction.