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As an NPR critic, Pop Culture Happy Hour host Aisha Harris helps make sense of how movies, music and TV inform our everyday lives. In her new book of essays, Wannabe, Harris applies that practice inward, reflecting on the impact Stevie Wonder and Sex and the City have had on her own upbringing. -
When P-22 – the puma that lived in LA's Griffith Park – died in December, Angelenos mourned the loss of one of their wildest celebrities. In his new book, Open Throat, Henry Hoke pays homage to the late cat in a different way; he takes on the voice of a mountain lion living beneath the Hollywood sign, pondering community and climate change and gender identity.
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In Nicole Cuffy's novel, Dances, CeCe Cordell becomes the first Black woman to be named principal dancer at a major ballet company; but this big break also comes with big expectations. -
Today's episode features interviews with two very high-profile officials who have written thrillers. -
Journalist Rachel Louise Snyder has covered gender-based violence around the world for a number of media outlets and in her widely-acclaimed book, No Visible Bruises. But in her new memoir, Women We Buried, Women We Burned, she examines the role it played in her own life. -
Jennifer De Leon's new YA novel, Borderless, tells the story of a Guatemalan teenager named Maya. Though she has a rich and fulfilling life in her home country, circumstances arise that push Maya and her mother towards the U.S. border, where they're separated by immigration officials. -
Today's episode features interviews with two poets who revealed different sides of themselves through memoirs. -
Elise Hu moved to Seoul, South Korea to set up an NPR bureau and report on the geopolitical tensions of the mid-2010s. But her new book, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture from the K-Beauty Capital, focuses on a different, albeit inescapable, part of life there – beauty standards and the industry driving them. -
Kennedy Ryan's The Kingmaker portrays two seemingly opposite characters – a Yavapai-Apache activist and the heir to an oil fortune – falling in love, and dealing with the complicated fallout of their differences. -
For decades, male editors told women they couldn't be reporters because of congenital inaccuracies, or because they required having a male escort to report at night. In her new book, Undaunted: How Women Changed American Journalism, Brooke Kroeger provides a historical record of reporters like Ida B. Wells, Nellie Bly, and Gloria Steinem, who went ahead and did it anyway. -
Alex is 22 years old and staying with a much older, wealthy man in the Hamptons. She's the protagonist of Emma Cline's new novel, an outsider looking in at the perfectly pruned life people of a certain social status lead in these towns. -
It's been three years since George Floyd's murder. Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison prosecuted the former police officers who killed Floyd, but accountability and justice is not always found in state-sponsored violence against Black Americans.
