Jazz Great Wynton Marsalis called it “ghetto minstrelsy” while rapper Snoop Dogg said “hip-hop is what makes the world go around”. Some have said that it simply perpetuates countless age-old stereotypes while others insist that hip-hop gives a creative outlet to urban youth. If the genre has done one thing over the course of its twenty plus year existence, it has sparked controversy. Its lyrical content and legitimacy as an art form have been questioned again and again, but those who sing its praises say it is a product of it’s inner-city environment. Regardless of what they say, hip-hop has become one of the most popular genres of music on the planet and shows no signs of waining. It must be on to something…

Michael Eric Dyson certainly thinks so. A Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, Dyson has become one of the foremost thinkers of the “hip-hop intelligentsia”, and was voted one of the 100 most influential black Americans by Ebony. His latest project is Know What I Mean?: Reflections on Hip-Hop, a series of essays that consider some of the pertinent issues surrounding the genre, from its often times profane and sexist lyrical content to the inadvertent self-parody caused by its rampant commercial success. The book also features an intro by Jay-Z and an outro by Nas.

Watch the Today interview, and read the prelude>.

When tasked by the National Endowment for the Arts to put together a book of solider’s writings, editor Andrew Carroll didn’t expect to find “The Cat”, a poem written by then newly-deployed Marine Ryan Alexander about a relationship he fostered with a pregnant cat. “You have this very stoic culture in the armed forces, where they’re not encouraged to and there isn’t a lot of expressing oneself,” Carroll says. “You do what you’re told, essentially, and there aren’t a lot of opportunities to say, ‘Here’s how I feel about that.’”

Operation Homecoming is the culmination of the NEA’s project. The organization drafted the help of Tom Clancy, Mark Bowden, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, Jeff Shaara, and Marilyn Nelson, who encouraged U.S. Military Personnel to start writing about what they were experiencing, what they felt. Carroll came in and edited together the volume, which contains pieces from soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as writing from the families they left behind.

Carroll was interview on NPR recently. Listen to the full interview, and read an excerpt of work, including “The Cat”.

Some years ago, suburbanite mystery writer Jon Katz packed up and bought an upstate New York farm in hopes of giving his border collies the best life possible. Now, some five books later, Katz has discovered what that really entails. His sixth in the series, Dog Days, is series of dispatches from Bedlam farm, which now boasts the beloved dogs, as well as sheep, steers and cow, donkeys, a barn cat, a rooster and three hens. Katz, who writes about farm life for Slate and co-hosts “Dog Talk”, a public radio talk show, dropped in on Diane Rehm to discuss how hard it is to promote harmony between animals, why his donkeys like Willie Nelson best, and how his collies continually surprise him.

Listen to the full interview.

In Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, there is a prison there known as the Wire, where those suspected of terrorism are detained, oftentimes without formal charges brought against them. To pass the time, many of them have turned to writing poetry. Attorney Mark Falkoff, who represents 17 Yemeni prisoners, discovered this and edited together a volume of detainee poetry entitled Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak.

“It wasn’t just the first poem I’ve written in captivity,” says Moazzam Begg, a poet who was detained in Guantanamo for 3 years. “It’s the first poem I’ve ever written in my life of any meaning at all. It has particular significance because it describes, demonstrates and is a message to people outside of Guantanamo Bay of what I feel and what is happening around my surroundings.”

The poems, Falkoff says, are not at all a security risk, despite the army’s suggestion that the detainees were not writing for “the sake of art”, but rather using poetry as “another weapon to attack the Western ideals against which they are at war”.

You can read excerpts and listen to the full interview here.

NPR’s Book Czar Alan Cheuse has written a quick and largely favorable review of Rick Moody’s newest collection of short fiction, Right Livelihoods, which includes three novellas, The Omega Force, K & K, which Cheuse notes as the low point of the book, but followed finally by The Albertine Notes, an apocalyptic tale that describes a dirty bomb attack on Manhattan and the ensuing addiction to Albertine, a new drug that swallows millions of New York minds.
Listen to the full, if brief, review here.

Esquire, perhaps the only periodical to have John McCain and Jessica Beil on its cover in the same year, has hit the big time: in a press release, the magazine announced it would be featuring The Gingerbread Girl, a 21,000-word novella by the guitar player from the Rock Bottom Remainders, Stephen King!

Editor-in-Chief David Granger spoke with the Associated Press last week: “Over the last year, we’ve been trying to breathe life back into magazine fiction. The best way to do that is to publish nothing other than event fiction—stories that have something in addition to their literary merit to call attention to themselves.”

King’s story, which appears in the July issue, is the latest in a rich tradition of Esquire fiction. Truman Copote’s “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” was first published there, as was Norman Mailer’s “An American Dream.” Not bad company to keep.

In this day and age, it seems as though cheating is more commonplace than successful monogamy. Maybe you’ve cheated, or been cheated on, or simply known someone who’s been involved with it. Whatever the relation, it’s touched millions of people’s lives, but never before has it been taken head on like this: The Other Woman: Twenty-one Wives and Lovers Talk Openly About Sex, Deception, Love, and Betrayal.

Edited by Victoria Zackheim, the book contains memoirs and essays from women on both sides of the coin. The Today Show has both posted the first chapter on its Website, and caught up with a number of these women, assembling their stories in a clip viewable here.

In 2004, NPR correspondent Rob Gifford traveled across China, following a single highway, Route 312, west from Shanghai for nearly 3,000 miles. He observed the booming economy behind China’s rise to power, but also discovered overwhelming poverty and numerous other things that could undermine the country’s new-found role on the world stage. Part On the Road, part brilliant social commentary, his observations, originally a seven-part series on NPR, have been collected here in China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power.

Gifford spoke with NPR’s Steve Inskeep late last month: “I’d just get on a bus, and you just find the four people sitting around you all have amazing stories about their life in the countryside or their life in the city. You know, everywhere you go, you just ask the people, ‘What are you doing? What’s your life like?’ And they just want to talk about it, and that’s really what the book is.”

Gifford stopped by The Diane Rehm Show earlier today, during which time he presented a mixture of humorous travel stories with his larger theories on the social and economic progressions of one of the most important countries in the world. Listen to the interview here and read the NPR article and excerpt here.

Emma Forrest has noticed a phenomenon: women share secrets not just with hairdressers, but with their masseurs, Chi Gong teachers, bikini waxers and aestheticians, too. Though who can blame them, really? Those are the people she trusts to keep her aesthetically on track and looking as she feels she should. The sort of intimacy that warrants secret-sharing is inherent in the relationship from the start.

Forrest took this concept and ran with it, assembling essays on how personal grooming has effected personal relationships from notables such as Rose McGowan, Minnie Driver, Francesca Lia Block and Judy Raines. Damage Control: Women on the Therapists, Beauticians, and Trainers Who Navigate Their Bodies, and The Today Show has made the introduction available on their Website. You may view it here.

Remember that book, Hate Mail from Cheerleaders and Other Adventures in the Life of Reilly, by that Sports Illustrated-columnist Rick Reilly? Remember that? It was a collection of his funniest, wittiest and most touching columns from the course of 9 years occupying the back page of SI. Yeah, that one. Well, now you can see what that guy looks like, because CBS has posted a clip of the interview with Reilly on its Website, in which he discusses some of the columns contained therein and why his book makes a great fathers’ day gift.