I really have no idea how you could not know this by now, but just in case, the seventh and final Harry Potter novel is being released worldwide on July 21. The series is by far the most popular in the history of publishing, so successful in fact that its author, J.K. Rowling, is now worth an estimated 1.1 billion pounds, significantly more than the net worth of the Queen of England. It seems as though literally everyone has at some point picked up a Harry Potter book, seen one of the five movies, or dressed up as Dumbledore and appeared in public. Now, on the eve of the grand series finale, literally everyone is trying to make sense of it all.

Scholastic editor Arther A. Levine spoke with NPR recently about how he first discovered the Harry Potter phenomenon, and how it has ballooned into more than he could ever imagine. Listen to the full interview here. Under that same link, you will also find an interview Rowling did with NPR in 1998, before the books struck it big, in which she discussed the origins of the idea.

On The Diane Rehm Show yesterday, an author, a movie critic, and the headmistress of a Harry Potter fan site gathered to trace the ten year history of Harry in all its various forms, and to offer predictions for the final book, ominously titled Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Listen to that interview here.

And finally, Today has devoted an entire section of its website to the books. It boasts various interviews with Rowling herself, the stars of the movies, and pillars of the publishing industry, who are making gleeful predictions of how well The Deathly Hallows will sell. Find out more than you ever wanted to know here.

In the past few years, it seems as if people are finally taking notice of all that’s going on in Africa. Movies like Blood Diamond and The Last Kind of Scotland, and books like Dave Eggers’ What is the What and Philip Gourevitch’sWe Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda highlight both the beauty of the continent and the atrocities it has had to endure. Author Aminatta Forna makes a significant contribution to that list with her newest, Ancestor Stones, a novel that takes on Sierra Leonian life through the eyes of four sisters over the course of eighty years.

From Sierra Leone herself, Forna saw her father hanged for leading the popular opposition against an increasingly tyrannical dictator. She fled to Britain where she could only watch from afar until granted the chance to go back two years ago to interview dozens of women about their wartime experiences, noting that women have a distinct view of the war. Where with men, war is all about where they were and what they did, “The experience of war is different for women,” she said in an interview with NPR. “Every woman in that country lived under the constant threat of rape and sexual assault. In my family’s village, on a single day when the rebels invaded, every single woman was raped and some of them were taken away.” It was those interviews that would become the source material for her four sisters and their wartime experiences.

Listen to the full interview.

Sixth time’s a charm in the case of Jon Clinch, whose novel, titled simply Finn is an elaborate expansion on the life of Huckleberry Finn’s notorious father, Pap. Clinch wrote his first novel five separate times before arriving finally at a version he felt was suitable. Of writing novels, Clinch, who spoke with NPR this past weekend, said “It’s like building a house out of raisins. It’s the most bizarre thing.” Regardless, he says the failed efforts were still valuable time, and “honestly, I’m just as happy that they’re not out there dragging behind me.” Clinch was discovered on Backspace, BKSP.org, when his current agent read the ten pages Clinch had posted and asked to see more.

And aren’t we glad he did? Finn imagines the life of “Pap” Finn, father to the famous Huckleberry, who appears only briefly, and primarily as a corpse, in Twain’s original text. Clinch took full advantage of the more Gothic aspects of the novel, creating a cast of murdering, moon-shining characters the gives the queen of southern depravity, Flannery O’Conner, a run for her money.

Listen to the full interview.

No, it’s not the name of that crappy band that practices next door to you, its the premise behind Matthew Sharpe’s newest novel, Jamestown. Silly you.

Sharpe has taken the now legendary story of Virginia’s first colony, and reimagined it in the 21st century, shortly after the Chrysler building as mysteriously fallen into the Earth’s gaping maw. A band of rogue survivors gets it into their heads that they’re going to travel down to southern Virginia, find oil and exploit the native population. Members of the group have assumed the roles of famous Jamestownians of yore: Pocahantas, John Smith, Powhawtan, all with clever tweaks on the qualities generally associated with originals. By juxtaposing the traditional narrative against an apocalyptic backdrop that modern readers can more easily identify with, Sharpe has illuminated an American legend in ways never before conceived.

And aren’t you lucky, NPR has put an excerpt on its website.

Lucky Santangelo is back, and you should be excited.

Jackie Collin’s mafia-princess-turned-Vegas-mogul makes a most triumphant return in Drop Dead Beautiful, a sequel to 1999’s Dangerous Kiss. The latest finds Santangelo simultaneously planning a mega-resort and her father’s 95th birthday, unaware that family-rival Anthony Bonnar is plotting revenge! From there, Collins takes the reader through a whirlwind of mafia justice, double-crossings, Internet predators, and, if Dr. Pepper isn’t enough for you, some supposedly fantastic sex scenes involving Bonnar’s wife, their Mexican gardener and a federal drug enforcement agent, though not necessarily at the same time.

Collins appeared on The Today Show yesterday, flustering Matt Lauer and discussing the plot of the book in more detail, the history of Lucky Santangelo, the sex scenes and Wolfgang Puck’s newest drink, The Jackie Collins.

Watch the interview here, and read more about Collins herself here.

“I have to convince the experts,” says Greg Bear on his style of “hard” science fiction — novels based on existing and plausible science. “These are the guys that spend their all their time in labs doing tests. They know when it’s not going to work.” The idea for Bear’s latest work, Quantico, came to him while working alongside the FBI to devise real-life methods for combating terrorism. THAT is how hard Bear is.

But he noticed something, though: Among all these new ideas and new technologies, there was very little addressing domestic terrorism. With echoes of the 2001 Anthrax scare still ringing in his head, he set to work creating a world in which domestic terrorism is the chief fear in America and dangerous pathogens and viruses are being created, both deliberately and inadvertently, in basements all across the country. Bear’s ultimate question is, how do we as a nation combat something so nebulous when we can’t just go in and blow everything all up.

Watch the full interview.

Does the name Jane Austen conjure nightmares of high-school English class? Of being called out in front of the whole class for not doing the reading? Of trying to decipher paragraph-long sentences? Me too.

But ’tis not the case for the protagonist of Shannon Hale’s latest novel, Austenland, which involves coming-of-age in Pembrook Park, a Regency England-era theme park for those women who never quite found their Mr. Darcys. Hale sat down with NPR and discusses her real-life love of Jane Austen, her fascination with Colin Firth’s rendering of Mr. Darcy and her qualms about undertaking Jane Austen, even in satire.

Listen to the full interview here.

Don DeLillo, author most notably of Underworld and White Noise, seems like an author that does not enjoy writing, but rather writes out of a sense of obligation to himself and to the reader. His books tackle grandiose topics — death, love, popular culture — in grandiose ways and the results are always lucid and startling. No different is his latest, Falling Man, a novel of the weeks immediately following 9/11. The main character, Keith Neudecker, survives the attack, stumbling out of the North Tower and back home to desperately try to reconcile his old life with this new existence.

DeLillo sat down with All Things Considered, and said the whole book started with one photograph of a man walking from the rubble, holding somebody else’s suitcase. “I didn’t know who the man was at first, but what I did know was the fact that the briefcase he was carrying was not his and that seemed to suggest a mystery that needed to be solved.”

Listen to the whole interview here.

Middlesex Jeffery Eugendies’ Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, was the June pick for Oprah’s Book Club. The story, which you really should read, follows the course of a genetic mutation as it is passed down through three generations of the Stephanides family, emerging finally in their young daughter Calliope, born a hermaphrodite but raised a girl until puberty, when complications arise.

On the Book Club Web site, you can find an introduction to the book, an in-depth bio of Eugenides — who is also well known for his novel, The Virgin Suicides, which Sofia Coppola turned into a movie of the same name in 2003 — and a discussion of nature vs. nurture, which is actually fairly interesting.

I know you are bored at work reading this, so why not check it out?

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.