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.

In the latest of a series of books with hyper-literal titles, historian and journalist Dan Kurzman brings us Special Mission: Hitler’s Secret Plot to Seize the Vatican and Kidnap Pope Pius the XII, a fascinating look at one of the increasingly infirm dictator’s late-stage plots.

Fearing that Pius XII would speak out against the Nazi’s actions against the Jews, he ordered the SS leader in Italy, Gen. Karl Wolff, to carry out the deed. Kurzman, then writing for The Washington Post, was the first to interview Wolff after the war. Describing him as a successful opportunist, Kurzman explains Nazi/Vatican relations from the 1933 Concordat, the ultimate reason for Pius XII’s silence throughout the war to that point.

Kurzman was interviewed by NPR’s All Things Considered today, during which time he described Wolff’s daring betrayal of the Fürer and his hopes that the pope might be an instrument in negotiating peace and a subsequent Anglo-American-German offensive against the unruly Soviets.

Read an excerpt and listen to the full interview here.