From the NPR website: ” Some years ago, acclaimed novelist Mary Gordon wrote a memoir about her father, revealing how the man she had loved as a Catholic intellectual was actually a converted Jew, a rabid anti-Semite and an academic fraud.”

I tried to rewrite that, but could think of no other way to put it. Now, in Circling My Mother Gordon tackles the other half, and casts mom Anna Gagliano Gordon in a more favorable light. Spurred by Anna’s death in 2002 at the age of 94, Gordon began tracing the major events of mom’s life, from contracting polio at age three, enduring both World War II and immigration to the United States, and successfully bringing up Mary on her own (Dad died early on) while holding down a steady job. The result is this memoir, a loving testament to the woman. “I write about her,” says Gordon, “because I am a writer and it’s the only way that I can mourn her.”

Gordon appeared yesterday on NPR to discuss the project. Listen to the full interview.

Have you ever been to Provincetown? It’s a hell of a town. Nestled amongst tourist hamlets at the outermost tip of Cape Cod, it has inexplicably become a magnet for bohemian culture and boasts one of the largest gay populations in Massachusetts. Many a vacationing family has unwittingly driven out there only to their very foundations irrevocably rocked.

Hyperbole, yes, but the town still would make a fantastic setting for your first novel, except that Annie Dillard beat you to it. Her latest is called The Maytrees and follows the post-WWII marriage of bohemian couple Toby and Lou Bigelow from its tipsy, when-a-young-man’s-fancy-turns-to-love beginnings to its crumbling, adulterous descent some twenty-five years later.

Described on her barnesandnoble.com author page as being a “gregarious recluse”, Dillard emerged to briefly discuss The Maytrees on NPR over the weekend. Listen to the full interview and read an excerpt.

Philip K. Dick has, in the years since his death in 1982, supplied the basis for more okay/pretty good science fiction than any other person. Ever. Surprisingly, and unjustly, the man that gave us Blade Runner, Minority Report, A Scanner Darkly and Total Recall (among others) is still largely unknown to the general populous. Until now…

Literary hero Jonathan Letham, whose own novel You Don’t Love Me Yet appeared this past March, has edited and republished four of Dick’s novels — The Man in the High Castle, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, Ubik, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? — in one seminal volume: Philip K. Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s.

Letham talked about the project on NPR this past weekend, during which time he cited Dick as a major personal influence and discussed the author’s notoriety in the fledging sci-fi scene (”He’s sort of like what Lenny Bruce was to comedy in the 1960s.”) Listen to the full interview.

Do you remember Poppa Neutrino? I suspect very few people do, but for god’s sake they should! His accomplishment(s) are definitely for the history books. In 1998, Neutrino — who changed his name from David Pearlman after a brush with death some years earlier — built a raft from trash he found on the streets of New York. Pushing off from there, Neutrino sailed across the North Atlantic on his homemade raft, and actually succeeded.

And not only that, he also invented the Neutrino Clock Offense, a nearly unstoppable football play that a former New York Jets coach called “as innovative as the forward pass”.

He’s just that kind of guy.

Now, ten years after his historic voyage, Neutrino, seventy-four, is preparing to take another, similar one across the Pacific. It is around the preparation for this voyage that Alec Wilkinson has based his book, The Happiest Man in the World: An Account of the Life of Poppa Neutrino, which serves both as a biography and an in depth explanation of Neutrino’s philosophical base, a concept called Triads. He believes that that in order for a person to be truly happy, he or she must define their three deepest desires and pursue them without end.

The fun doesn’t end there: Wilkinson appeared on NPR just yesterday. Listen to the full interview.

Jewish terrorism analyst Solomon Rosner lies dead in a hotel in Amsterdam, and it is Gabriel Allon’s job to sift through Rosner’s files. It’s in doing this that Allon discovers two things:

1. Rosner had requested an emergency meeting with Allon’s employers, Israeli Intelligence, not twenty-four hours before his death.
2. The target is the daughter of an American ambassador to the Court of St. James.

Allon appears seconds to late to save the girl from being brutally kidnapped, but reveals his face to her captors, setting in motion of chain of events that ties Allon forever to the girl and places in his hands the fate of Western Europe.

Dan Silva is routinely hailed as one of the most gifted spy novelists alive, and Gabriel Allon, the art-restorer/part-time spy/”the legendary but wayward son of Israeli Intelligence”, is perhaps his best known character. Appearing in no less than seven books so far, Allon has gone to hell and back to give us a thrill, and the seventh, The Secret Servent, is no exception, addressing relevant but touchy issues such as Islamic fundamentalism and the moral boundaries of intelligence and interrogation.

Silva’s been in the news a fair amount this week. NPR reviewer Alan Cheuse says nice things about him here, and Today has , posted the first chapter on its website.

Cleveland Indians superstar Jay Alcazar has been accused of his rape, and damned if his manager Howie Traveler is going to leave him high and dry. Before you run to flip on SportsCenter, perhaps you should make a quick stop at the NPR website.

“What! NPR doesn’t cover sports! You’ve gone mad, boy!”

No, you’ve gone mad! NPR recently sat down with sports writer Frank Deford, in whose novel The Entitled, you’ll find Alcazar and Traveler faced with decisions that could end their careers or land them in jail. To complicate things further, Alcazar has been around the bases a few times off the field, too, and when Traveler walks by his player’s hotel room on one such night, he sees that will make him continually question everything he’s put his career on the line for.

And we don’t find out who is right ’til the very end!

When asked why he chose baseball to frame his plot, Deford responded, “the easiest thing to write about and I guess the most fun to write about …. Every day there [are] winners and losers and there’s drama and there’s joy and there’s glamour. And the guys playing it are young, and so lots of times they say all the wrong things.”

True enough. Listen to the interview and read the article here.

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.

The Clash, which for a number of years enjoyed the title of “the only band that mattered”, has emerged as a lasting symbol of the politics and noise of 1970s punk, and is one of the few bands from that era that still enjoys any sort of cultural relevance. They were the first band to take punk beyond its three chord boundaries, mixing together elements of reggae, rockabilly and R&B into a wholly unique sound that served as an elegant platform for front man Joe Strummer’s highly politicized lyrics. Unfortunately, after dozens of London Calling reissues and hundreds of Rolling Stone and NME retrospectives, many of the details of the band and Strummer’s life have been glossed over or lost. Thank god for Chris Salewicz, a feature writer for NME during the band’s heyday. Some thirty years after the fact, he brings us Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer, a biography that spans the first raucous days of punk to Strummer’s tumultuous, conflicted post-Clash years. Salewicz sat down with NPR recently and discussed one of the central themes of the book: how does a figurehead in an anarchist movement, one that shuns material wealth, deal with commercial success?

Listen to the full interview here.

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”.

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.