Soul Singer Mavis Staples' "Time" Is Now

Playwright John O'Keefe has a new one-man show called Shimmer, about his adolescence. He joins Fresh Air to perform a short excerpt.

Apelfeld is a Holocaust survivor; his family was sent to a concentration camp, despite their being non-practicing Jews. This history informs much of Apelfeld's work, including his new novel, For Every Sin.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan is no fan of minimalist literature, which she derides for its familiar, navel-gazing themes. By contrast, she admires T. Coraghesson's expansive, political, and historical fiction. Unfortunately, his approach is better suited to the novel, rather than the short stories in his latest collection, If the River Was Whiskey.