Books & Literature

Entomologist Mark Moffett loves ants. He's devoted his career to studying the tiny insects: how they move, what they eat, when they attack their prey. Moffett's book, Adventures Among Ants, details his explorations around the world, tracking many a species through jungle forests and remote mountain passes.

Filmmaker Debra Granik knew right away that she wanted to adapt Daniel Woodrell's 2006 novel Winter's Bone for the big screen. Granik and Woodrell discuss the process of turning the meth-fueled family drama into an award-winning film.

If the Dead Rise Not, the latest book in Philip Kerr's Bernie Gunther detective series, shifts the saga from prewar Nazi Germany to 1954 Havana. Critic John Powers says the Chandleresque novel kept him glued to his deck chair for days.

Few topics are off-limits for the brash comedian: She has joked about her many face lifts, her husband's suicide, her bankruptcy and the sacrifices she made as a female performer. The documentary Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work follows the comedian as she fights to still make people laugh.

When the Hoover Dam was finished in 1935, it was three times larger than any other dam on the planet. Journalist Michael Hiltzik examines the humongous engineering achievement — including how the Hoover Dam was conceived, designed and built — in a new book, Colossus.

Linda Greenlaw took a decade off from commercial fishing, but the siren call of the deep blue water drew her back in. The only female swordfish boat captain in the United States recounts her latest adventure at sea in a memoir, Seaworthy.

Pawnshops, payday lenders, check cashers and rent-to-own companies take in $33 billion a year. In writing his new book, Broke, USA, Gary Rivlin discovered how the businesses justified making huge profits off the working poor.

The writer and filmmaker known for the cult classics Pink Flamingos, Cry-Baby and Hairspray reflects on the many people who have inspired him throughout his life — from playwright Tennessee Williams to the crazed martyr Saint Catherine of Siena — in a new memoir, Role Models.

Maureen Corrigan has booked an armchair getaway this summer with four books that will send her traveling through time. From turn-of-the-last-century New York tenements, to the 1939 World's Fair, to literary romance on the shores of Lake Geneva, these books will take you to places even the most luxurious vacations can't go.

The Daily Show's senior correspondent opens up about her crush on Jesus Christ, her introduction to sex and her ability to coax total strangers into conversation on national TV — all in her new memoir, I Know I Am, But What Are You?

Poet Jehanne Dubrow shares several poems from her third poetry collection, Stateside, about her experience as a Navy wife, trying to understand her own life while waiting for her spouse to return from war.

Private Life, the new novel by Pulitzer-Prize-winning author Jane Smiley, follows the life of a midwestern woman who moves with her new husband, an astronomer, to California at the start of the 20th century. Reviewer Maureen Corrigan says the story, which spans a half-century, is beautifully observed.

For 20 years, the Rev. Gregory Boyle has run Homeboy Industries, an anti-gang program that employs and is run by ex-gang members in Los Angeles. Boyle recently had to lay off most of his staff because of financial problems. He recounts the decades he's helped ex-gang members turn their lives around in a new memoir, Tattoos on the Heart.

Dominique Browning ran the magazine House & Garden until it folded in 2007. Her new memoir, Slow Love, reveals how Browning refocused her life by baking, playing the piano and wearing pajamas all day.

The Publisher, Alan Brinkley's biography of Henry Luce, digs into Luce's professional successes -- among them, Time and Life magazines -- the sway his politics held over his journalism empire, and his eccentric personal habits.

Robert Hass, the former poet laureate of the United States, explores one of Walt Whitman's most iconic poems, Song of Myself — and shares his opinion about why the poem still resonates 155 years after it was written.

On April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tenn. For the next two months, the man who shot him, James Earl Ray, was able to evade the FBI during a massive worldwide manhunt. Writer Hampton Sides traces the movements of both King and Ray in his new book, Hellhound on His Trail.

Wilbert Rideau went to prison in 1961 at the age of 19 for killing a woman during a bungled bank robbery. Prison changed him. He became the editor of the award-winning prison magazine The Angolite and was released with time served in 2005. His new memoir, In the Place of Justice, describes his 44 years behind bars.

The former poet laureate reflects on his brother's passing in the new poem "August Notebook: A Death." The elegy is included in Hass' new collection, The Apple Trees at Olema, which includes material from his first five works — as well as new poems on the art of storytelling and personal relations in a violent world.