Barrie Hardymon
Barrie Hardymon is the Senior Editor at NPR's Weekend Edition, and the lead editor for books. You can hear her on the radio talking everything from Middlemarch to middle grade novels, and she's also a frequent panelist on NPR's podcasts It's Been A Minute and Pop Culture Happy Hour. She went to Juilliard to study viola, ended up a cashier at the Strand, and finally got a degree from Johns Hopkins' Writing Seminars which qualified her solely for work in public radio. She lives and reads in Washington, DC.
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Musician John Legend is using his national platform to elevate local races for district attorney — endorsing progressive prosecutors who prioritize preventative solutions over incarceration. -
Lauren Tarshis's I Survived series takes kids through famous historical disasters — and more recent ones like the California wildfires. So they're perfect pandemic books for anxious little readers.
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The Mirror & the Light will be the last novel in Mantel's acclaimed trilogy about King Henry VIII's powerful chief minister Thomas Cromwell. "I fold my hands. It's over to you, the reader," she says.
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The novelist, who died last week at 91, was often slammed by critics as a frivolous sex-and-shopping writer. But her luxuries were meticulously researched and her sex scenes gloriously shameless.
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It's hard to remember a world before Harry Potter. But it's been 20 years since readers in the U.S. were first introduced to the boy wizard, whose story has captivated audiences since.
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The election in southwest Pennsylvania on March 13 is being closely watched by Democrats and Republicans looking for early clues about how Americans will vote in the midterm elections.
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Nevermind that she didn't like kids all that much — Brown wrote books they adored. One of her previously unpublished picture books has just come out, as has a new biography of this brave, bold author.
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Rowling studied real criminal case studies to write the latest in the Cormoran Strike mystery series — "It was horrible," she says. But writing under a pseudonym remains "a very private pleasure."
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If the cold and snow has you feeling, well, frigid, here's the solution. Five titillating titles that'll put you in a steamy frame of mind.
