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In Make the Bread, Buy the Butter, Jennifer Reese tries her recipes for foods that you might never think to make at home. She walks NPR's Melissa Block through make-your-own marshmallows. Turns out, it's not so hard.

Enter the haunting imagination of the 2011 Nobel laureate, whose Swedish-language poems — rich in silence and metaphor — survive translation particularly well.

John Brown, the man who led the 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, Va., may be among the most polarizing figures in American history. To some, he's a traitor and terrorist; to others, he's a hero. Tony Horwitz discusses his book Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War.

F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald wed in 1920, and the two went on to have a famously turbulent literary marriage. Would Zelda have been better off without her husband? Novelist Therese Anne Fowler says, "They were two sides of one coin."

Author and sociologist David Cunningham speaks with Fresh Air's Terry Gross about the origins of cross burnings and white hoods, and why North Carolina had more Klan members during the height of the civil rights movement than all other Southern states combined.

Companies and governments have access to an unprecedented amount of digital information, much of it personal: what we buy, what we search for, what we read online. Kenneth Cukier, co-author of the book Big Data, describes how data-crunching is becoming the new norm.

David Sedaris' latest essay collection, Let's Explore Diabetes With Owls, mixes his trademark quirky observations with less successful fictional asides in which he takes on the voices of assorted ultraconservative bad guys.

There's a lot of talk going around about the end of big publishing as we know it, but soon-to-be Hachette Book Group CEO Michael Pietsch says he and his kind still have a lot to offer — especially in the age of self-publishing.

"Mister hit Josephine with the palm of his hand across her left cheek and it was then she knew she would run." So begins Tara Conklin's debut novel, The House Girl, which links the stories of an artistically talented 19th-century slave and an ambitious 21st-century lawyer.

Questlove, drummer and co-founder of The Roots, is coming out with a memoir in June called Mo' Meta Blues, co-written with Ben Greenman. The musician spoke with NPR intern Lidia Jean Kott about why the movie Spring Breakers made him feel like less of a rock star, and whether you can ever outgrow being a dweeb.