Comedian Bill Maher's new book contains heartfelt essays about the condition of our country. There are also some rules — for things like typography, warning signs and lamp cords.

There are many ways to describe the season between Thanksgiving and New Years, but for cooks, it's cooking season. People across the country are dusting off pots, pans and favorite cookbooks to prepare for multiple holiday dinners and all the meals in between. Host Audie Cornish speaks with Susan Chang of NPR's Kitchen Window about the best cookbooks to cook from or give for the holiday season.

Kurt Vonnegut liked to present himself as the American Mark Twain, but the real man underneath that image was considerably more complicated and damaged.

Julian Barnes' Man Booker award-winning The Sense of an Ending investigates the power of self-delusion and how our memories are more edited than we believe.

Based on Brian Selznick's 2007 children's book, Martin Scorsese's latest film, Hugo, pays tribute to early 20th-century French filmmaker — and cinematic trailblazer — Georges Melies.

Barron Lerner, a professor of medicine and public health at Columbia University, wrote One for the Road, about the history of drunk driving in America. And what he found was that the legal limit is very lenient, especially compared with other countries. And there is little political will to change it.

On Wednesday, author Jesmyn Ward won the National Book Award. Her novel, Salvage The Bones, takes place in a small town during a hurricane. The story was based on her own experience of surviving hurricane Katrina, which she describes in this essay.

Stephen Greenblatt's The Swerve, a dramatic account of the Renaissance-era rediscovery of the Latin poet Lucretius, won for nonfiction. Salvage the Bones, set in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, by Jesmyn Ward, won for fiction.