NPR's Book of the Day

Singer-songwriter David Archuleta and writer Lindy West are both out with memoirs that deal with letting go of the past. First, Archuleta was the runner-up on the seventh season of American Idol. Underneath that success, he struggled privately with his queer identity and his relationship to the Mormon church. In today’s episode, he talks with Here & Now’s Indira Lakshmanan about his new memoir Devout. Then, Lindy West tells NPR’s Leila Fadel about Adult Braces, the cross-country road trip that reset the Shrill writer’s life, and how she opened herself to the idea of a non-monogamous marriage.

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Next month, tech giant Apple will turn 50, marking five decades since Steve Jobs and his co-founders set out to put powerful technology in the hands of everyday people. David Pogue joined NPR’s Michel Martin for a conversation about his new book Apple: The First 50 Years – and said he sees the company’s story as one of “focus.” In today’s episode, Martin and the CBS News correspondent discuss Steve Jobs as a Rorschach test, Jobs’ relationship with Steve Wozniak and Apple’s lesser-known third founder, Ronald Wayne, and a time when the company faced bankruptcy.

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The narrator in Black Bag is an unnamed and mostly unemployed actor until a professor offers him the starring role in an experiment. The narrator is asked to zip himself in a black bag and sit in the back of a lecture theater. Luke Kennard’s new novel is based on an experiment from 1967, in which a professor set out to explore “the mere-exposure effect.” In today’s episode, Kennard talks with NPR’s Scott Simon about why the protagonist takes up this non-role – and what the experiment reveals about masculinity.

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Fred Brathwaite — aka ‘Fab 5 Freddy’ — is a pioneering multimedia artist credited with bringing hip hop to the mainstream in the 1980s. His new memoir Everybody’s Fly looks back at Brathwaite’s life in New York, beginning when art forms like rap, graffiti, breakdance, and DJ remained mostly underground. In today’s episode, Brathwaite joins NPR’s Adrian Ma to discuss his inspiration behind the memoir, and how his widespread artistic collaborations throughout the 1970s, 80s and 90s synthesized culture and propelled it forward.

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In Sarvat Hasin’s novel Strange Girls, a Pakistani woman and an American woman meet at a London-based university in the 2010s. There, they quickly become close, bonding over a shared dissatisfaction with the definition of femininity available to them. In today’s episode, Hasin joins NPR’s Juana Summers for a conversation about the intense relationship that forms between the two protagonists, the way friendships can be strained in the post-college years, and what makes this novel a kind of “period piece.”

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