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David Lipsky says that his favorite comic, Runaways, is both a brilliant reading experience — and an embarrassment festival. The tiny digests by Brian K. Vaughan have been a fount of guilt, awkwardness and grave personal doubts, but he still pulls them out on the subway, because they are just that good.

In a powerful memoir, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Natasha Trethewey surveys the storm-battered landscape of the place she once called home. Beyond Katrina is a powerful meditation on things long gone that will never come back.

Writer Lev Grossman was raised on a strict diet of literary classics — until he discovered T.H. White's masterful retelling of the King Arthur tale. In The Once and Future King, what was once as stiff and two-dimensional as a medieval tapestry becomes rich and real and devastatingly sad.

Shaun Parker moved from Menasha, Wis., to Los Angeles to pursue his dream to work in film. After nearly two decades of setbacks and stalling, Parker began crafting a new life story -- one that got a kick-start with an appearance at the storytelling series Mortified.

Nine years in the making, the author's new book explores the story of a country through the story of a Minnesota couple and their best friend. Franzen tells NPR's Guy Raz that getting it to the page was a dark -- and at times stormy -- journey.

Math is the only truly exact science, but numbers can also be used to fudge and deceive. Author Charles Seife explores the ways numbers can lie in his new book, Proofiness: The Dark Arts of Mathematical Deception.

The Colombian politician was on her way to a remote village when she was abducted by members of the FARC in 2002. At first she thought she'd be held for only a few weeks — but then six years passed. She says she didn't want to make it easy on her captors despite being tortured, underfed and forced to march through the rain forest.

Real archaeologists are nothing like Indiana Jones, but that doesn't mean their world isn't dramatic and dangerous. Author Craig Childs sheds a light on pot hunters and relic diggers in his new book, Finders Keepers: A Tale of Archaeological Plunder and Obsession.

Even in an age of sexting and online porn, Blume's 1975 teen novel is still considered controversial. Writer J. Courtney Sullivan says she picked up Forever... for the scandal — but she stayed for the feminist lesson. At its core, the novel is about young women who make responsible choices — and have sex on their own terms.

Host Guy Raz talks to Karl Case, a professor of economics at Wellesley College and inventor of the Case-Shiller housing price index, about whether it's a good idea to buy a house in the current real estate market.