J.D. Salinger, author of "The Catcher in the Rye," died yesterday at age 91. The critically acclaimed novel about teenage angst shocked and inspired the world of literature for decades, while its author refused interviews and eventually withdrew to a small town in New Hampshire.

Fifty years ago today, Truman Capote came across an article in The New York Times about an entire family murdered in their Kansas home. He immediately began to investigate the crime and write what became the first major piece of literary non-fiction: "In Cold Blood." Patricia Cornwell, best-selling crime writer, and true-crime television journalist Bill Kurtis talk with us about Capote's work, why it remains popular and how it helped launch our national obsession with true-crime journalism.

If you go to any national park or protected wilderness in the U.S. today, you will find the friendly, heroic figure of the forest ranger: a uniformed caretaker of natural splendor, and watcher for forest fires. Oftentimes, these forest heroes go unnoticed, but in his new book, Timothy Egan writes about how forest rangers banded together, along with President Theodore Roosevelt, to control a blazing inferno.

We talk with Pulizer Prize–winning author Timothy Egan about his new book, "The Big Burn," on the huge forest fire back in 1910 that blazed through forests in Washington, Idaho and Montana.

Margaret Atwood, the Canadian writer famous for her inventive and dark novels — including "Oryx and Crake," "The Handmaid's Tale" and "The Blind Assassin" — talks with us about science, devotion,and her new novel, "The Year of the Flood." Unlike her previous standalone works, this book is something of a companion piece to "Oryx and Crake," involving characters new and old. It also includes a separate "soundtrack" of hymns about God, the earth and animals.

I've never gravitated toward Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are." I know, terrible. As a kid I thought the 338-word masterpiece was creepy, and imagined myself being punished by my mother much more severely, had I spazzed out like Max did in the book.  Curious then, that I have three copies of the Caldecott Medal award-winning story in my home - the embossed gold sticker on the edition I had as a kid, ironically, made the book a premium in my developing library.  Two other copies were given to my son a few years ago and are on a shelf in his room.

Anyway, Max was a bad kid, man. And he was rewarded by getting to hang out with big Muppets: exactly how I imagined the creatures then, and, in a cool coincidence, the way Spike Jonez had Jim Henson's Creature Shop make them in his new "Where the Wild Things Are" flick, being released today. (...continue reading)