New Zadie Smith

How do you write an accurate memoir without perpetuating stereotypes? Jesmyn Ward struggled with this when writing about absent black fathers and husbands in her book Men We Reaped. "I also had to figure out how much of the truth do I tell, how do I make the truth as balanced as I possibly can? How do I make these people as complicated and as human and as unique and as multifaceted as I possibly can? For me, that was the way I attempted to counteract some of that criticism," she told The Rumpus.

In her scathing, yet utterly necessary, review of Steve Jobs and its subject, Maureen Tkacik writes that "with any luck future generations will saddle Steve Jobs, the brand, with the blemish of all the jobs (small 'j') a once-great nation relinquished because of brand-name billionaires like Jobs."

Tim Weiner won the Pulitzer Prize for Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Then, four years after its publication, he received a box of J. Edgar Hoover's "personal files on [FBI] intelligence operations between 1945 and 1972" from a well-connected D.C. lawyer. That treasure trove of information has since wound up in his recently published book, Enemies: A History of the FBI, and he sat with NPR's Terry Gross to talk all about it.