Bill Streever is intimately familiar with extreme temperatures. To write 2010’s “Cold,” the Alaskan biologist visited some of the world’s chilliest locales. Now he’s...

Stephen Hess found good news where no one would expect to find good news: in the news biz. “People really love being journalists,” says Hess, the author of “Whatever Hap...

Some people know Dave Barry as the author of such fiction books as “Peter and the Starcatchers,” “Big Trouble” and his latest, “Insane City.” Some know him as a fo...

As vice presidents who did not become president go, Al Gore gives hope to those who have held a job that basically consists of checking whether the president’s still alive a...

The secrets of Scientology are not so secret anymore. Magazine articles, personal testimonials and even a “South Park” episode have exposed the deepest doctrines of the be...

Presidents talk a lot — it’s part of their job. And some of the words they use are pretty interesting, particularly to Paul Dickson, author of the new book “Words from t...

Who keeps us sane in troubled times? It’s Calvin Trillin, pundit poet. He reformats the news in rhymes, Which sounds so tough to us — although it Makes some old jokes newl...

Behind every great Washington-area chef is a great tale: a childhood memory, a professional U-turn, a reality-TV competition, an unswerving love for the community. That’s ev...

Self-described “dissident feminist” writer and professor Camille Paglia has made a career of questioning (usually with pointed, arch humor) pretty much everything in cultu...

The subtitle for David Skinner’s book “The Story of Ain’t” could have been “Word Nerds Fight It Out.” Instead, Skinner, who will speak at Politics and Prose on Sun...

Poet Mary Oliver speaks in much the same way that she writes. Which is to say that the 77-year-old Pulitzer and National Book Award winner drops phrases in casual conversation...

Zadie Smith, one of the western world’s most prominent young novelists, has a new book out: “NW.” There’s no way you’ll have time to finish it before her reading Thu...

Though the epithet “People of the Book” refers to Jews’ devotion to the Torah, we feel it can be more inclusive during the Jewish Literary Festival. People of the Biogra...

A.M. Homes’ writing — fiction and non — is daring and dangerous: Like Raymond Carver (the early ’80s king of irredeemable characters), Homes, 50, brings readers inside...

Now that the presidential debates have begun, everybody’s got an opinion about how this thing is going to turn out. Some have loud, kind of paranoid ones. Others have more r...