Parenting & Families

Maureen Corrigan reviews Lorrie Moore's most recent novel.

Rafael Yglesias' novel is inspired by his wife, Margaret, who died in 2004. A Happy Marriage spans their three-decade relationship, from their courtship to her battle with cancer.

Seattle director Lynn Shelton's fabulously squirmy film Humpday centers on two seemingly straight men who decide to have sex with each other as part of an amateur porn video competition.

Ta-Nehisi Coates' pays tribute to his father in his Memoir.

Masterpieces make their own rules — and David Edelstein says it's hard to think of a work comparable to Olivier Assayas's hauntingly beautiful film, about cultural tides and the people carried on them.

Four years ago, novelist Ayelet Waldman sparked a controversy — and wound up on Oprah to defend herself — when she wrote in an essay that she loved her husband more than her children.

In her new memoir, When You Lie About Your Age, the Terrorists Win: Reflections on Looking in the Mirror, stand-up comedian and Seinfeld writer Carol Leifer recounts her experiences working as a comedian.

Psychologist Richard Weissbourd contends that parents who are obsessed with their children's happiness are ignoring other important values — like goodness, empathy, appreciation and caring — that are necessary to a well-rounded personality.

By refusing to serve up even one likable main character, Zoe Heller's new novel raises implicit questions about readers' expectations about fiction. Reviewer Maureen Corrigan calls The Believers a "smart, caustic novel."

Isabel Gillies grapples with the sudden dissolution of her marriage in the memoir Happens Every Day. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls this "all too-true story" a "compulsive" and "chilling" late-night read.

Fresh Air's film critic reviews Everlasting Moments, the latest from Jan Troell, the 77-year-old Swedish director best known in the U.S. for the '70s epics The Emigrants and The New Land.

Comic actor Danny McBride stars in Eastbound and Down, a new HBO series about a washed-up baseball star who becomes a substitute gym teacher.

Atlantic contributing editor Ta-Nehisi Coates describes growing up with a father who was a member of the Black Panthers in his new memoir, The Beautiful Struggle.

Bill Paxton plays Bill Henrickson, the head of a polygamous family in the HBO series Big Love. He received Golden Globe nominations for his work on the show in 2007 and 2008.

Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Updike died of lung cancer on Jan. 27. Fresh Air remembers the writer with archival interviews from 1988, 1989 and 1997.

Natasha Trethewey won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for poetry for her book Native Guard. Her parents had an interracial marriage while it was still illegal in Mississippi, and Tretheway's poetry often draws on her childhood as a biracial child in the south.

Ann Leary's new book is about a woman whose husband (a TV star) may be cheating on her. In real life, Leary is the wife of comedian and actor Denis Leary. She says that while the main character bears a resemblance to her, the book is not entirely based on fact.

Director Jonathan Demme (Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia) and screenwriter Jenny Lumet discuss their critically acclaimed new wedding dramedy Rachel Getting Married.

In Francine Prose's new novel, Goldengrove, a sister's sudden death leaves a young girl adrift. Prose is the author of 15 previous novels, including A Changed Man and Blue Angel, as well as the nonfiction book Reading Like a Writer.