NPR's Book of the Day

In American Pope: Leo XIV’s Road from the South Side of Chicago to Vatican City, NPR host Scott Detrow and religion editor Daniel Burke chronicle Pope Leo XIV’s path to leading the Catholic Church as the first American to take the position in its 2,000 year history. Reported across Peru, Chicago and Rome, the biography paints a picture of the pope, as told by his friends, confidants, family, classmates, fellow clergy and Vatican insiders. Detrow and Burke discuss the Pope’s upbringing and more in today’s episode with Weekend Edition’s Scott Simon.

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Natalie Baszile’s new book, Friends and Family, follows the friendship of two mothers: Babs, a Black woman, and Nora, a white woman with an adopted Black son. When the police are called on their kids while they’re home alone, the two women are left to grapple with their tightly-held beliefs on race, identity and how to best protect their kids. In today’s episode, Baszile joins All Things Considered’s Juana Summers to talk about how the book’s questions of race, class and allyship strike personally for the author.

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Over the past few months, some industry insiders have warned that rogue AI could escape its human creators, resulting in dangerous – and perhaps existential – consequences. But in his new book, Kevin Roose reminds readers that billionaire tech executives behind the technology have been fighting about this possibility for a decade or more. The AGI Chronicles follows the all-out sprint to create artificial general intelligence, despite its risks. In today’s episode, Kevin Roose, host of the new NPR podcast Machine Gods, speaks with Here & Now’s Peter O’Dowd about the quasi-religious pursuit of this technology.

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Bonnie Garmus’ 2022 novel Lessons in Chemistry was a smash hit, selling more than 8 million copies worldwide. Her new novel Peck & Peck is set in the ‘80s and centers around Batter Gray, a young man who lands a job in the copy room of a prestigious poetry magazine. But soon, Batter becomes embroiled in personal and editorial conflicts. In today’s episode, Garmus joins NPR’s Elissa Nadworny for a conversation about poetry, reading aloud and why Peck & Peck is a novel about being misunderstood.

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Spooky season is year-round, and so are our episodes about scary stories. First up, NPR's Ayesha Rascoe speaks with Jeanette Winterson about The Night Side of the River, a collection of ghost stories that weaves in the liminal spaces — Metaverses, one might say — created through technology to coexist with the dead. Then, NPR's Juana Summers asks Desiree Evans and Saraciea Fennell about The Black Girl Survives in This One, an anthology of horror stories by Black writers that contend with the genre's relationship to race.

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