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Alex Cohen may be a public radio reporter by day, but by night she goes by her roller derby name — Axles of Evil. Cohen has joined forces with fellow L.A. Derby Doll Jennifer "Kasey Bomber" Barbee to write Down and Derby, an insider's guide to a rough-and-tumble sport.

Host Guy Raz talks to Karl Case, a professor of economics at Wellesley College and inventor of the Case-Shiller housing price index, about whether it's a good idea to buy a house in the current real estate market.

Rakoff doesn't often look on the bright side, and in his latest collection of essays, he explains why you shouldn't either. Thoroughly depressing subjects addressed in Half Empty include cancer, AIDS and Sept. 11.

Readers know Roald Dahl through his books, specifically his children's stories. But Donald Sturrock's Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl delves much deeper into the life of the famed author.

Kate Zernike's Boiling Mad chronicles the rise of the Tea Party movement, which she says was driven by young, tech-savvy libertarians who have built the movement up from its grass roots.

In her new book, Modern Fairies, Dwarves, Goblins, and Other Nasties, Lesley M.M. Blume creates a world in which trolls use bones for money and dwarfs dig rubies out of the Lincoln Tunnel.

Nine years in the making, the author's new book explores the story of a country through the story of a Minnesota couple and their best friend. Franzen tells NPR's Guy Raz that getting it to the page was a dark -- and at times stormy -- journey.

The Bard is rolling in his grave — and according to novelist Anne Fortier, that's a good thing. Her retelling of Romeo and Juliet is a contemporary fairy tale mixing medieval and modern mystery — a time-shifting maze that unravels the unknown story of the feuding families in fair Verona.

The humorist, who made his name with personal essays and other nonfiction, tells Steve Inskeep that his return to fiction kept taking him to surprising places. But the unhappy endings? Those he could have predicted.

The Colombian politician was on her way to a remote village when she was abducted by members of the FARC in 2002. At first she thought she'd be held for only a few weeks — but then six years passed. She says she didn't want to make it easy on her captors despite being tortured, underfed and forced to march through the rain forest.