books

Governor Kay Ivey, alongside elected officials, community leaders and teachers, celebrated the statewide expansion of the program on Wednesday. Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library partners with community organizations to provide free books every month to children from birth to age 5.

The University of Alabama School of Library and Information Studies has announced it will award $19,200 in new, free books to elementary, middle, and high school libraries in Alabama via the SLIS Book Bonanza for the Black Belt & Beyond Program this month.

If you have any used books around the house, then the University of Alabama wants to talk to you. UA’s Center for Economic Development is launching its seventeenth annual book donation drive for Black Belt schools.

Harold Fry is retired and sedentary — and in no way the sort of person who'd spontaneously decide to walk the length of England to visit a dying friend. Rachel Joyce's new novel, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry, follows Fry as he does just that — and finds emotional awakening along the way.

A new book about global attitudes to the AIDS epidemic in Africa says lays some of the blame at writer Joseph Conrad's door. Conrad's Heart of Darkness, says author Uzodinma Iweala, connected inferiority and disease with Africans in way which is still evident today. Host Scott Simon talks the author about Our Kind of People.

From the ultimate Olympic reference book to an account of the last London Games, bibliophile cabbie Will Grozier recommends books that put both the 2012 Games and their host city in context.

Commentator Barbara J. King recommends five novels that touch on topics in the natural and social sciences. She connects them with themes taken up here by the five writers at the 13.7 Cosmos and Culture blog.

If you're searching for a delicious read but aren't sure what to pick up next, NPR Books has answers for you. Here are five recommendations that are sure to keep you engrossed.