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Some of the biggest names in science fiction right now — like The Martian author Andy Weir — are writing what's called hard sci-fi, based on real-world science and a vision of hope for the future.

Serge Brussolo's hallucinatory 1992 novel The Deep Sea Diver's Syndrome follows a group of lucid dreamers whose slumbers produce a strange ectoplasm that can soothe and even heal people who see it.

Elliott Chaze's classic 1953 noir about an escaped prisoner, a secretive blonde and one last big heist has just been reissued. Critic Michael Schaub says Chaze's writing stands out from the pulp pack.

From brogurt to gastrosexual, humorist and food writer Josh Friedland has collected many of the new words born of our current foodie culture in a new food dictionary, Eatymology.

We get hundreds of books in the mail every week, and some always fall through the cracks. NPR's Petra Mayer singles out a biography of a Sikh princess turned suffragette for a second look.

Rowling studied real criminal case studies to write the latest in the Cormoran Strike mystery series — "It was horrible," she says. But writing under a pseudonym remains "a very private pleasure."

Thomas Laqueur, author of The Work of the Dead, discusses the ways people have dealt with human remains over the course of history. Modern cemeteries, he says, are byproducts of the French Revolution.

After being convicted of carjacking as a teenager, Reginald Dwayne Betts spent eight years in an adult prison. Since his release, he has become a poet and a Yale law student.

The book's outside cover boasted poems by a disgraced writer. But inside was page after page of handwritten recipes for alcohol — the secretly preserved know-how of a Prohibition-era doctor.

Author Sherry Turkle is concerned that we are outsourcing too many of our conversations to screens and robots. "Face to face conversation is the most human and humanizing thing that we do," she says.