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In the ninth century, the Buddhist sage Lin Chi told a monk, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him." He meant that those who think they've found all the answers in any religion need to start questioning. The new book Killing the Buddha takes this advice to heart, examining American roadside distractions on the path to enlightenment. Chicago Public Radio's Jason DeRose reports.

In her new work Safe in Hell, now on stage in Southern California, playwright Amy Freed renders the Salem witch trials as black comedy. The play centers around the dysfunctional relationship between two historic figures involved in the 17th-century trials: moralist Increase Mather and his son, Cotton. Freed talks with NPR's Renee Montagne.

NPR's Liane Hansen speaks with clinical psychologist and sociologist Thomas J. Cottle, author of When the Music Stopped: Discovering My Mother (SUNY Press). Cottle's mother, Gitta Gradova , was an established concert pianist of the 1920's and 30's, and she relished her budding career and rubbed elbows with the musical greats of the day. She gave it up to raise a family, and her son contends it led her into depression.

NPR's Scott Simon talks to author Daniel Silva about his new novel A Death in Vienna. The former journalist, now a prolific writer, brings back his hero, Gabriel Allon, a European art restorer who hunts down Nazi criminals who have escaped justice. (The book is published by G.P. Putnam & Sons.)

Think 1950s food and you might conjure up Jell-O salads with a riot of add-ons or soda pop put to unnatural uses. In her new book, Something from the Oven, Laura Shapiro deconstructs food from the '50s -- and the industry that foisted it on American households. Shapiro talks with NPR's Melissa Block.

A report published in the Journal of Death Studies finds that poets die younger than novelists, playwrights and other writers. James Kaufman, a researcher at California State University at San Bernardino, suggests poets may die young because they tend to be more tortured and prone to self-destruction. NPR's Bob Edwards reports.

Rachel Cohen's book A Chance Meeting: Intertwined Lives of American Writers and Artists, 1854-1967 describes encounters -- sometimes fleeting, sometimes influential -- between such luminaries as Mark Twain and Ulysses S. Grant, for example, or Richard Avedon and James Baldwin. Hear NPR's Liane Hansen and Cohen.

The latest romance in Hollywood is between filmmakers and Los Angeles public schools. Location scouts say school campuses are among their favorite settings for movies, TV shows, music videos and commercials. And schools strapped for cash are grateful for their lucrative cameos. NPR's Mandalit del Barco reports.

Just in time for Mother's Day, participants in the StoryCorps national oral history project make special recordings with, and for, their moms. Hear a sampling of the conversations recorded in a booth at New York City's Grand Central Terminal.

Pulitzer prize-winning author Jane Smiley's nonfiction book A Year at the Races chronicles her lifelong love affair with horses and the race tracks where they battle to the wire.