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Lorrie Moore's new collection, Bark, contains eight stories — but our reviewer Alan Cheuse says only two of them really stand out. But, he adds, those two offer some "first-rate reading pleasure."

In his new book, The Fine Print: How Big Companies Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind, author David Cay Johnston examines the fees that companies have added over the years that have made bills incrementally larger. He tells Fresh Air that companies are misusing language to "confuse people."

In a new memoir, James Lasdun describes how a former-student-turned-friend stalked and slandered him online. Give Me Everything You Have is a meditation on what it means to control your reputation on the Internet — and the book is Lasdun's attempt to fight back.

As accusations of sexism ricochet through the book industry, Nell Freudenberger continues to craft wonderful literary fiction, writes Maureen Corrigan. Freudenberger's latest novel, The Newlyweds, tells the story of an Internet-arranged, cross-continental marriage.

Workers at more than 200 U.S. Starbucks locations walked off the job Thursday in what organizers said was the largest strike yet in the two-year-old effort to unionize the company's stores.

By their own accounts, the former president and first lady weren't just spouses, but full partners who counted their relationship as their greatest achievement.

In Marcel Theroux's Strange Bodies, dead people inhabit new bodies and immortality isn't all it's cracked up to be. Theroux tells NPR's Scott Simon, "I think that everyone who loves books has experienced the feeling of being taken over by another mind."

Goli Taraghi writes about life in Iran — about love, loss, alienation and exile. She is particularly equipped to the task, as her own exile from the country began in 1980 at the outset of the Iranian Revolution. She discusses her latest collection of short stories, The Pomegranate Lady and Her Sons.

A century ago, author Isaac Babel immortalized the Jewish community in one of Ukraine's principal cities. He's still remembered fondly today.

Ukrainian novelist Andrey Kurkov writes short, surrealistic stories full of dark comedic surprises. His latest is The Case of the General's Thumb, but critic John Powers suggests starting with his 1996 novel, Death and the Penguin. It's a fast-paced, witty read and what Powers calls "an almost perfect novel."