"A Wanton Woman: The Life of Ida C. Craddock" from NPR by ALICE GREGORY

Ida C. Craddock. Don't feel bad if you've never heard of her. Neither had I. But according to her most recent biographer, Leigh Eric Schmidt, this is a travesty. She deserves a place in our pantheon of polymaths. A professor of American religious history at Harvard, Schmidt champions Craddock as a secular oracle, civil liberties proponent and religious therapist. His aim with the biography, Heaven's Bride, is to retroactively legitimize Craddock, a self-taught, quasi-academic dismissed by the intellectuals of her day and all but forgotten in ours. [...] And though auto-didacticism is not a glittery or singular enough basis upon which to historicize an individual, it becomes clear over the chapters that Craddock's most basic attributes — her "unregulated intelligence" and her "destructive impulse to impart knowledge without discrimination" — are actually her most impressive. Craddock's intellectual infatuations ran the gamut, but most were "peculiar" or at least arcane: Ouija boards, Alaskan totem poles, tantric yoga. She herself was a wunderkammer of marvels.

Read that full NPR feature story, here. Read an excerpt from the book, here. See also: Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays, Hearing Things: Religion, Illusion, and the American Enlightenment, Restless Souls: The Making of American Spirituality, Holy Fairs: Scotland and the Making of American Revivalism

Us And Them: The Year's Best Outsider Fiction from NPR by Danielle Evans, Reginald Dwayne Betts

When I sat down to write this list, I realized that I would need to define what "outsider fiction" was in the first place, a daunting prospect. I came up with (and then discarded) several definitions that seemed to me problematic because they posited the "inside" as fixed and unchanging, or insider status as only an accident of birth or demographics. Much of the fiction on this list recognizes that boundaries between inside and outside are fluid and always shifting, and that people can shift with them. Still, the books retain a certain sensibility of outsider status, an identity forged by characters well aware that they must define themselves in light of or in opposition to external forces that might seek to impose definitions or limit possibilities. Beyond that, these books are all great, provocative reads that I'm excited to have encountered in 2010.

This is a really good, well put together "best of" list. Check it out, here. See also: Death Is Not an Option: Stories

Short Takes: Richard Russo On 2010's Best Stories from NPR Topics: Arts & Culture

Pulitzer-Prize winning author Richard Russo edited this year's compendium of the best short stories. He speaks to Audie Cornish about the best new voices in fiction.

Download the podcast here. See also: Empire Falls, Straight Man: A Novel, That Old Cape Magic: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries), Bridge of Sighs: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

'Lion Of Liberty': Patrick Henry's Fiery Life from NPR Arts & Life by MICHAEL SCHAUB

It's unfair to reduce Henry's career to excerpts from two speeches, but it's also fitting that he's remembered chiefly for his words. Henry was a hardworking lawyer, a somewhat adequate military commander, and a popular, if inconsistent, politician. He wasn't the best farmer or the best businessman, but he was almost certainly the greatest orator in 18th century America. And he was, in a way, the Father of the Founding Fathers — as Harlow Giles Unger notes in his excellent new Lion of Liberty, Henry was the first of the American revolutionaries "to call for independence, for revolution against Britain, for a bill of rights, and for as much freedom as possible from government — American as well as British."

View the full NPR feature, including a free chapter of the book, here. See also: Lafayette, John Hancock: Merchant King & American Patriot, The Last Founding Father: James Monroe and a Nation's Call to Greatness

"Keith Richards' 'Life': Sex, Drugs And Brown Sugar" from NPR's Arts & Life by MICHAEL SCHAUB

Rock and roll, by its nature, doesn't have many rules; if it did it wouldn't be rock and roll. It does have, however, an unwritten code, and this is part of it: real rockers never quit. Retirement isn't hardcore, which explains why the Rolling Stones haven't called it quits after nearly 50 years as, arguably, the world's second most famous band. Keith Richards, the legendary founding guitarist of the Stones, is 66, but don't mistake his new memoir for a valedictory. It's more like a statement of purpose; a lead-off track, not a final cut. "I can't retire until I croak," he writes — more than once — in Life. It seems like as safe a bet as you're ever going to find in rock. Rock and roll, after all, is his first love. Early in Life, Richards describes his first guitar, "a gut-string job," given to him by his mother when he was 15: "I took it everywhere and I went to sleep with my arm laid across it." It's the kind of honest, guileless moment that makes this book so charming, so unexpectedly moving. Richards might epitomize the popular idea of the rock lifestyle more than any other living artist — and he doesn't shy away from admitting his deep affections for women and drugs — but he's at his best, unsurprisingly, when he's rhapsodizing about rock. "[W]hen it works, baby, you've got wings," he writes. "It's flying without a license."

Read an excerpt of the book here. There was also this NPR WHYY Fresh Air show, with Richards. See also: What Would Keith Richards Do?: Daily Affirmations from a Rock and Roll Survivor, Stone Me: The Wit and Wisdom of Keith Richards, Keith Richards: The Biography, Keith Richards: Satisfaction

"'Bee Season' Author Returns: A 'False Friend' Atones" from NPR's Arts & Life

Recent headlines remind us of the tragic consequences of bullying. Mean girls have tormented other girls for generations. (Ditto boys.) Myla Goldberg's intriguing new novel adds a retrospective twist to the problem. The False Friend is about a woman who heads back to her hometown to confess to perpetrating and then covering up a crime against another girl when they were both eleven. Goldberg, author of the 2000 bestseller Bee Season, begins her story with a blast of memory. Celia sees a red VW bug and imagines she hears the familiar, long-forgotten voice of her childhood best friend Djuna. In memory she is transported back to age eleven, when, after a raging argument, the two of them led their clique of five girls in a forbidden walk home through the woods in upstate New York. In an episode Celia's memory has blanked out until this moment, she recalls seeing Djuna fall into a hole, and leaving her there, telling no one.

Read an excerpt of the book, here. Read the full NPR Arts & Life feature here. See also: The False Friend, Wickett's Remedy: A Novel, Catching The Moon

'Other People': A Family Portrait Of Depression from NPR by HELLER MCALPIN

"Every family has a secret and the secret is that it's not like other families," Alan Bennett writes in A Life Like Other People's. This family memoir, extracted from his 2006 autobiographical volume, Untold Stories, is at once a touching portrait of his parents, "the tenderest and most self-sufficient couple," and a sobering tale of depression and dementia.

You can find a lengthy excerpt of the book at NPR.org. See also: The Uncommon Reader: A Novella, Untold Stories, Writing Home, The Complete Talking Heads