
Barrie Hardymon
Barrie Hardymon is the Senior Editor at NPR's Weekend Edition, and the lead editor for books. You can hear her on the radio talking everything from Middlemarch to middle grade novels, and she's also a frequent panelist on NPR's podcasts It's Been A Minute and Pop Culture Happy Hour. She went to Juilliard to study viola, ended up a cashier at the Strand, and finally got a degree from Johns Hopkins' Writing Seminars which qualified her solely for work in public radio. She lives and reads in Washington, DC.
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Nevermind that she didn't like kids all that much — Brown wrote books they adored. One of her previously unpublished picture books has just come out, as has a new biography of this brave, bold author.
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Carrie Fisher's well known for her acting and comedy. NPR's Ailsa Chang talks with Weekend Edition books editor Barrie Hardymon about why we should remember Fisher as not just a Hollywood star.
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One of the profound pleasures of reading to children, says Barrie Hardymon, is the thrill of sharing a story's secrets for the first time.
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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."
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If the cold and snow has you feeling, well, frigid, here's the solution. Five titillating titles that'll put you in a steamy frame of mind.
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NPR's Barrie Hardymon has been scanning the catalogs all year, searching for the summer's best books. Her five favorites range from young-adult fiction to a memoir about cheese.
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Passing along a book that no one has heard of is like telling a really good secret. NPR's Barrie Hardymon recommends a hot Southern thriller, a scathing evisceration of the newspaper biz, a slightly ridiculous, totally gratifying romance, and one extra gem that's been hiding in plain sight.
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When her sister drowns, 13-year-old Nico must navigate grief and growing up at the same time. Francine Prose's Goldengrove captures the confusion of adolescence tenderly and without condescension.
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To solve the murder of her own doppelganger, Detective Cassie Maddox assumes the dead woman's identity and enters into the complex, collective psychology of a charismatic group. Barrie Hardymon has a review.
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Almost every word of Chris Hannan's debut novel is a toothy treat. The rollicking tale of Dol McQueen is so festooned with 1862-era Wildly Western jargon it's tempting to read the whole thing aloud — in a brogue.