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As Election Day nears, polls suggest Texas might be in play for Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Turning Texas blue has been a dream for Democrats. NPR discusses if this dream could become reality.

The host of All Songs Considered listens for the moments when the poetry of a song's lyrics seem woven into its sound. This year, his playlists overflowed.

Barrett Strong, longtime Motown songwriter, who was responsible for such megahits as "I Heard It Throgh the Grapevine" has died at age 81.

Oil giant BP will plead guilty to criminal misconduct related to the 2010 Gulf Oil spill. The settlement deal will also include the largest-ever penalty in a criminal case, $4.5 billion.

Caleb Crain's perceptive novel examines the ways we're all under surveillance by corporations and computers, every move and click tracked, and the ways that intersects with how we watch each other.

Patti Smith's new memoir is a dreamy, elegiac recollection of loved ones gone too soon, energized by her interests and travels. It jumps in time, from her husband's death in 1994 to Hurricane Sandy.

Ken Liu's debut is an epic saga of gods, kings and rebels, set in an invented world with echoes of pan-Asian myth. Reviewer Amal El-Mohtar calls it "beautiful, nuanced, fierce, original and diverse."

Chigozie Obioma's novel follows a group of young boys who disobey their elders to spend afternoons fishing on the banks of an unlucky river, and the terrible consequences that flow from that choice.

Amanda Filipacchi's novel is about a costume designer who wears a fat suit after a suitor commits suicide. It's structured as a mashup of an old Friends episode, a fairy tale and a murder mystery.

Peter Carey's new novel starts with a sad-sack disgraced reporter tasked with writing the biography of a notorious hacker, but reviewer Jason Sheehan says there's a jarring change of gears halfway.

Each of the ten narrators in Ceridwen Dovey's new book is an animal affected by human warfare. Critic Michael Schaub says the book lacks the imagination it would need to pull off its high concept.

Max Porter's darkly funny, fiercely emotional new novel centers on a family — a husband and two sons — devastated by the loss of their wife and mother. And then the crow appears.

Edward Carey's new novel is about the life of wax museum pioneer Madame Tussaud — but it's also about the French Revolution, about humans, bodies, art and loneliness, and it's deeply, painfully sad.

Can Xue's book is hard to describe, much less explain — there's a town, and a mountain, and a poplar grove, and a host of people just trying to connect in a world of absent-minded strangeness.

Detroit garage-rocker Josh Malerman's second novel follows a fictional 1950s rock bad recruited by the government to find the source of a mysterious, ominous sound emanating from the Namib Desert.

Janacek's touching opera, The Cunning Litttle Vixen, tells a fanciful tale of forest creatures and the people who learn from the animals' innate wisdom.

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey says Republican Scott Brown's victory in the Massachusetts Senate race is not unique, but a reflection of events across the country. The Republican says there is anger at the Democrats and their initiatives, as seen by small-government activists changing the face of elections in Florida and New Jersey.

A US Airways plane has crashed into the Hudson River. It is not clear if there are any injuries. More than 100 people were on board flight 1549 that had taken off from LaGuardia Airport on its way to Charlotte, N.C.

A jury as ordered Ammon Bundy and an associate to pay more than $50 million in damages to Idaho's largest hospital after armed protests last year led to a security lockdown.

Critic and novelist James Wood has often dinged other writers for what he calls "hysterical realism," but his new novel Upstate — while beautifully written — goes too far in the other direction.