Jeff Glor talks to Jon Friedman about "Forget About Today:Bob Dylan's Genius for (Re)invention, Shunning the Naysayers, and Creating a Personal Revolution."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Jon Friedman: I became disillusioned by the flood of inaccurate and pretentious Bob Dylan "biographies" as well as the silly theories about the meanings of his songs. I saw that authors had not attempted to write about what really matters: Dylan's genius for longevity, owing to his knack for re-invention and the related factors that enabled him to have a FIFTY-year career. He is still going strong, too. I've heard his upcoming album "Tempest" -- his 35th! -- and it is excellent. He sure has attained longevity, the quality we all want to achieve. I explain in "Forget About Today" how he has done it. I also want to inspire the readers to learn from Dylan's example so they can live more fruitful lives.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

JF: I was most surprised by how many big chances Bob Dylan took throughout his life -- start with JF: dropping out of a good school such as the University of Minnesota as a sophomore and embarking on an iffy career as a folk singer -- by moving across the country to Greenwich Village! Then, just as he was starting to catch fire, he walked off The Ed Sullivan Show in 1963 because he refused to be censored. How about going electric when he was the king of folk music -- or releasing an album ("Slow Train Coming") containing strictly songs about his shocking born-again status! Dylan has taken many, many chances throughout his career, and I admire him for trying to be innovative all the time.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

JF: I'd be playing shortstop for the New York Yankees -- sorry, Derek Jeter. You'd have to be the designated hitter because I can still "pick it!"

JG: What else are you reading right now?

JF: I am reading "A Long Way Down" by Nick Hornby, a terrific novel that I had to put it aside several times to do more Bob Dylan research or hand in a rewrite to my book editor. (Nick knows how it is)

JG: What's next for you?

JF: I'd like before too long to start working on another book, though I haven't settled completely on the topic. I am also the Media Web columnist for MarketWatch.com, and I think the media's treatment of the presidential candidates will be fascinating to chronicle.

For more on "Forget About Today" visit the Penguin Group website.

Jeff Glor talks to Dustin Thomason about "12.21: A Novel"

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Dustin Thomason: My own insomnia was the first inspiration for the idea. I was working on another project and having great difficulty sleeping -- something I've struggled with my entire life. So finally I decided I was going to use it in some way. When I started researching insomnia, I learned about this rare disease called Fatal Familial Insomnia in which you have trouble sleeping and eventually can't sleep at all and finally die. And by then I was hooked. I loved the idea of setting a thriller in a world where people could no longer sleep. The connection to the Maya quickly followed based on my research into prions, and soon I knew that setting the book against the backdrop of the 2012 phenomenon was exactly what I wanted to do.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

DT: What surprised me most in the research process was how much still isn't known about prions, the type of proteins that causes Fatal Insomnia and Mad Cow. We've known about their existence for half a century, but we still don't know what they are, where they fall within biology, or why they spread and cause disease the way they do. These mysteries are what really got me excited about the idea of writing the book. What surprised me most in the actual writing process was how much fun it was to write in the voice of a ninth century Maya scribe. I had dreaded writing those sections at first because I was worried about getting the voice just right, but once I was into them, I just loved being able to imagine myself in that place and time.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

DT: I'd probably be a psychiatrist. I loved my rotations in psychiatry during medical school, and I think psychiatry is about the closest you can come to being a writer; you are probing the human psych in the same way, trying to understand character and helping people think about what it means to be alive. I love a lot of different fields in medicine, but I think psychiatry is both the least understood and most exciting.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

DT: I'm loving reading the early books in Lee Child's "Jack Reacher" series, and I'm hoping to get through all of them eventually. They're an incredible ride -- action packed and written in such a close perspective that in only a few pages you feel like you know the character. I'm also just finishing William Landay's amazing "Defending Jacob," one of the best written mysteries I've read in years.

JG: What's next for you?

DT: All of my books have an international flavor to them, and one of the great things about being a writer is having the opportunity to explore new parts of the world each time. For the next book I'm headed farther south, past the reaches of the Maya jungles and into South America. The escalating intrigue around natural resources in those rapidly developing nations is the backdrop for my newest thriller.

For more about "12.21" visit the Random House website.

Jeff Glor talks to Rich Cohen about "The Fish That Ate the Whale."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Rich Cohen: I was a student at Tulane University in New Orleans, where the President lives in the grand mansion that had once been the roosting place of Sam Zemurray, the Banana Man, where the buildings are named for Sam and members of his family, where the professors, speaking in whispers, tell legends of the big Russian, Alabaman, New Orleanian Jew who came to this country penniless at 14 and by 18 had made a fortune selling bananas that other traders dumped as too ripe. The professors spoke of his as Gatsby's house guests spoke of their mysterious host in the Fitzgerald novel: I heard that he killed a man. You live in such a place only so long before you start to wonder, "What the hell is going on here? Who was this guy." I was inspired by whispered stories heard in New Orleans about Sam the Banana Man, El Amigo, Z, the Gringo, The Russian. I have a simple journalistic rule: any man with three nicknames is going to be a good story. Zemurray had five.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

RC: Just how central Zemurray was in the history of America in the 20th Century. He was not an oddball, sidelight, eccentric, but a key player, unknown to people today because that's how he wanted it. Here was the guy behind the guy behind the guy behind the guy. His company, United Fruit, known in Latin America as the Octopus--because it had its tentacles in everything--was a key player in American history, a secret force behind revolutions and social movements. No matter what door I opened, I found Sam, with his piles of bananas. Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, John Foster Dulles, Franklin Roosevelt, Chaim Weizmann, Huey Long . . . no matter where you look, Sam is there.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

RC: I'd be installing hot tubs in some resort town in the Dakotas or the Idahos, earning just enough cash to free me for a life in the mountains, among the white peaks, where I would have a best friend, and we would talk and confide and cry from lack of oxygen, while our very beautiful wives waited in the little towns, where yellow light glowed. Or I might be a lawyer.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

RC: I am reading "Patton: A Genius For War" by Carlo D'Este, as well as Mike Ditka's autobiography "In Life, First You Kick Ass." I am also reading, and not for the first time, the George Trow book "My Pilgrim's Progress."

JG: What's next for you?

RC: I am working on a book about the Chicago Bears, my team, especially the Ditka/McMahon/Payton/Dent/ Fencik teams of the 1980s that made the Chicago winters bearable, cause, you know, it gets cold in that town in the winter, and it's just as flat as a skillet.

For more on "The Fish That Ate The Whale," visit the Macmillan website.

Jeff Glor talks to Vincent Lam about "The Headmaster's Wager."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Vincent Lam: My parents are ethnically Chinese from Saigon. I grew up in Canada. So, as a kid during the '70s and '80s, I heard two narratives about the Vietnam War. One was the western narrative - about drafted soldiers fighting a terrifying jungle war, and about the protests against the war. The other narrative came out of family stories. My parents told me how Saigon kids were fascinated by the Americans who came to Vietnam - they were tall, gregarious, and interesting because they were so different. Daily childhood life in Vietnam was innocent and sweet in many ways, despite the war. I heard stories about my grandfather, who was both a successful school headmaster and an incorrigible man about town. He was a gambler, womanizer, and drank too much cognac. The existence of these two narratives, and the intersections between them fascinated me. I wanted to write a novel set in this world. Also, I knew there could be a great protagonist inspired by my grandfather.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

VL: I was surprised by how visceral certain scenes became as they were written. My relationship with writing is that I drive it along to a certain point. Then the book begins to pull me forward, dictating its imperatives. When the book 'took over,' it seemed to require that certain scenes of violence be rendered in very frank, open language, as did certain sexual episodes. I'm a quiet sort of person. People who know me personally and who have read the novel often say they're surprised that I wrote those scenes.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

VL: I would be an emergency doctor. That's sort of cheating, because I actually am an emergency doctor. If I weren't a writer, I would still be an emergency doctor, and I would spend more time riding bicycles.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

VL: I recently read 'The End of Your Life Book Club' by Will Schwalbe, which is a tender, beautiful, life-affirming book that all book lovers will embrace. I just finished 'The Malice of Fortune' by Michael Ennis. It is an amazingly immersive historical novel that features both Niccolo Machiavelli and Leonardo Da Vinci. I'm reading 'The Power of Kindness' by Piero Ferrucci, which is a small and important volume that everyone on this planet should read. It has a blurb by the Dalai Lama. Need I say more?

JG: What's next for you?

VL: I'm going to enjoy the rest of the summer with my wife and kids, go on lots of bike rides, do some book touring in the fall, and then write another novel.

For more on "The Headmaster's Wager" visit the Random House website.

Jeff Glor talks to Karl Taro Greenfeld about "Triburbia."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Karl Taro Greenfeld: Tribeca was the first place I lived in with children of school age, so I became more profoundly trapped in the web of community here than any previous city or town. I began to write these stories about my neighborhood, the people, the school, the attitudes, the pretensions, the aspirations and the comedy. I didn't know they would all fit together but I had this idea they might and after a few years--and the success of novels-in-stories like A Visit from the Goon Squad--my publisher agreed with me.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

KG: From the start I was surprised by how well I knew my characters and their motivations. So much writing is about defining character yet in this book I started with such a clear idea of who I was writing. That may be a problem in the work for some, since that means these are not stories of self-discovery or a vast tale that turns on a tragic flaw. But it does mean these stories read very fast and easily. You can read Triburbia in one or two sittings.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

KG: I really can't do anything else. If I could, I would. I've had office jobs. I don't last very long.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

KG: I'm writing a story about ESPN for a magazine (Bloomberg Businessweek), so I've been reading the book These Guys Have All the Fun, an oral history of ESPN. I have two novels, How Should A Person Be by Sheila Heti and Office Girl by Joe Meno that I am starting on. I just finished the book Opium Fiend by Steven Martin. That one is fantastic.

JG: What's next for you?

KG: My next novel is sort of an updated Grapes of Wrath, set in foreclosure America. Or that's one strand of it. I'm about halfway through and the book seems ungainly and awful, but that's how books seem when you are half-way through writing them.

For more on "Triburbia" visit the Harper Collins website.

Jeff Glor talks to Ben Macintyre about "Double Cross: The True Story of the D-Day Spies"

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Ben Macintyre: The release of the official, hitherto top secret files on wartime espionage has transformed this area of intelligence history. I was first inspired to write on this subject with the release of the files on Eddie Chapman, code-named Agent Zigzag, a conman and criminal who became one of the most successful double agents of the war. Three books later, Double Cross is the summation of that research. Espionage offers such an extraordinary backdrop for studying character, personality and issues of loyalty, love and betrayal. The story of Double Cross, the great hoax that ensured the success of D-Day, is not so much a military history as a story of people, and the subtle interplay between spies and spymasters, both Allied and German.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

BM: I was most surprised by the gamble which the D-Day planners were prepared to take with the "Double Cross" ruse. If it had gone wrong - as it very nearly did - then thousands of lives were at stake. And of course, in relying on these five spies, they were dealing with extremely unconventional, not to say fickle people.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

BM: I would love to think I would have made a good spy, but on reflection, having been immersed in this world for nearly eight  years, I think I would be hopeless at intelligence work- an inability to keep a secret being one of my main failings. I suspect if I did not write, I would be teaching history.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

BM: At the moment I am deeply immersed in "Hiroshima Nagasaki," a fascinating, if gruesome, retelling of the use of the atom bomb on Japan in 1945. I have also just discovered (belatedly) the brilliant novels of Alan Furst and am charging through them.

JG: What's next for you?

BM: I am making a three-part BBC TV documentary on espionage during the First World War. It is thrilling stuff, and wonderfully amateur - people in false moustaches writing secret messages on serviettes in Viennese cafes in 1913! I am also gearing up for my next book - undoubtedly something in the espionage realm, but probably a different period.

For more on "Double Cross," visit the Random House website.

Jeff Glor talks to M.J. Akbar about "Tinderbox: The Past and Future of Pakistan"

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

M.J. Akbar: The freedom of India from British rule in 1947 was one of the most significant events of the 20th century; it marked the end of the era of European colonisation of Asia and Africa. That historic popular movement was led by a genius called Gandhi, who believed in non-violence, equality of all faiths, and had an uncompromising conviction in democracy.

Why then did he fail to keep India united? Why were two nations born after the British left, secular India and Islamic Pakistan? What were the consequences for the region and the world, then and stretching into a troubled future? Six decades later, why is democratic India moving towards social stability, economic progress and a gradual resolution of the many internal conflicts that bedeviled its existence up to the 1980s? Why has Pakistan, created as a fortress of the faith for Muslims, turned into a land where more Muslims are being killed on an average every day than in the rest of the Muslim world combined?

These and many other questions have been at the heart of my enquiry into my own, and my country's past: I am an Indian Muslim and wanted to know which of the two ideas, that of Gandhi's India and that of Muslim League's Pakistan, would prove to be more viable when measured on the scales of time. Indians and Pakistanis are the same people: why then have their two countries travelled on such different trajectories? My answer is: the idea of India is stronger than the Indian, and the idea of Pakistan has proved weaker than the Pakistani.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

MA: Facts never ceased to surprise me; and the ability of human beings to distort facts in order to serve political ends never ceased to amaze me. The first was uplifting; the second depressing.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

MA: That's easy: watching cricket, since I do not know how to play it well. And reading, both Shakespeare and P.G. Wodehouse.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

MA: A marvellous history of early Australia, but one of the great contemporay chroniclers: "The Fatal Shore," by Robert Hughes. And "The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers," by Richard McGregor.

JG: What's next for you?

MA:  A book is a long pregnancy, and it is difficult to describe what form the embryo will take - but I am being drawn to the history of what I call The Brown Slaves, Indians who were driven into the great slave plantations of the British Empire, in West Indies, Fiji, Mauritius, South Africa or Malaysia after slavery was "abolished". This was virtual slavery, thinly disguised by the fiction of "indentured labor".

For more on "Tinderbox" visit the Harper Collins website.

Jeff Glor talks to R. Jay Magill about, "Sincerity: How a Moral Ideal Born Five Hundred Years Ago Inspired Religious Wars, Modern Art, Hipster Chic, and The Curious Notion That We All Have Something to Say (No Matter How Dull)"

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

R. Jay Magill: It was partly out of the frustration of watching how both political parties continually demand sincerity from the other, though both engage in political trickery, and every voter knows it. Sarah Palin, for one, has been particularly vocal in saying how regular people were "sincere and awesome" but that political strategists were sneaky sharks because they didn't say what they really meant; they engaged in deception and pretense and hid their motives. They were insincere. This is all true. Then there were those on the other side of the political aisle who thought that Palin was the most insincere VP candidate ever. I was interested in why sincerity had become such a compelling moral benchmark despite widespread knowledge to the contrary. There is something curiously disingenuous about it all.

This is not at all to say that sincerity is not important in private life, for forging and keeping close relationships. It certainly is. But all political performance is by definition insincere because it involves an awareness of how one presents oneself -- "impression management," as they call it -- and is motivated by some kind of ulterior outcome. This is all fine. Strategy and cunning are necessary to get votes to win, and they have from time immemorial been a part of political culture. This is the point of democratic politics. True, it may not be the most morally pretty thing, as it involves dirty compromise and political one-upmanship, but it is far preferable to the contrary, which is an authoritarian, non-compromising politics whereby one group thinks they have the truth and may legitimately force it upon everyone. I think that many of us have forgotten that living in a democracy, as John Dewey once said, also means cultivating an open, democratic (with a small "d") personality.

My own concern for this book stemmed not from the presence of political insincerity, but from the childish demand that it always be made apparent in public life. In other words, the demand for sincerity is often itself insincere, and, moreover, the presence of sincerity in public figures is in no way indicative of that person's grasp on reality. The great American sociologist David Riesman thought that concern for sincerity in politicians had in the 1950s become "a vice." This was so, in part, because a politician can be utterly sincere and be completely wrong. Nevertheless, Americans in particular are obsessed with detecting the trait, and I wanted to know why.

What I found was that our concern for personal sincerity stems from the influence of religion, a realm which many figures -- including our Founders -- argued should be kept separate from politics. In America, at least, the influence of religious values on public life has a long history, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. In the case of sincerity, at root a very Protestant value, it has meandered out of the religious realm and into the secular culture over the past 300 years (seen in cultural movements such as Romanticism), and we live in the shadow of that influence.

Ultimately, a compelling conclusion: the political demand for sincerity attempts to compensate for otherwise weak social bonds, which social scientists and observers since Tocqueville have lamented is the case in America. We don't need more shows of sincerity; we need a more cohesive society so that insincerity does not bother us so much. As the German philosopher Theodor Adorno wrote in 1951, "Estrangement shows itself precisely in the elimination of distance between people."

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

RM: The first book I wrote, Chic Ironic Bitterness (2007), was a revised doctoral dissertation -- and it reads as such. What was most surprising making this book over the past few years was how challenging it was to create a narrative that was not straightforward but that still kept a logic. You can have an abstract argument that you and your editors understand in just a few pages, but then you have to figure out how to illustrate it and make it concrete over several hundred. It gave me a whole new appreciation for talented fiction writers -- an incredibly difficult undertaking, as I see it. I thank both my editors for their brilliant guidance.

Also a surprise: how much a new baby can make your life utterly insane.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

RM: Like many of my writing peers, likely statistical thermodynamics with a focus on equipartition theorem and Maxwell's ideal gas law.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

RM: A few things, in fits and starts:

Tom Bissell, "The Magic Hours: Essays on Creators and Creation"

Stephen Greenblatt, The Swerve: "How the World Became Modern"

Gideon Lewis-Kraus, "A Sense of Direction"

Re-visiting some parts of Nietzsche and Richard Sennett's "Fall of Public Man"

JG: What's next for you?

RM: "Thermodynamics 101."

For more on "Sincerity" visit the WW Norton website.

Jeff Glor talks to James Donovan about "The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo--and the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation"

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

James Donovan: You can't believe the reverence Texans have for the Alamo story--it's the real religion of Texas. I'm originally a Brooklyn boy, but I've lived in Texas since 1975, and over the years I learned enough about it to question some of the myths and legends. The Alamo saga has more of those than any other American event of the last 200 years. I decided to strip the story down to the truth as much as possible, by going back to the primary sources. I found some fresh sources that hadn't been tapped, and that enabled me to flesh out the story and answer some enduring mysteries, such as whether or not Alamo commandant William Barret Travis really drew that famous line in the sand.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

JD: A refreshing realization: How proud Americans were in 1836 of this new kind of government they had brought into the world just 60 years before--they were almost evangelicals for democracy, and wanted to spread it to other countries. They were sending money and soldiers to revolutionaries in nations such as Poland and Greece, so of course, when their American cousins in nearby Texas called for their help, men poured into the Mexican province by the thousands to aid them in what they saw as a revolution similar in many ways to the American Revolution of 1776--colonists fighting for their freedom and liberty against a despot. We're so accustomed to our republican democracy and our liberties that we take them for granted. Just to get a whiff of the excitement and pride those principles inspired in Americans early in our history was an experience I'll always treasure and hope to never forget.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

JD: I'm a literary agent by day, and have been for almost 20 years, so I'd still be representing other writers. But I'd probably be writing poetry at night--I've read some before falling asleep almost every night since I was a teenager. I'm currently making my way through Tennyson's works. He's very underrated these days, but his ear was exquisite. Sheer poetry, in the old-fashioned sense. Of course, if I had the talent, I'd much rather be a rock-and-roll musician. I've played harmonica a few times on stage with a rock band, and there's no stronger drug than the feeling you get of an audience responding favorably to what you're playing.

JG:What else are you reading right now?

JD: Besides Tennyson, I read a lot of thrillers and mysteries, some literary fiction, and of course history, mostly American. I'm rereading David McCullough's "1776," which is wonderful, and next is "Unbroken," by Laura Hildenbrandt. She's an amazing writer--really knows how to tell a story. I dare anyone to read that book's two-page preface and not continue.

JG: What's next for you?

JD: I haven't decided--but it won't be another last stand. After writing about the Battle of the Little Bighorn in "A Terrible Glory," and now the Alamo in "The Blood of Heroes," I'm a bit burned out on last stands. They're difficult to research, because of course one entire side of the battle in question has been destroyed, so you're missing important first-hand sources from that side. I'd like to do a book where I can actually talk to some of the participants--I envy writers who can do that!

For more on "The Blood of Heroes" visit the Hachette Book Group website.

Jeff Glor talks to Tana French about "Broken Harbor."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Tana French: I owe this book to mice. One night a few years ago, I went into the kitchen and half-saw something dash across the counter and vanish. My now-husband and I couldn't find any sign that anything had actually been there, and he gently hinted that my active imagination is a wonderful thing, but was I sure I had seen something? Luckily, a few nights later he was the one who went into the kitchen late at night, and he saw a mouse legging it down behind the cooker. We got traps, and that was the end of that - except that something stayed in my mind: that sense that our home, which was meant to be the ultimate safe place, was actually porous and vulnerable; that sense of knowing what I'd seen, but not being able to convince my husband. That's one thing if you're in a happy, strong relationship, with no outside pressures on you - but what if it were to happen to someone whose relationship and home were already under attack? The feeling linked up with the image of the ghost estates that litter Ireland, to become "Broken Harbor."

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

TF: How much I ended up feeling for the narrator, Scorcher Kennedy. He showed up in my previous book, "Faithful Place," where he came across as a pompous, rule-bound annoyance. People who are fanatical about rules and doing things the Right Way really aren't my kind of people - so, although I knew Scorcher belonged as the narrator of "Broken Harbor," I was worried that I wouldn't be able to do him justice. But as I wrote, I started to realize that he's much more complex, more intense and more damaged than I'd originally thought - and that his obsession with rules isn't just pomposity. It's because he doesn't trust his own mind and his own instincts to steer him right; he thinks of them as fragile, tricky and hideously dangerous. Once I figured that out, he stopped being annoying and became much easier to write.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

TF: I was an actor for years before I wrote "In the Woods." If I weren't writing, I'd still be doing that. I love writing, but I miss acting - being on stage, being in rehearsals, and also the social side of it. In acting, you're working with a group of people all day, and then you all go to the pub together. If you have a day when nothing works, then you're surrounded by people who can help to bounce you out of that: someone else in a scene will throw you something that sparks an idea, or the director will nudge you in the right direction. When you're writing and you have a day when nothing works, you're basically stuck being Homer Simpson, staring blankly into thin air while inside your head a cow plays the fiddle.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

TF: "An Evening of Long Goodbyes," by Paul Murray. I loved his "Skippy Dies." This is his first book: Charles and his sister live in the old family mansion on the outskirts of Dublin, and Charles is desperately trying to hang on, not only to the house, but to the graceful way of life that he sees being destroyed around him by boomtime vulgarity. It's very different from "Skippy Dies," but it's got the same wild creativity and the same wonderful writing, lyrical and very funny (I really like the description of Charles taking a seat on a 'dysmorphic sofa').

JG: What's next for you?

TF: I'm working on my fifth book. It's called "The Secret Place," and it picks up a couple of characters from the third book, "Faithful Place." The narrator is Stephen Moran, who was a young, eager detective back then. It's been seven years, and one day Holly Mackey (Frank's young daughter from "Faithful Place") shows up at Stephen's work. She's sixteen now, she's at a girls' boarding school, and she's brought Stephen a card she found pinned to a noticeboard where the girls can reveal their secrets anonymously. The photo shows a teenage boy who was murdered a year ago; the caption says 'I KNOW WHO KILLED HIM'.

For more on "Broken Harbor" visit the Penguin Group website.

Jeff Glor talks to Molly Birnbaum about "Season to Taste: How I Lost My Sense of Smell and Found My Way"

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Molly Birnbaum: I fell in love with cooking when I was in college. I was studying art history, but spent more time with cookbooks than textbooks, more time in the kitchen than in the library. After graduation, I began training to become a chef. But it wasn't long after I began working in a professional kitchen that I went for a jog near my home in Boston and was hit by a car. In the accident, I broke my pelvis, tore the ligaments in my left knee, and fractured my skull. I would later learn that when I hit my head, my brain bounced, severing the olfactory neurons, which run from the nose to the brain. In a split second, I lost my sense of smell.

I knew that the sense of smell was tied to taste and flavor, but I didn't realize how integral it really was until my ability to perceive the scent of butter, of chocolate, of a chicken roasting in the oven vanished. As the weeks and months passed after my accident, I realized that the sense of smell was tied not only to flavor, but to memory and emotion, to sex and relationships. The sense of smell is one of the most important ways we place ourselves in the world, among food and friends and family. But it's also the least studied. There is so much we don't know. Doctors couldn't tell me much about what had happened to me, and if I would ever recover. I wrote this book in order to understand my loss, and why it meant so much. I also wrote this book to show the others (and there are millions of others who, like me, have lost their sense of smell, some who recover and others who don't) that they aren't crazy to feel so affected by the loss, that they aren't alone, and that there is hope.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

MB: First: how long it took. I wrote and rewrote the proposal for this book many times before selling it to Ecco. I wrote and rewrote many different parts of the book before it was published. At times the act of writing and rewriting felt like it would never end. But it did!

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

MB: I'd be a chef. Even when I couldn't smell a thing (I've since recovered, very slowly, over the course of years), I cooked. I couldn't tear myself away from the kitchen. Today, I work as an editor for "Cook's Illustrated" magazine. So even if I'm not actively working in a professional kitchen, I'm not far away.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

MB: I recently finished an advanced copy of Maria Semple's "Where'd You Go, Bernadette?", which is hilarious and touching and just plain old awesome. Long a fan of Cheryl Strayed's "Dear Sugar" columns on The Rumpus, I'm halfway through her new memoir, "Wild." She writes with such raw honesty, which I love.

JG: What's next for you?

MB: I have about a million ideas for a next book, and I'm working on pairing them down, slowly, so that I know that what I do next is something I can be passionate about, something I can again happily write, and rewrite, over and over again.

For more on "Season to Taste" visit the Harper Collin's website.

Jeff Glor talks to DW Gibson about "Not Working: People Talk About Losing a Job and Finding Their Way in Today's Changing Economy"

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

DW Gibson: I was speaking with my editor, Colin Robinson, about "Black Wednesday" - the day in 2008 when he lost his job at a large, commercial publishing house. It was a combination of his story along with our discussion (and admiration) for Studs Terkel's WORKING that led to the idea of capturing an oral history of the depression that the US fell into after the housing market collapsed in 2007. It was affecting for Colin to share his story-- likewise, for me to hear it--and we realized there was something illuminating about sharing stories of enduring unemployment.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

DW: I was surprised by how intense it was to revisit the stories that people shared. I didn't realize how little I had processed the gravity, frankness and vulnerability of these stories in real time. It was only upon listening to the tapes again, and editing the transcripts, that I absorbed so much of the nuance, emotion and humanity for the first time. Over the course of our cross country trip collecting the stories we were working at such a breakneck pace there was so little time to absorb what was actually being said in these conversations so there was somewhat of delayed reaction on my part--something I think I'm still going through.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

DW: If this refers to wild dreams then I would certainly be a future Hall of Fame baseball player. In a more realistic frame of mind I think I might have liked to get involved in politics and policy. Seems like a messy racket but, for better or worse, I think I could do okay in those waters.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

DW: I've been reading a lot of about the psychology of being laid off (what little has been written about it) and also a lot about labor in general--everything from Louise Uchitelle and Howard Zinn to Andrew Ross and Barbara Ehrenreich.

JG: What's next for you?

DW: Another substantial oral history project, except not nearly as time sensitive--something that I can develop a bit more deliberately over a few years. But I'm not quite ready to let the cat out of the bag regarding the subject matter--stay tuned.

MORE VIDEO:

DW Gibson talks about the common thread that runs through the many interviews he conducted for his book, "Not Working: People Talk About Losing a Job and Finding Their Way in Today's Changing Economy." Author DW Gibson talks about the movie that accompanies his new book, "Not Working," which will include filmed conversations with 18 of the 200 or so people he interviewed for the project. "Not Working" FILM TRAILER

For more on "Not Working" visit the Penguin Group website.

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Guy Lawson: When I first talked to Sam Israel in prison I thought I was working on a story about a Wall Street fraudster--at the time the biggest ever. But Israel started to tell me this entirely different story about a secret bond market and the CIA and how the Federal Reserve is running a Ponzi scheme. It was literally incredible--as in unbelievable. But those are the kinds of stories I'm drawn to--stories that prove how much stranger fact is than fiction.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

GL: How much truth there was to Israel's stories. The wilder and taller the tales got, the more there was a basis in historical reality. Like the existence of Federal Reserve bonds stolen from the Chinese government by the Japanese during the Rape of Nanking in the Second World War. At the height of his fraud, as Israel was trying to find a way to make $150 million very, very quickly to save Bayou and himself, he fell in with a CIA operative in London who told him about these mythical bonds. They were hidden in caves in the south of the Philippines. The CIA operative told Israel they were worth billions. It's a lunatic story--on the surface. But when I reported the story I discovered that there actually is a chance the bonds are real. Leading historians and special forces soldiers all said there was more than a little truth to the legend called Yamashita's Gold.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

GL: I'm a recovering attorney (I take it one day at a time) so I think I might be a criminal defense lawyer. It was my favorite class in law school. I loved the stories, the investigations, the human drama--and the fact that the stakes are so high. But the truth is that I'm very glad I don't have to do all the hard work of preparing for trials, nor do I have to deal with all the tedious stuff involved in practicing the law. One way or another, I'd be involved in crime--in a good way, that is.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

GL: I just finished Alex Berenson's novel "The Shadow Patrol." It's an excellent thriller set in Afghanistan. I'm also a big fan of Ben McIntyre's books "Agent Zig Zag" and "Mincemeat" and really look forward to "Double Cross."

JG: What's next for you?

GL: I'm working on a book about these two young stoner dudes from Miami Beach who won a $300 million contract to supply ammunition to the Pentagon for the Afghanistan army. The book is based on a story I wrote for Rolling Stone. It's a truly rip roaring tale filled with weed, weapons, and wartime deceptions. It involves the Pentagon, the State Department, the Justice Department, the New York Times, and the government of Albania. Like I said, I'm drawn to unusual tales.

For more on "Octopus" visit the Random House website.

Hear what the author had to say when he appeared on "CBS This Morning" by clicking on the video below.

Jeff Glor talks to Jess Walter about "Beautiful Ruins."

Jeff Glor: What inspired you to write the book?

Jess Walter: Initially, I was inspired by a trip to Italy, and to the Cinque Terre, the cliffside villages south of Genoa, in 1997. But over the years, the novel shifted so many times and I realized a few years ago, that it was really a story about how we tell stories, the artifacts and ruins that make up our lives. Also cannibalism.

JG: What surprised you the most during the writing process?

JW: Everything surprised me. Because this was a book I set down and picked up so many times (at least five times over fifteen years) it bears almost no resemblance to the book I started in 1997. Every sentence has changed, every character has been altered. The only constant has been this small town in Italy and a couple of the characters.

JG: What would you be doing if you weren't a writer?

JW: Hmm. Modeling, probably. But I wrote for years and years before I was paid for it, so even if I wasn't published and had to make my living in the cutthroat world of short, middle-aged, one-eyed male models, I'd still be a writer.

JG: What else are you reading right now?

JW: I just finished the new Martin Amis novel, "Lionel Asbo," and it's marvelous. I hit a remarkable streak of great novels: Jim Lynch's "Truth Like the Sun," Ben Fountain's "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk," Kim Barnes's "In the Kingdom of Men," Wiley Cash's "A Land More Kind Than Home." All wonderful reads.

JG: What's next for you?

JW: I have a book of short stories, "We Live in Water," due to come out next year. And I'm adapting my last two novels as film scripts.

For more on "Beautiful Ruins," visit the Harper Collins website.