Arts & Life

'Tis the season when an escape from holiday madness may be necessary --and these three romance novels will whisk you away to fictional worlds where all the high stakes drama is resolved with true love and happily ever after.

Many of the best of this year's books were graced with humor and distinguished by deep dives into American identity. It was also a very good year for deceased authors whose posthumously published books were so much more than mere postscripts to their careers. Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers -- a sweeping story about the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and its long aftermath — is my pick for novel of the year.

Imagine driving alone in your car, but instead of sitting behind the wheel, you're dozing in the backseat as a computer navigates on your behalf. It sounds wild, but former New York City Traffic Commissioner Sam Schwartz says that scenario isn't so far off the mark.

"I was a New York City cab driver back in 1968, and I watched transportation evolve over time. I have never seen anything as rapid as what has happened this decade," Schwartz says. "Autonomous vehicles are coming."

My guess is that you've never read a book quite like Heather Rose's The Museum of Modern Love. I know I haven't. This is the Australian author's seventh novel, though it's her first published in the United States, and it's a real find.

"I'm fascinated by the necessity of quick decisions," Inge Morath told me more than 30 years ago, when she came to NPR for an interview. Morath was in the business of quick decisions — as a photographer and photojournalist she was the first woman to be accepted as a full member of the Magnum photo agency.

Now, her life is the subject of a new biography by Linda Gordon. It recounts Morath's escape from Nazi Germany, her boundary-breaking career, and her marriage to playwright Arthur Miller.

At the movies, 2018 was the year of Black Panther, the year of more Incredibles and Avengers, more Star Wars and Mission: Impossible. But it was also the year of intimate stories of youth and love. It was the year of period pieces and fantasies, crushing tragedies and raucous comedies. Bob Mondello, Linda Holmes and Glen Weldon would never agree on a single list of best movies of the year. But here are 15 of the movies we admired and will remember.

Black Panther

Are you hosting for New Year's Eve? There's always a lot to juggle — food, decorations, friends, family and so much more. For Weekend Edition's holiday advice series, "Help, I'm Hosting," we want to hear your New Year's Eve hosting dilemmas and challenges. Or maybe you need a little encouragement? We may put your question to the queen of hosting, Martha Stewart, for an upcoming on-air segment.

Share your thoughts with us below or here. A producer may contact you to follow up. Thank you.

Trevor Paglen writes the kinds of books that get you into weird conversations with strangers. He takes the kinds of pictures that are slightly unnerving until you read the title card, and then it becomes a regular amount of unnerving.

He also just sent a giant inflatable mirror up into space.

That last one is just the latest art piece in a career all about being watched by things you can't see.

Thirty years after it first debuted in 1988, the sit-com Murphy Brown is back — and Candice Bergen is still in the title role. Bergen played Murphy Brown for a decade in the 1980s and '90s ... but how much does she know about Murphy's law? Three questions about the universal rule that anything can go wrong will go wrong.

Click the audio link above to hear how she does.

The Ferryman starts in a graffiti-covered back alley in Derry, Northern Ireland. A parish priest is questioned by an IRA captain — the body of a man who disappeared 10 years ago has been found in a bog.

The scene then shifts to the dead man's family and their farm. It's harvest time, 1981, and despite the joy and warmth abundantly on display, the first scene looms in the background.

Science fiction always perches on a tightrope of believability, and that tightrope is no fun place to stand. It's ill-defined (what makes something believable, anyway?), badly designed (it changes according to the perceptions of each individual reader, notoriously flaky though such perceptions may be) and invisible to the walker (who must intuit its arc from clues). And yet the penalty for a single stumble is horrifying: Beneath that wavering rope lies the quicksand of readerly scorn. It's a miracle, really, that any would-be worldbuilder ever places a trembling foot on the line.

As a teacher, father and children's book author, Jon Scieszka avoids books full of lessons. "Since the beginning of kids' books ... it was like: learn your alphabet, learn the colors, or learn morals, learn proper behavior," he says. But the author of the kids' classic The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales says books for small readers don't need big lessons.

Posters for the film Mary Queen of Scots label Mary Stuart "Born to Fight," and Elizabeth I "Born to Power." But this rivalry is so famous we already know those taglines are applied to the wrong queens.