Movie monsters for Halloween

Also this week: Prince's 'The Beautiful Ones,' comforting picture books, critics' picks and more [Monster maker Rick Baker]( Elaine Baker/Courtesy of Cameron Books Happy Halloween! Thinking of cueing up a classic monster movie tonight? You're probably going to see the work of monster master Rick Baker, who worked on everything from An American Werewolf in London to Maleficent. His career is chronicled in a massive new two-book set, Metmorphosis, and our own Mandalit del Barco visited the now-retired Baker at his California home. [Check out the story here.]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Newsletter continues after sponsor message --------------------------------------------------------------- [The Beautiful Ones, by Prince]( Dan Piepenbring was a 29-year-old editor of the literary magazine The Paris Review when he met Prince for the first time in 2016 — and agreed to help the musical icon pen a memoir. It was the assignment of a lifetime for a writer who had not yet published a book. "If there was any advantage to the kind of guilelessness that I brought to our conversations, it was that it let me listen to him very openly and without judgment," [Piepenbring tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross](. [Reviewer Tanya Ballard Brown says]( "we'll never know what it might have been if Prince had lived. But it's a good start." [Ordinary Girls, by Jaquira Diaz]( There's another great memoir on our radar this week -- this one from critic and author Jaquira Díaz. Ordinary Girls is about her rough childhood in Puerto Rico's El Caserío Padre Rivera housing project. Her mom worked all the time and was later diagnosed with a mental illness, and her dad? "My father was a drug dealer," [she tells NPR's Steve Inskeep](. "There was a lot of drug dealing. There were fights. There were raids," Díaz remembers -- but at first, she says she thought everyone lived that way. "And so now I look back and I realize how not normal that was, how lucky we are to be alive." [Eat Joy: Stories & Comfort Food]( It's been a wild week, all over the world, and we're not going to blame anyone who wants to take refuge in comfort food. In fact, there's a whole new book collecting essays and recipes from writers like Claire Messud, Colum McCann and Lev Grossman, about their favorite comfort foods. It's called Eat Joy -- and you can find out more about it over at our food and culture blog, [The Salt](. [The Kindness Book, by Todd Parr]( And if you're not quite old enough to cook for yourself, but you still want a little comfort, our kids' books columnist Juanita Giles is back to tell you all about the colorful world of [author and illustrator Todd Parr]( whose latest is The Kindness Book. (Giles says her kids love Parr so much, they sometimes make hand-drawn copies of his work.) [One Day, by Gene Weingarten]( For Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten's new book, he decided to pick one random day in the past 20 years and tell all the stories he could find from that day. So he asked people to pull a series of random dates from a hat -- and December 28, 1986 became the basis of his new book, One Day. "The book has these tragedies in it," [he tells NPR's Scott Simon.]( "It also has stories that are ostensibly simple and straightforward. And what I did find is that the deeper you dig, you find out that nothing is really simple or straightforward." Finally this week, reviewer Katharine Coldiron calls the essays in Burn it Down: Women Writing About Anger "[an extraordinary collection of talent.]( Genevieve Valentine says Mira Ptacin's The In-Betweens, is a "[deft account]( of her experiences at the historic Spiritualist enclave Camp Etna, though it sometimes has the feel of a summer camp scrapbook. And for Halloween, may we suggest you spend some time with the witches of Ben Blacker's Hex Wives? Critic Etelka Lehoczky says the graphic novel owes a lot to The Stepford Wives -- but it's "[an excellent romp]( [Burn It Down: Women Writing About Anger]( [The In-Betweens, by Mira Ptacin]( [Hex Wives, by Ben Blacker and Mirka Andolfo]( — Happy reading! --------------------------------------------------------------- What do you think of today's email? We'd love to hear your thoughts, questions and feedback: [books@npr.org](mailto:books@npr.org?subject=Newsletter%20Feedback) Enjoying this newsletter? Forward to a friend! They can [sign up here](. Looking for more great content? [Check out all of our newsletter offerings]( — including Music, Pop Culture, Code Switch and more! You received this message because you're subscribed to Books emails. This email was sent by National Public Radio, Inc., 1111 North Capitol Street NE, Washington, DC 20002 [Unsubscribe]( | [Privacy Policy](