Mark de Castrique talks about “Hidden Scars” on “North Carolina Bookwatch” today at 11 a.m. and Thursday, May 24, at 5 p.m.

Graduates of any of North Carolina’s fine colleges and universities sometimes assert that theirs is the best known or most influential.

Those tags might, however, be better applied to an institution that went out of business 60 years ago, Black Mountain College. Still today, educators praise and criticize the college’s progressive and collaborative approach.

A recent exhibit at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, titled “Leap Before You Look: Black Mountain College 1933-1957,” celebrated the college’s “cultural force long felt” and the “school’s ethos, in which experience was the basis of knowledge, and objects were not fixed things, but mirrors of their environment, the result of action and experimentation.”

One fun way to learn about the college and its history is by reading Asheville’s Mark de Castrique’s detective story novel, “Hidden Scars.” Two modern detectives set out to solve a 70-year-old death and stumble into a complicated set of new crimes.

Charlie Lovett May 27

Charlie Lovett talks about “The Lost Book of the Grail” on “North Carolina Bookwatch” Sunday, May 27, at 11 a.m. and Thursday, May 21, at 5 p.m.

Best-selling Winston-Salem-based author Charlie Lovett’s latest novel, “The Lost Book of the Grail,” connects its readers to King Arthur, the Holy Grail and more than 1,000 years of British church history.

The book is an unusual thriller. Its central character, a teacher named Arthur Prescott, is happiest when he is among the ancient books and manuscripts in the library of a historic cathedral in the fictional English town of Barchester.

How Lovett blends the disruptive challenges of modern technology with the legacy of the Holy Grail is itself an entertaining miracle.