Podcast Episodes

Musician Orenda Fink on Glass Castles, Witchy Mothers, and Family Dysfunction

Season 3 Episode 6

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The musician Orenda Fink, best known for her early 2000s band, Azure Ray, purveyors of a dreamy, confessional pop, has now penned a frank, unsparing memoir, The Witch's Daughter, in whi…

Published on 1 year ago

Jennifer Belle on complicated teenage girls, and writing with Madonna

Season 3 Episode 5

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What does Charles Portis’s 1968 novel, True Grit, twice made into a Hollywood western,  have in common with Kay Thompson’s whimsical children's book, Eloise? Here to tell us is Jennifer…

Published on 1 year, 4 months ago

Curtis Sittenfeld on writing comedy, and Jane Austen's headstrong heroines

Season 3 Episode 4

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The author of seven novels and one collection of stories, Curtis Sittenfeld specializes in sharp-witted female protagonists in stories that reflect a Jane Austen-like cunning in using c…

Published on 1 year, 4 months ago

Ada Zhang on the Lives of Others and stanning Eudora Welty

Season 3 Episode 3

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Loss, longing and melancholy dominate the strange and sometimes mordantly funny short stories of Eudora Welty, the writer whose debut 1941 collection, A Curtain of Green is among two bo…

Published on 1 year, 6 months ago

The Dead Presidents Society with Actor Dylan Baker

Season 3 Episode 2

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When did you first encounter Dylan Baker? Perhaps it was as the brazen wife killer Colin Sweeney in the long-running CBS show, The Good Wife. Or maybe it was the FBI bully-in-chief, J. …

Published on 1 year, 7 months ago

Ramit Sethi on money, pleasure, and finding moments of awe

Season 3 Episode 1

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The bestselling  finance guru-turned-TV star, Ramit Sethi is on a mission to help all of us live what he calls our rich lives, but he's not just another finance bro. The son of Indian i…

Published on 1 year, 7 months ago

Season Three is Coming: turn the page on a new chapter.

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In the quiet hush of winter, there's a particular inclination to fold into the pages of unexplored narratives. Since Shelf Life paused its pulse last summer, I've wandered through a con…

Published on 1 year, 7 months ago

Between Dystopias: Marlon James and Hafizah Augustus Geter Live at Deep Water Lit Fest 23

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Each year  Deep Water Literary Festival in Narrowsburg, NY, identifies a unifying theme, often a particular literary work or an author, and builds a program to engage and interrogate th…

Published on 1 year, 11 months ago

DJ Taylor on George Orwell's literary genesis, and why the author of 1984 still matters

Season 2 Episode 23

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The writer and biographer D.J. Taylor on the rich, complicated and too-short life of one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, George Orwell. Almost 75 years after his death we discus…

Published on 2 years, 3 months ago

Christopher Bollen on Graham Greene, Agatha Christie, and the abiding pleasures of the whodunnit

Season 2 Episode 22

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Novelist Christopher Bollen has been writing twisty thrillers with emotional depth for over a decade. His latest, The Lost Americans, takes readers to Cairo for a deftly-plotted murder …

Published on 2 years, 4 months ago