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Joanna Quinn, author of The Whalebone Theater, on secret gardens, complicated heroines, and procrastination.
Season 2 Episode 21
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Few of us need reminding that childhood can be a difficult and challenging time; but it can also be a magical one. That duality is at the heart of The Whalebone Theater, the best-sellin…
Published on 2 years, 5 months ago
Ari Shapiro on singing for Bono, cooking for Nina Totenberg, and what novels teach him.
Season 2 Episode 20
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Tender hearted children growing up in oppressive and claustrophobic societies dominate the two novels chosen by the journalist and musician, Ari Shapiro. The first is Douglas Stuart’s a…
Published on 2 years, 5 months ago
Reading Stephen King with Sera Gamble, co-creator of the hit show, You.
Season 2 Episode 19
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Sera Gamble is perhaps best known as the screenwriter and showrunner for the hit Netflix show You, based on the novels of Caroline Kepnes, in which the romantic hero is not just a prett…
Published on 2 years, 6 months ago
Brooke Gladstone on her terrible waitressing, the future of media, and why Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita resonates today
Season 2 Episode 18
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For 22 years Brooke Gladstone has been demystifying the media for listeners of her indispensable public radio show, On the Media. But her long career, which began in summer stock theat…
Published on 2 years, 7 months ago
Jerry Stahl on a bus trip to Auschwitz, his friendship with Anthony Bourdain, and Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust.
Season 2 Episode 17
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A bus trip to Auschwitz in the company of the writer Jerry Stahl, who in 2016 set off for Poland to confront one of the darkest chapters in human history. The resulting book, Nein Nein …
Published on 2 years, 8 months ago
A Year in Reading with Joyce Maynard, Darcey Steinke, Edmund White, and John Waters
Season 2 Episode 16
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In this special holiday episode of Shelf Life, we took time out from our regular format to see what guests old and new read in 2022. The episode starts with Joyce Maynard, who shot to …
Published on 2 years, 8 months ago
Marion Nestle on late starts, unhappy families and her war on food myths
Season 2 Episode 15
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If you sometimes fret that your opportunity to make your mark on the world has passed, take a leaf from Marion Nestle’s career. At 50, she found herself divorced, out of a job, and not…
Published on 2 years, 9 months ago
Leila Taylor on Shirley Jackson's Haunted Houses, Black Goth, and Being a "Creepy Kid."
Season 2 Episode 14
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In this episode, Leila Taylor, the author of Darkly, an expansive rumination on the relationship between Gothic narratives and the Black experience in America, talks haunted houses cour…
Published on 2 years, 9 months ago
Lydia Millet on writing about goodness; and Mary Ruefle makes a cameo.
Season 2 Episode 13
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Do good people make for good novels? In this episode, the author Lydia Millet, best known for The Children’s Bible, a National Book Award Finalist, talks about her latest novel, Dinosau…
Published on 2 years, 10 months ago
Orlando Figes on writing history, radioactive fungi, and why Madame Bovary is the greatest novel ever written
Season 2 Episode 12
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How do we synthesize a 1000-plus years of history into a 300–page book. The historian Orlando Figes, who has made the study of Russia his lifelong work, shows us how in his new book, Th…
Published on 2 years, 10 months ago