Free Library Podcast

The United States Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Life on Mars, a ''strange and beautiful'' book of verse that ''pulses with America's adolescent crush on the impossible, on what waits beyond the edge of the universe'' (New York Times). Her other work includes the celebrated poetry collections Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award; The Body's Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; and the memoir Ordinary Light, a finalist for the National Book Award. A professor of creative writing at Princeton and contributor to myriad anthologies and periodicals, Smith earned a fellowship with the Academy of American Poets. Her latest collection ties the truths of America's present to its fraught founding history.

(recorded 4/5/2018)

A writer who ''luxuriates in language'' (San Francisco Chronicle), Peter Carey is the author of 15 quirky and daring novels, including Parrot and Olivier in America, Bliss, Oscar and Lucinda, and The True History of the Kelly Gang, the latter two of which won the Man Booker Prize. Frequently posited as Australia's next Nobel Laureate in Literature, he is also the author of two story collections and four works of nonfiction, and he has collaborated on two screenplays. A Long Way from Home follows three intrepid contestants in a grueling 10,000-mile road race across 1950s Australia.

''A novelist with a particular genius for inhabiting the past'' (The London Review of Books), Alan Hollinghurst is the author of the Man Booker Prize-winning The Line of Beauty, an elegiac account of cash, cars, cocaine, and coming out in 1980s London. Infused with wit, sweeping jumps in time, and eroticism, his other achievements in fiction include The Swimming-Pool Library, The Spell, and The Stranger's Child. The Sparsholt Affair mines the complex depths of a charismatic man's legacy across three generations of a unique English family.

(recorded 3/27/2018)

''A superstar of the crime-fiction world'' (Seattle Times), Elizabeth George is the author of 20 character-driven suspense novels featuring Scotland Yard's intrepid Inspector Thomas Lynley and idiosyncratic Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers. Her many honors include the Agatha Award, the Anthony Award, and France's Grand Prix di Literatture Policierer. George's other work includes three YA novels and the popular creative-writing manual Write Away. A tangled tale of lies and redemption, The Punishment She Deserves finds Lynley and Havers facing one of their most sinister murder cases to date.

(recorded 3/29/2018)

Join John Hemphill and the Military History Club for a discussion of Benito Mussolini, Dictator of Fascist Italy. (recorded 7/19/2017)

Join John Hemphill and the Military History Club for a discussion of Benito Mussolini, Dictator of Fascist Italy. (recorded 7/19/2017)

With an artist's eye and a ground-level view of people in extremis across the world, writer Anna Badkhen offers ''rich and lucid prose [that] illustrates her journey as vividly as might a series of photographs'' (Christian Science Monitor). Her immersive investigations of the world's iniquities have yielded six books of nonfiction, most recently The World Is a Carpet: Four Seasons in an Afghan Village and Walking with Abel: Journeys with the Nomads of the African Savannah. A contributor to Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and The New Republic, she won the Joel R. Seldin Award for documenting the lives of civilians in warzones. In Fisherman's Blues, Badkhen documents the cultural, economic, and environmental turmoil in a centuries-old Senegalese fishing village.  

Min Jin Lee is the author of the ''accomplished and engrossing'' (New York Times Book Review) novel Free Food for Millionaires, a story of culture clash and identity that was named to a number of 2007's ''best of the year'' lists. She is a former columnist for the Chosun Ilbo, South Korea's leading newspaper, and her fiction, essays, and articles have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Vogue, and Food & Wine. A National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestseller, Lee's newest novel tells the generation-spanning story of a Korean family's fight for purchase in 20th-century Japan.

(recorded 3/22/2018)

The One Book Finale will feature an interview with Jacqueline Woodson and Tamala Edwards, 6ABC Action News Co-Anchor. 

The program will also feature a celebration of the poetry and music found in Another Brooklyn, with performances of original works--inspired by the novel--from Curtis Institute of Music composer Chelsea Komschlies, performed by Curtis Institute musicians, and from Philadelphia Youth Poet Laureate Husnaa Hashim. 

 

(recorded 3/14/2018)

The One Book Finale will feature an interview with Jacqueline Woodson and Tamala Edwards, 6ABC Action News Co-Anchor. 

The program will also feature a celebration of the poetry and music found in Another Brooklyn, with performances of original works--inspired by the novel--from Curtis Institute of Music composer Chelsea Komschlies, performed by Curtis Institute musicians, and from Philadelphia Youth Poet Laureate Husnaa Hashim. 

 

(recorded 3/14/2018)

The Geraldine R. Segal Professor of American Social Thought at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Mary Frances Berry is one of America's most respected legal historians and human-rights advocates. Her many books include Power in Words, Five Dollars and Pork Chop Sandwich, and Black Resistance/White Law. A former chairwoman of the Commission on Civil Rights, she is a Distinguished Fellow of the American Society for Legal History and the recipient of 35 honorary degrees. In History Teaches Us to Resist, she offers a comprehensive tableau of the pushback against previous presidential administrations, posits that antagonistic leaders help progressive movements flourish, and details her six decades as an activist in an array of causes.

Barbara Gohn Day Memorial Lecture

(recorded 3/20/2018)

''One of those rare historian-humanists who bridge East and West'' (Wall Street Journal), Ian Buruma is the author of The Missionary and the Libertine; Murder in Amsterdam; Year Zero: A History of 1945; Theater of Cruelty: Art, Film, and the Shadows of War; and Their Promised Land, an account of his grandparents' love and separation during the 20th century's darkest hours. The winner of the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay, the Erasmus Prize, and the Shorenstein Journalism Award, he is the editor of The New York Review of Books. A Tokyo Romance is an unsparing account of Buruma's journey into that city's frenetic and surreal '70s underground culture.

(recorded 3/15/2018)