Free Library Podcast

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Jennifer Weiner is the ''funny, fierce, feisty'' (Glamour) no. 1 New York Times bestselling author of more than a dozen novels that dive headlong into the ups and downs of relationships, careers, and family dynamics. With 11 million copies in print in 36 countries, her works include The Next Best Thing, All Fall Down, and In Her Shoes, which was made into a popular film. An aficionado of The Bachelor, cannoli, and celebrity Twitter feuds, Weiner is also the author of Hungry Heart, a collection of essays in which she mines her many identities to paint a portrait of yearning and fulfillment. Little Foot, Big City is the second book in a YA trilogy about friendship, belonging, and urban sasquatches. 

(recorded 10/28/2017)

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In conversation with Dena Heilek

Reading ''like a conversation with a witty friend who can recommend the perfect nosh for any occasion'' (O, The Oprah Magazine), Deb Perelman's bestselling The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook won hearts and stomachs for its candid, can-do approach to good eating without complicated methods or expensive ingredients. Based on her award-winning Smitten Kitchen blog that counts the New York Times, Martha Stewart, NPR, and Rachael Ray among its many admirers, it won the IACP Julia Child Award and was a Cooking Light Top 100 Cookbook of the Last 25 Years. In Smitten Kitchen Every Day, Perelman dishes out more than 100 all-new recipes for real people who want to eat quality food. 

(recorded 11/1/2017)

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In conversation with Tamala Edwards, anchor, 6ABC Action News morning edition

Ta-Nehisi Coates won the 2015 National Book Award for Between the World and Me, a ''searing meditation on what it means to be black in America today'' (New York Times). Covering culture, politics, and social issues as a national correspondent for The Atlantic, he won the George K. Polk Award for his cover story ''The Case for Reparations.'' A Distinguished Writer in Residence at NYU's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, Coates is a recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship, among a string of other honors. We Were Eight Years in Power is a collection of new and previously published essays on the Obama presidency. (recorded 11/2/2017)

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The host of MSNBC's popular news and commentary program Hardball, Chris Matthews is one of America's most familiar media faces. A former longtime syndicated print media columnist, staffer for several Democratic members of Congress, and speechwriter during the Carter administration, he has penned many books, including Now, Let Me Tell You What I Really Think; Tip and the Gipper: When Politics Worked; and Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero, which was critically lauded and spent a dozen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. Matthews's latest book examines the underdog Kennedy brother who, though overlooked and overshadowed, came to represent hope and idealism for a generation of young Americans.

(recorded 11/3/2017)

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In conversation with longtime broadcaster and journalist, Tracey Matisak

One of the most decorated and popular journalists of all time, Dan Rather was anchor of the CBS Evening News for 24 years. Renowned for his laconic Texas drawl and no-nonsense delivery, he has interviewed every president since Eisenhower, covered the Kennedy assassination from the scene, reported from the frontlines of Vietnam and the Watergate scandal, and urged ''courage'' in the wake of 9/11, among his reporting of thousands of other stories. What Unites Us is an essay collection in which Rather expounds on what real patriotism looks like and extolls the institutions that sustain us.

(recorded 11/8/2017)

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In conversation with Janet Benton, author of the debut novel Lilli de Jong.

''Poignant, powerful'' and ''timeless'' (Boston Globe), Isabel Allende's acclaimed historical fiction weaves reality, memory, and mysticism into tapestries of intergenerational family sagas about war, love, and politics. The recipient of 50 awards in more than a dozen countries, she is also the creator of an eponymous foundation dedicated to empowering women and girls worldwide. Allende's first international bestseller, The House of the Spirits, was adapted into a feature film starring Meryl Streep. Her other novels include the New York Times bestsellers The Japanese Lover, Inés of My Soul, Portrait in Sepia, Daughter of Fortune, and Maya's Notebook. In the Midst of Winter explores the plight of immigrants and refugees in a time-hopping tale through Brooklyn, Guatemala, Chile, and Brazil.

(recorded 11/10/2017)

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Acclaimed for synthesizing historical insight with wit and exuberance, Gordon S. Wood won the Pulitzer Prize for History and the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award for The Radicalism of the American Revolution, a rollicking and watershed study of the struggle for U.S. independence. His many other books include The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, winner of the Bancroft Prize; The Americanization of Benjamin Franklin, recipient of the Julia Ward Howe Prize; and The Purpose of the Past. A frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books and The New Republic, Wood is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal and is the Alva O. Way University Professor of History at Brown University. Friends Divided is a biography of the two very different founding fathers whose intertwined fortunes and philosophies helped birth America.

Ellis Wachs Endowed Lecture

(recorded 11/13/2017)

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John Banville won the Man Booker Prize for The Sea, a story of loss and the fickle power of memory celebrated for its ''power and strangeness and piercing beauty'' (The Washington Post Book World). His other fiction-including The Book of Evidence, Ancient Light, and The Untouchable-has won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, the Irish PEN Award, the Franz Kafka Prize, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is also an acclaimed playwright, nonfiction writer, screenwriter, and crime novelist. In Mrs. Osmond, Banville broadens the story of the titular heroine of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady into intense, subtle, thrilling new realms.

(recorded 11/14/2017)

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Russell Shorto is the author of the bestselling The Island at the Center of World, ''a masterpiece of storytelling and first-rate intellectual history'' (Wall Street Journal) of the forgotten and mythologized Dutch colony of Manhattan. His other books include Descartes' Bones, Saints and Madmen, and Amsterdam, a centuries-spanning portrait of the world's most liberal city. A contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, he is the former director of the John Adams Institute in Amsterdam and Senior Scholar at the New Netherland Research Center. In Revolution Song, Shorto follows the lives of six historical figures from a British colony on the brink of revolt as a way of defending today's American values. (recorded 11/16/2017)

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''By turns grim and absurd, deeply poignant and laugh-out-loud funny'' (New York Times), Roz Chast has published more than 800 cartoons in The New Yorker since 1978. Chast has written or illustrated more than a dozen books, including several collected volumes of her published cartoons and the memoir Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?, a bestselling multi-genre narrative about her aging parents that won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was a National Book Award Finalist. Told with nostalgia, wonder, and deft observation, Going into Town is an illustrated paean/guide/thank-you note to Manhattan.

Carole Phillips Memorial Lecture

(recorded 11/21/2017)