Free Library Podcast

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Matt de la Peña was awarded the Newbery Medal and a Caldecott Honor for Last Stop on Market Street, a children's book that highlighted volunteerism, income inequality, and other topics not often addressed by the genre. The author of six acclaimed YA novels and the popular picture book A Nation's Hope: The Story of Boxing Legend Joe Louis, he has taught creative writing throughout the U.S. The author and illustrator of the New York Times bestselling Otis series of books, Loren Long also illustrated Barack Obama's mega-popular Of Thee I Sing and re-illustrated the children's classic The Little Engine That Could. In Love, de la Peña and Long depict the myriad wondrous ways we experience that most universal of bonds throughout our years.

(recorded 1/27/2018)

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The most widely read female writer in Turkey, Elif Shafak has penned more than a dozen ''vibrant, lush and lively'' (Washington Post) books that have been translated into more than 40 languages. This work includes the bestselling novels The Bastard of Istanbul, The Forty Rules of Love, and The Architect's Apprentice; the memoir Black Milk, which explores the conflicts between creativity and motherhood; and scores of articles in Turkish and English for periodicals around the world, including the Guardian, the New York Times, Der Spiegel, and La Repubblica, among others. Her writing has been nominated for the Orange Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Award. Three Daughters of Eve explores the East and West's roiling class, wealth, and religious differences.

Acclaimed for exploring questions of identity and perception, Siri Hustvedt's many novels include the international bestsellers The Blazing World, What I Loved, and The Summer Without Men. She has published scores of essays and papers in academic journals, especially fitting because many of these works examine the broadening interdisciplinary relationship between art and science. Her many honors include the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction. A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women is a three-part essay collection that employs feminism, psychology, neuroscience, and a host of other pursuits to bridge the gaps between the sciences and humanities.

(recorded 1/31/2018)

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Referred to as one of the ''world's leading authorities on armed conflict'' by the International Institute for Strategic Studies, military historian and foreign-policy analyst Max Boot is the author of The Savage Wars of Peace, War Made New, and the New York Times bestselling Invisible Armies, a centuries-spanning look at guerilla warfare. He serves as the Jeane J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. Echoing current-day entanglements and unlearned lessons in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Road Not Taken tells the story of a legendary CIA operative and his visionary but ignored ''hearts and minds'' roadmap to an American victory in the Vietnam War. 

(recorded 2/1/2018)

''A master of perpetual storytelling'' (The New Yorker), Salman Rushdie is the author of a dozen novels, including Shame, The Satanic Verses, and Midnight's Children, winner of the Booker Prize in 1981 and the ''Booker of Bookers'' Prize in 1993. His other works include a short story collection, East, West, and four works of nonfiction, including the memoir Joseph Anton, which chronicles his time in hiding during the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa calling for his death. Rushdie's latest novel finds an enigmatic billionaire taking up residence in an exclusive Greenwich Village enclave.

''Adept at evoking complex psychological territory'' (The New Yorker), Claire Messud is the author of The Emperor's Children, a cutting portrait of life among Manhattan's junior intelligentsia that was long-listed for the Booker Prize. She is a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and a recipient of Guggenheim and Radcliffe fellowships, and her work has been thrice counted among the New York Times Notable Books of the Year. Her other novels include When the World Was Steady, The Hunters, The Last Life, and The Woman Upstairs. In The Burning Girl, Messud tells of two inseparable friends who find their bond tested by adolescence.

(recorded 9/28/2017)

William Taubman won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, a portrait of the Soviet leader ''unlikely to be surpassed any time soon in either richness or complexity'' (New York Times Book Review). The Bertrand Snell Professor of Political Science Emeritus at Amherst College, he is the author of several other works detailing 20th-century Russian politics. Drawing from international archival documents, interviews with foreign leaders, Kremlin contemporaries, and Gorbachev himself, Taubman's new biography is a nuanced look at the transformational leader.

Yuri Slezkine is best known as the author of The Jewish Century, a boldly interpretive treatise about Jews' role in modernity. Jane K. Sather Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley and a W. Glenn Campbell and Rita Ricardo-Campbell National Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, he is also the author of several other books about the Soviet state, including In the Shadow of Revolution, Arctic Mirrors, and Between Heaven and Hell. In House of Government, Slezkine tells the epic of the massive apartment building occupied by high-ranking Communists until their annihilation during Stalin's purges.

(recorded 9/26/2017)

Lauded for bringing the Middle Eastern, North African, Mediterranean, and Eastern European influences from Solomonov's titular Philadelphia restaurant to readers' home kitchens, Michael Solomonov and Steven Cook's Zahav: A World of Israeli Cooking won the 2016 James Beard Book of the Year and Best International Cookbook award. Solomonov won the 2011 James Beard Award for ''Best Chef, Mid-Atlantic,'' and his restaurants have been recognized by Bon Appétit, Food & Wine, and Travel + Leisure. At once a madcap bio of their donut mini-empire, canticle to American passion, and collection of cult-favorite recipes, Solomonov and Cook's new book tells the ''hole'' story of all things ''Fednuts.''

In conversation with Tom Henneman, Bob Logue, and Felicia D'Ambrosio

Moderated by culinary expert, food writer, and permanent judge on BRAVO's Emmy-winning series Top Chef, Gail Simmons. She also makes frequent television appearances on TODAY and Good Morning America, and is the author of the 2012 memoir Talking With My Mouth Full and the forthcoming cookbook Bringing It Home: Favorite Recipes from a Life of Adventurous Eating. She was named the #1 Reality TV Judge in America by the New York Post. 

(recorded 9/25/2017)

In conversation with Meg Wolitzer, bestselling author of The Interestings among many novels.

A writer for The New Yorker for more than three decades, Adam Gopnik is the author of Paris to the Moon, Angels and Ages: A Short Book About Darwin, Lincoln, and Modern Life, and The Table Comes First, an ''unapologetically intelligent yet charmingly witty'' (The Atlantic) bite into the deeper truths of food culture. A three-time recipient of the National Magazine Award and a winner of the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting, Gopnik was decorated with the French Republic's medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters. At the Strangers' Gate is a memoir of his 1980s move to a peculiar New York that is both romantically familiar yet light years from today's incarnation.

(recorded 9/22/2017)

''A daring chronicler of our most profound anxieties and human desires'' (Washington Post), Tom Perrotta is the author of some of the most popular and critically acclaimed novels of our time, including Election, which was adapted into an Oscar-nominated film starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon; Little Children, which was adapted into a film for which he won an Academy Award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay; and The Leftovers, named to several prominent best-of-the-year lists and adapted by HBO into a popular TV series. In Mrs. Fletcher, Perrotta tells the story of an empty-nester whose placid life is upended by an anonymous salacious text message. (recorded 9/19/2017)

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, Stephen Greenblatt is widely acclaimed as the father of New Historicism, which strives to understand works of literature within their historical and social contexts. His other books include the New York Times bestselling Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, Hamlet in Purgatory, and Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. A two-time Guggenheim fellow and former president of the Modern Language Association, Greenblatt is Cogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard University. The Rise And Fall of Adam and Eve delves into the boundless creation story of the founding parents of all humanity.  (recorded 9/15/2017)

A ''fiction pioneer, toying with fresh ways of rendering experience and emotion'' (NPR), Nicole Krauss is the bestselling author of the acclaimed novels Man Walks into a Room, The History of Love, and Great House. Named one of Granta's Best Young American Novelists and The New Yorker's ''20 Under 40,'' she is the winner of the Saroyan Prize for International Literature and a finalist for the National Book Award, among many other honors. In Forest Dark, Krauss interweaves the disparate paths of an older lawyer and a young novelist searching for transcendence in an Israeli desert. 

Nathan Englander is the author of the story collections For the Relief of Unbearable Urges and What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award. In addition to his widely anthologized short fiction, he is the author of the novel The Ministry of Special Cases, a play titled The Twenty-Seventh Man, and works that have appeared in The New Yorker and The Washington Post, among other places. In his new novel, Englander illustrates the Israeli–Palestinian conflict via a political thriller that hinges on the complicated relationship between a guard and his secret prisoner. (recorded 9/14/2017)