Free Library Podcast

''A maestro of orchestrating emotion'' (Elle), Wally Lamb is the author of the novels She's Come Undone and I Know This Much Is True, both New York Times bestsellers and Oprah's Book Club titles. In addition to penning many other works of fiction, he is the editor of the nonfiction anthologies I'll Fly Away and Couldn't Keep It to Myself, collections of autobiographical essays mined from his work with inmates in Connecticut prisons. In I'll Take You There, the ghost of a trailblazing female silent-movie director uses the silver screen to help a film scholar reflect upon the women who've most impacted his life and to help him understand feminist tribulations in all eras. 

(recorded 11/29/2016)

Janet Evanovich is the author of the no. 1 New York Times bestselling Stephanie Plum mystery series.  Detailing the continuing adventures of a Garden State lingerie-buyer-turned-bounty-hunter with a knack for ''making trouble and winning hearts'' (USA Today), Evanovich has seen her work translated into more than 40 languages and sell 200 million copies worldwide. The winner of the New Jersey Romance Writers Golden Leaf Award and several Romantic Times awards, she has also written the popular Fox and O'Hare series, the Alexandra Barnaby novels, and How I Write, a guide to writing engaging bestsellers. Turbo Twenty-Three is a new adventure featuring Evanovich's spunky, fierce heroine.

In conversation with Andy Kahan

(recorded 11/15/2016)

With his partners in the seminal rock group The Band, Robbie Robertson helped change the face of popular music throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s. A collaborator on such classic songs as ''The Weight,'' ''The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,'' and ''Up on Cripple Creek,'' he continues to have an enduring influence through his singular songwriting and ''torrid'' (Rolling Stone) guitar sound. In Testimony, Robertson reflects on his half-Jewish, half-Mohawk childhood on an Indian Reservation to his rise to rock ‘n' roll royalty. Along the way he and The Band worked with the biggest names in music, including Bob Dylan, Muddy Waters, and Van Morrison, among countless other artists. On the eve of the 40th anniversary of his group's swansong, the legendary The Last Waltz concert, Robertson tells his lyrical story.

In conversation with Tom Moon, contributor to NPR's All Things Considered and author of the New York Times bestseller 1000 Recordings To Hear Before You Die. (recorded 11/16/2016)

Jonathan Dee is the author of five novels, including The Privileges, a finalist for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize and winner of the 2011 Prix Fitzgerald. He is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, a National Magazine Award-nominated literary critic for Harper's, and former senior editor of The Paris Review. Dee ''is the kind of writer who thinks hard about contemporary realities and then builds sturdy, stately novels of ideas around them'' (New York Times) that are ''full of elegance, vitality and complexity'' (New York Times Book Review). In his new book, the fallout from a marriage tests the bounds of truth, apology, forgiveness, and redemption.

''An astoundingly tuned voice-graceful, dark, authentic, and funny-telling just the kinds of stories we need to get us through these times,'' (Thomas Pynchon), George Saunders is the acclaimed author of several collections of short stories, including the New York Times Notable Books Pastoralia and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline, as well as a collection of essays and a book for children. One of Entertainment Weekly's 100 top most creative people in entertainment, Saunders is the recipient of Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships and a 2009 inductee into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His new book, Tenth of December cuts to the core of contemporary existence in a moving collection of stories about class, sex, love, loss, work, despair, and war. (recorded 3/28/2013)

Robert Kanigel was a National Book Critics Circle finalist for The Man Who Knew Infinity, ''an exquisite portrait'' (Los Angeles Times) of the rich collaboration between an unschooled but brilliant Indian clerk and a pre-eminent English mathematician. The author of six other books and more than 400 articles, essays, and reviews, Kanigel has produced biographical and scientific writings that earned him a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation grant. He was formerly a professor of science writing at M.I.T., where he was the creator and director of its Graduate Program in Science Writing. Eyes on the Street tells the story of Jane Jacobs, the irascible, unstoppable polymath activist who changed the way we understand the metropolis.

(recorded 10/27/2016)

The most revered Italian scientist since Galileo, Nobel Prize winner Enrico Fermi was one of the most prolific and consequential figures of the 20th century. Though a modest and unassuming man, he became one of the fathers of the nuclear age whose contributions to the modern world loom large still. Presenting his personal and scientific story are University of Pennsylvania professors Gino Segré and Bettina Hoerlin. In addition to Penn, Segré has taught at M.I.T. and Oxford, was Director of Theoretical Physics at the National Science Foundation, and has authored three books of scientific history. Hoerlin served as Health Commissioner of Philadelphia, was a visiting lecturer at Haverford College and Oxford, and is the author of Steps of Courage: My Parents' Journey from Nazi Germany to America.

In conversation with Larry Gladney

(recorded 10/26/2016)

''With a firm grasp of the delicacy and complexity of human relationships'' (Boston Globe), Jodi Picoult has delivered no. 1 New York Times bestsellers that are renowned for marrying controversial topics with nuanced characters and pitch-perfect descriptions of suburbia's fraught and precarious underbelly. Her 23 novels include House Rules, Handle with Care, Change of Heart, Nineteen Minutes, My Sister's Keeper, and The Storyteller, as well as the YA novel Between the Lines, co-written with her daughter, Samantha van Leer. In Small Great Things, Picoult tackles race, privilege, prejudice, and compassion through the story of an African American nurse and a white supremacist couple's baby.

In conversation with Laura Kovacs

(recorded 10/25/2016)

One of the principal definers of postmodern art, painter David Salle is one of the last four decades' most celebrated artists. Known for paintings and prints of what seem to be indiscriminately overlaid found images from a variety of sources and styles, his work hangs in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, The Guggenheim, the National Gallery in Washington D.C., the Tate Modern, and the National Galerie Berlin, among many others. In How to See, Salle offers a master class in the complexities of engaging with contemporary art via essays, theory, and profiles of his friends and peers.

In conversation with Eileen Owens, Suzanne Andrée Curatorial Fellow in Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, Philadelphia Museum of Art (recorded 10/18/2016)

Francine Prose is acclaimed for creating satirical worlds of absurd situations, sardonic humor, intelligence, compassion, and grief. An acclaimed novelist, critic, and essayist, she is the author of 16 novels, including the National Book Award finalist Blue Angel and, most recently, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932. A former President of the PEN American Center and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and a Fulbright fellowship, Prose has also written three short-story collections, a children's picture book, and eight nonfiction works. Mister Monkey weaves the darkly funny tale of an off-off-off-off Broadway children's musical as told from several dizzyingly unreliable viewpoints.

Rabih Alameddine was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award for his novel An Unnecessary Woman, a ''paean to the transformative power of reading'' (LA Review of Books). In addition to authoring several other novels and a collection of short stories, he was the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship and has had solo gallery exhibitions of his paintings on three continents. Alameddine was born in Jordan to Lebanese parents and was educated in America and England. In his new novel, a gay Middle Eastern man reflects on the defining events of his life during a night in a psych clinic waiting room.

(recorded 10/17/2016)

It's 1947, and twelve-year-old Clyde Thomason is proud to have an older brother who guards the Freedom Train-a train that is traveling to all forty-eight states carrying the country's most important documents, including the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. Clyde is chosen to say the Freedom Pledge at the train's stop in Atlanta, but his terrible stage fright forces him to refuse the honor. Instead, it's the class bully, Phillip, who gets selected, and he begins to torment Clyde. When an African-American boy saves him from a beating, Clyde is shocked. Especially when he learns that William lives in the white part of town. How can this be? And why can't he bring himself to be friends with William?

Clyde hasn't told his parents he won't perform the pledge, nor has he mentioned his confusing friendship with a boy of color. So when the townspeople threaten William's family, Clyde has a choice to make: Will he keep quiet, or stand up for real freedom?

Evelyn Coleman's books include To Be a Drum, White Socks Only, The Riches of Oseola McCarty-a Smithsonian Notable Book and a Carter G. Woodson Honor Book-and Born in Sin. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia, where she received the Atlanta Mayor's fellowship for achievement in children's literature. (recorded 10/14/2016)