Free Library Podcast

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After more than 20 years of bringing attention to progressive issues underreported by the mainstream media, Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! program now airs simultaneously on satellite and cable television, more than 1,400 radio stations throughout the world, and the internet. Her many honors include the first Right Livelihood Award, a lifetime achievement award from Harvard's Nieman Foundation for Journalism, and the George Polk Award. Goodman's five New York Times bestselling books include Breaking the Sound Barrier and her newest work, Democracy Now!: Twenty Years Covering the Movements Changing America. Now she returns to the Free Library to analyze and contextualize the last year's tempestuous political events. 

(recorded 5/8/2017)

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Starring a hard-bitten and self-destructive maverick Oslo police detective, Jo Nesbø's ''maddeningly addictive'' (Vanity Fair) Harry Hole novels have sold more than 23 million copies and have been translated into more than 50 languages. A musician, songwriter, economist, and former professional soccer player, the Norwegian native is the recipient of the Glass Key Award for best Nordic crime novel. In The Thirst, Nesbø's 11th installment in the Harry Hole series, the titular protagonist hunts for a nemesis from his past as he investigates a serial killer who targets Tinder daters.

(recorded 5/9/2017)

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Paula Poundstone's decades-long stand-up comedy career has included multiple HBO specials, an Emmy Award, two comedy albums, and an American Comedy Award for Best Female Stand-Up. Renowned for her self-effacing wit and cheeky observations, she is a frequent panelist on NPR's Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me and a recurring guest on A Prairie Home Companion. She is the author of There's Nothing in This Book That I Meant to Say and has contributed articles to The Los Angeles Times, Glamour, and Mother Jones. In her new book, Poundstone embarks on a series of diverse adventures in search of long-term happiness.

Barbara Gohn Day Memorial Lecture

(recorded 5/11/2017)

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In conversation with Joel Nichols, Data Strategy & Evaluation Administrator, Strategic Initiatives

Acclaimed for his ''unparalleled inventiveness'' (Chicago Tribune), China Miéville is the author of a score of fantasy novels, comics, novellas, short story collections, Marxist nonfiction, and essay collections. Associated with the ''New Weird'' writing movement, his books include This Census-Taker, Railsea, The City & The City, and Perdido Street Station. A contributor to The New York Times, The Guardian, Granta, and a founding editor of the quarterly Salvage, he has won the Hugo, World Fantasy, and Arthur C. Clarke awards. In October, Miéville plunges into the extraordinary 1917 political tumult that led to the creation of the world's first socialist state.

(recorded 5/16/2017)

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''His generation's most gifted writer of love's complicated, contradictory power'' (Los Angeles Times), Colm Tóibín is the author of an impressive list of novels, short stories, essays, plays, poetry, and criticism. His novels The Master (2004) and The Testament of Mary (2013) were shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and Brooklyn (2009) was adapted into the popular BAFTA Award-winning film of the same name. The Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, in 2011 Toibin received an Irish PEN Award. In House of Names, Tóibín brings a modern sensibility and sympathy to the story of Clytemnestra, the vengeful wife of Ancient Greece's King Agamemnon. 

(recorded 5/17/2017)

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Dennis Lehane's ''raw, harrowing, and unsentimental'' (Washington Post Book World) bestselling crime novels include Mystic River; Shutter Island; Gone, Baby, Gone; and Live by Night, all of which have been adapted into critically acclaimed films by Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, and Ben Affleck. His other writing includes the story collection Coronado, several episodes of the television shows The Wire and Boardwalk Empire, and the screenplay for the film adaptation of his book The Drop. Lehane's latest novel tells the story of a shut-in, former television journalist who finds her sanity tested as she slips into a violent conspiracy.

(recorded 5/18/2017)

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Blending dramatic historical narrative with critical interpretation in order to make surprising connections to contemporary political and cultural struggles, William Hogeland's three books on founding American history include The Whiskey Rebellion, Founding Finance, and Declaration. He has also contributed articles and essays about history, music, and politics to a slew of publications, including The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times, and Salon, and has appeared on PBS's History Detectives, Book TV, and Good Morning America. In Autumn of the Black Snake, Hogeland tells the story of the creation of the U.S. Army and how its first victory against the indigenous people of the Ohio Valley opened the way to western settlement.

(recorded 5/23/2017)

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Then We Came to the End, Joshua Ferris's ''truly affecting novel about work, trust, love, and loneliness'' (Seattle Times), won the 2008 PEN/Hemingway Award for best first novel and was a finalist for the National Book Award. His other works include The Unnamed and To Rise Again at a Decent Hour, which was shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize. One of The New Yorker's ''20 Under 40'' writers and winner of the International Dylan Thomas Prize, Ferris has published fiction in Granta, Prairie Schooner, and Best American Voices, among other places. The Dinner Party, his first story collection, is rife with characters searching for answers in the aftermath of life's pitfalls.

''Nailing entire worlds together with teeming, precise detail'' (The New York Times), Jim Shepard is the author of seven novels, including The Book of Aron and Project X. A writer's writer, he is perhaps more celebrated for his short fiction, which has appeared in publications ranging from The Paris Review to Playboy. His story collections include You Think That's Bad and Like You'd Understand, Anyway, a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of The Story Prize. His new collection explores the emotional hazards of everyday life writ large on the canvases of historic tragedy and triumph.

(recorded 5/24/2017)

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Military historian and journalist Thomas E. Ricks won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting for his Wall Street Journal series on U.S. defense spending in the post-Cold War era. His books include The Generals, The Gamble, and the Pulitzer Prize finalist Fiasco, a bestselling account of America's tragic and reckless invasion of Iraq. A member of the Center for a New American Security defense policy think tank, he has reported on a wide variety of military activities for The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Atlantic Monthly, among other publications. His new book is a dual biography of Winston Churchill's and George Orwell's farsighted fight for democracy during its darkest hours.

(recorded 5/25/2017)

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Yaa Gyasi's breakout debut novel Homegoing, a multigenerational tale that ''brims with compassion'' (NPR Books), follows two half-sisters on opposite sides of the 18th-century Ghanaian slave trade and their descendants. It was a New York Times bestseller and 2016 Notable Book and a Guardian Best Book, and it was nominated for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize. Gyasi, a native of Ghana who emigrated with her family to the U.S. in 1991, earned a Master of Arts from the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was selected by Ta-Nehisi Coates for the National Book Foundation's 2016 ''5 under 35'' award.

Acclaimed for portraying the cultural and socio-political issues of his native Jamaica, Kei Miller is the author of the novels The Last Warner Woman and The Same Earth; the story collection The Fear of Stones; and several collections of poetry, including the award-winning The Cartographer Tries to Map a Way to Zion. A creative-writing teacher at the University of London, Miller is the recipient of the Forward Prize for Poetry and an International Writer's Fellowship at the University of Iowa, and he was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Set in the Jamaican backlands, Augustown tells the story of a woman's struggle to overcome the weight of history, race, and violence.

(recorded 6/8/2017)