Free Library Podcast

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In 2013 NSA contractor Edward Snowden shook the pillars of the worldwide intelligence community when he revealed a trove of highly classified information that exposed astonishingly widespread mass U.S. surveillance overreach on a variety of international and domestic levels. Labeled a hero and whistleblower by some, he was formally charged with espionage and has been granted asylum in Russia, where he lives in an undisclosed location. In this one-of-a-kind interview, Snowden will discuss these revelations along with the current status of the surveillance state with Jeremy Scahill, investigative journalist, co-founder of the online journal The Intercept, and author of the bestselling books Blackwater, Dirty Wars, and The Assassination Complex.

(recorded 9/11/2017)

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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)

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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)

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''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)

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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)

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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)

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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)

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''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)

Cultural historian Robert Darnton is the author The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History. His many other books include The Business of Enlightenment, Berlin Journal, The Case for Books, and The Devil in the Holy Water. His towering and sundry honors include a MacArthur "genius" grant, election to the French Legion of Honor, a National Humanities Medal, and a National Book Critics Circle Award. In his latest book, the former director of the Harvard University library maps the rollicking, comedic, occasionally dangerous trails traveled by those in the French publishing industry during that country's time of greatest upheaval.

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(recorded 2/15/2018)

Counting Fortune 500 CEOs, veterans with PTSD, Michael J. Fox, inner-city youth, and Oprah Winfrey among his eclectic student body, Bob Roth is one of the world's most respected teachers of Transcendental Meditation. For more than 45 years he's sought to lessen the emotional and physical toll stress places on our lives through this 5,000-year-old practice, training first under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, one of the 20th century's most popular meditation gurus. In Strength in Stillness, Roth explains the three types of meditation, breaks down the science behind them, and in simple language explains how Transcendental Meditation is the best way to eliminate stress from our lives.

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(recorded 2/20/2018)