Free Library Podcast

''A superstar of the crime-fiction world'' (Seattle Times), Elizabeth George is the author of 20 character-driven suspense novels featuring Scotland Yard's intrepid Inspector Thomas Lynley and idiosyncratic Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers. Her many honors include the Agatha Award, the Anthony Award, and France's Grand Prix di Literatture Policierer. George's other work includes three YA novels and the popular creative-writing manual Write Away. A tangled tale of lies and redemption, The Punishment She Deserves finds Lynley and Havers facing one of their most sinister murder cases to date.

Watch the video here.

(recorded 3/29/2018)

Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier's ''rare and extraordinary'' (San Francisco Chronicle) Whitman-esque Civil War odyssey of love, separation, and desertion, won the National Book Award, was adapted by Anthony Minghella into an Oscar-winning film, and was the 2016 One Book, One Philadelphia featured selection. His other bestselling novels are Nightwoods and Thirteen Moons, both period pieces set in Frazier's beloved native North Carolina. In his new novel, Frazier returns to the time of Cold Mountain to tell the story of Varina Howell, wife of the much older Jefferson Davis and the only First Lady the Confederate States of America would ever have.

Watch the video here.

(recorded 4/4/2018)

The United States Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith is the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Life on Mars, a ''strange and beautiful'' book of verse that ''pulses with America's adolescent crush on the impossible, on what waits beyond the edge of the universe'' (New York Times). Her other work includes the celebrated poetry collections Duende, winner of the James Laughlin Award; The Body's Question, winner of the Cave Canem Poetry Prize; and the memoir Ordinary Light, a finalist for the National Book Award. A professor of creative writing at Princeton and contributor to myriad anthologies and periodicals, Smith earned a fellowship with the Academy of American Poets. Her latest collection ties the truths of America's present to its fraught founding history.

Watch the video here.

(recorded 4/5/2018)

Junot Díaz won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the ''unruly, manic, seductive'' (Esquire) multigenerational tale of a cursed Dominican family. He is also the author of the story collections Drown and the National Book Award finalist This Is How You Lose Her. He serves as fiction editor at Boston Review and professor of creative writing at MIT. His many honors include a MacArthur Fellowship, induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. Islandborn-Diaz's first foray into children's books-is an ode to the power of our imaginations to connect us to the past.

Watch the video here.

(recorded 4/7/2018)

Perhaps America's most esteemed Central and Eastern European historian and academic, Timothy Snyder is the author of the no. 1 bestseller On Tyranny, Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning, Wall Around the West, and an impressive array of other books, articles, and essays about that continent's contentious and complicated past. His many honors include the Hannah Arendt Prize, the literature award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding. He is the Housum Professor of History at Yale, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. The Road to Unfreedom maps authoritarianism's rapid and alarming resurgence from Putin's Russia west toward the bastions of liberal democracy.

Watch the video here.

(recorded 4/9/2018)

A ''genuine artist ... who can render the intricate dazzle of it all and at the same time plumb its philosophical implications'' (Esquire), Richard Powers explores a remarkable range of subject matters in his novels. Among them are The Echo Maker, a story of the precarious brain, mass migrations, and car accidents; Orfeo, the narrative of a falsely accused amateur scientist/composer; and Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, in which a WWI-era photo sends two men on very different quests. His many honors include the National Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Award, and two Pushcart prizes. Powers' new book evokes activism, resistance, and the beauty of the natural world in the tale of disparate people saved and summoned by trees.

A writer of ''wide learning, audacious innovation and sardonic wit'' (Washington Post), prolific polymath William T. Vollmann is a novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and war correspondent. His 10 novels include the National Book Award-winning Europe Central, a portrait of Germany and the USSR at war. Two of his works of nonfiction, Rising Up and Rising Down and Imperial, were National Book Critics Circle Award finalists. Vollmann's articles and fiction have appeared in Harpers, The New Yorker, Esquire, and too many other publications to name. With firsthand research, sardonic wit, and far-reaching scope, No Immediate Danger details the ongoing disaster of the Fukushima nuclear plant and the global consequences of climate change. 

Watch the video here. (recorded 4/12/2018)

In conversation with Carlin Romano, Critic-at-Large, The Chronicle of Higher Education, former literary critic The Philadelphia Inquirer and author of America the Philosophical.

David Grossman won the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for his novel A Horse Walks into a Bar, a ''magnificently comic and sucker-punch-tragic excursion into brilliance'' (New York Times). Born in Jerusalem, Grossman is the author of numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature, including To the End of the Land, a meditation on war, family, and loss, praised as ''one of those few novels that feel as though they have made a difference to the world'' (New York Times) His many international honors include the French Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Israel's Emet Prize, and the just announced 2018 Israel Prize.

Watch the video here.

(recorded 4/13/2018)

In conversation with A.D. Amorosi, reporter Philadelphia Style Magazine and The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Lamont ''U-God'' Hawkins is one of the founding members of the Wu-Tang Clan, ''the most significant posse in hip-hop'' (Rolling Stone). He and fellow members RZA, GZA, Ol' Dirty Bastard, Method Man, Ghostface Killah, Raekwon, Inspectah Deck, Masta Killa, and CappaDonna released four gold and platinum studio albums, including 1993's Enter the Wu-Tang, widely considered to be one of the greatest albums in hip-hop history. Raised in some of New York City's harshest neighborhoods in the 1970s and '80s, U-God met and bonded with his future groupmates over a shared love of music and the dream of escape. Raw tells his deeply personal story.

Watch the video here.

(recorded 3/8/2018)

A staff writer for The New Yorker, Steve Coll is the author of The Bin Ladens, a history of the eponymous clan and its most infamous member; the Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars; and Private Empire, an examination of the notoriously secret machinations of the ExxonMobil Corporation. A former president of the public policy institute of the New America Foundation, Coll was a 20-year writer and editor at The Washington Post, where he also won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory journalism. He is currently the dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University. Directorate S tells the sprawling story of America's post-9/11 battle against Al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Watch the video here.

Pinetree Foundation Endowed Lecture

(recorded 3/5/2018)

A ''genuine artist ... who can render the intricate dazzle of it all and at the same time plumb its philosophical implications'' (Esquire), Richard Powers explores a remarkable range of subject matters in his novels. Among them are The Echo Maker, a story of the precarious brain, mass migrations, and car accidents; Orfeo, the narrative of a falsely accused amateur scientist/composer; and Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, in which a WWI-era photo sends two men on very different quests. His many honors include the National Book Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, the Lannan Literary Award, and two Pushcart prizes. Powers' new book evokes activism, resistance, and the beauty of the natural world in the tale of disparate people saved and summoned by trees.

A writer of ''wide learning, audacious innovation and sardonic wit'' (Washington Post), prolific polymath William T. Vollmann is a novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and war correspondent. His 10 novels include the National Book Award-winning Europe Central, a portrait of Germany and the USSR at war. Two of his works of nonfiction, Rising Up and Rising Down and Imperial, were National Book Critics Circle Award finalists. Vollmann's articles and fiction have appeared in Harpers, The New Yorker, Esquire, and too many other publications to name. With firsthand research, sardonic wit, and far-reaching scope, No Immediate Danger details the ongoing disaster of the Fukushima nuclear plant and the global consequences of climate change. 

Watch the video here. (recorded 4/12/2018)