Free Library Podcast

In conversation with longtime broadcaster and journalist, Tracey Matisak.

The anchorman for Noticiero Univision for more than 30 years, eight-time Emmy-winning broadcaster and columnist Jorge Ramos is one of America's most popular and influential journalists. His 10 bestselling books include The Other Face of America, No Borders: A Journalist's Search for Home, and A Country for All: An Immigrant Manifesto. His weekly column is carried by dozens of newspapers across the U.S. and Latin America. Ramos's many honors include the Walter Cronkite Award and The Gabriel García Márquez Prize. In Stranger, the legendary journalist draws from hard data and personal experience to respond to the Trump administration's controversial remarks and policies directed toward Latino-indeed all-immigrants to this country.

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(recorded 3/2/2018)

A writer who ''luxuriates in language'' (San Francisco Chronicle), Peter Carey is the author of 15 quirky and daring novels, including Parrot and Olivier in America, Bliss, Oscar and Lucinda, and The True History of the Kelly Gang, the latter two of which won the Man Booker Prize. Frequently posited as Australia's next Nobel Laureate in Literature, he is also the author of two story collections and four works of nonfiction, and he has collaborated on two screenplays. A Long Way from Home follows three intrepid contestants in a grueling 10,000-mile road race across 1950s Australia.

''A novelist with a particular genius for inhabiting the past'' (The London Review of Books), Alan Hollinghurst is the author of the Man Booker Prize-winning The Line of Beauty, an elegiac account of cash, cars, cocaine, and coming out in 1980s London. Infused with wit, sweeping jumps in time, and eroticism, his other achievements in fiction include The Swimming-Pool Library, The Spell, and The Stranger's Child. The Sparsholt Affair mines the complex depths of a charismatic man's legacy across three generations of a unique English family.

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(recorded 3/27/2018)

In conversation with Tamala Edwards, anchor, 6ABC Action News morning edition

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu made waves in 2017 with a ''stunningly eloquent'' speech about race in America (CNN) in which he explained his decision to remove four Confederate statues from his city, arguing that ''there is a difference between remembrance of history and reverence for it.'' The president of the U.S. Conference of Mayors and a former lieutenant governor of Louisiana, Landrieu is the son of a legendary progressive Louisiana state senator and Crescent City mayor. Part memoir, part history, and part prescription for change, In the Shadows of Statues tackles the larger legacy of slavery and institutional inequality that continues to plague America in a time of resurgent racism.

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(recorded 3/28/2018)

''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.

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(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.

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(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.

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(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.

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(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.

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(recorded 4/9/2018)

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In conversation with Laura Kovacs, associate director, author events

Possessed of ''a magnificent gift for humanizing characters,'' (San Francisco Chronicle), Elizabeth Strout won the Pulitzer Prize for the 2008 bestseller Olive Kitteridge, a linked collection of narratives about a woman in coastal Maine. It was adapted into a multi-Emmy-winning HBO miniseries starring Frances McDormand. A PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and Orange Prize nominee, Strout also penned the novels Amy and Isabelle, Abide with Me, and My Name is Lucy Barton, a no. 1 New York Times bestseller about an estranged mother and daughter's reconnection. Written in tandem with that book, Anything is Possible is a latticework of fiction that fleshes out the lives of the inhabitants of Lucy Barton's little town. 

*Optional book with ticket purchase

Please allow extra time to get to Parkway Central, due to extensive road work in the area.

(recorded 5/1/2017)

Watch the video here.

In conversation with Andy Kahan, Ruth W. and A. Morris Williams director of author events.

''A talent as strong and varied as American fiction has to offer" (The New York Review of Books), Richard Ford won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award for Independence Day, the sequel to his bestselling 1986 novel The Sportswriter. In 2006 and 2014 he returned to his most indelible character, famed everyman protagonist Frank Bascombe, in The Lay of the Land and the Pulitzer Prize finalist Let Me Be Frank With You. He is also the author of several other novels and story collections. His first memoir is an intimate portrait of his parents' travails across the panorama of mid-20th century America. 

Natalie Cohn Memorial Lecture

(recorded 5/2/2017)