NYIH Conversations

Caitlin Zaloom is a Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. Her first book, Out of the Pits: Traders and Technology From Chicago to London, an ethnographic study of the international financial system, appeared in 2006. Her second book, Indebted: How Families Make College Work at Any Cost, was published in 2019.

Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of Creative Nonfiction, and teaches in the School for the Future of Innovation in Society at Arizona State University. His memoir, My Last Eight Thousand Days: An American Man in His Seventies, was published by Georgia University Press.

Novelist and Institute Fellow Ben Taylor talks about Here We Are, a memoir of his friendship with Philip Roth. Taylor is the author of two previous memoirs--Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay, and The Hue and Cry in Our House, which received the 2018 Los Angeles Times/Christopher Isherwood Prize.

In addition to three collections of poetry, NYIH fellow Honor Moore is the author of several celebrated works of nonfiction, including The White Blackbird: A Life of the Painter Margaret Singer by Her Granddaughter and The Bishop's Daughter, a memoir of her father. Her newest book is Our Revolution: A Mother and Daughter Mid-Century. Here, she talks about the book, women's lives and second-wave feminism, writing a hybrid of biography memoir, and the experience of publishing a book in the middle of a pandemic.

Biographer Benjamin Moser talks with Robert Boynton about the making of his 2019 biography of Susan Sontag, which was awarded to Pulitizer Prize. Moser’s previous book, a biography of the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

This episode pays tribute to longtime fellow Deirdre Bair, who passed away on April 18, 2020. The author of six biographies and two memoirs, Bair received the National Book Award for her 1978 biography of Samuel Beckett. At a January 2020 NYIH luncheon, she discussed her final book, Parisian Lives: Samuel Beckett, Simone de Beauvoir, and Me: A Memoir, and looked back at her celebrated career.

Poet and NYIH Fellow Peter Filkins talks with Eric Banks about his exceptional involvement with the work of H.G. Adler, the Holocaust survivor who authored definitive fictional and ethnographic portraits of life in the camps. In 2019 Filkins published his biography of this extraordinary figure, a book that was preceded by his translation of the novelistic trilogy.

NYIH Fellow Josh-Jelly-Schapiro is a geographer and writer whose last book, Island People, explored the Caribbean in all its complexities. On the occasion of Mardi Gras, he sat down with us to talk about New Orleans’s deep Caribbean roots.

NYIH Fellow Clifford Thompson joins us to discuss his latest book, written in the aftermath of the 2016 election, What It Is: Race, Family, and One Thinking Black Man’s Blues (Other Press).

Celebrated memoirist and critic (and NYIH fellow) Vivian Gornick discusses her newest book, Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader, and tells us what she learned when she revisited the works that nourished her at different points in her life.