Politics and Prose Presents

In 1983, Thomas Mallon was still unknown. A literature professor at Vassar College, he spent his days traveling from Manhattan to campus, reviewing books to make ends meet and searching the city for his own purpose and fulfillment. The AIDS epidemic was beginning to surge in New York City, the ever-bustling epicenter of literary culture and gay life, alive with parties, art, and sex.

Though he didn't know it, everything would soon change for Mallon. Riding the success of his debut, A Book of One's Own, he became a fixture within the city's literary scene, crossing paths with cultural giants and becoming an editor at GQ. He captured it all in his daily journals. But in some ways it was the worst possible time for a gay coming-of-age in the city. One of his lovers succumbed to AIDS, and the illness of others was both a heartbreaking reality and a constant reminder of his own exposure.

Tracing his own life day by day, Mallon evokes all that those years encompassed: the hookups, intensifying politics, personal tragedies, as well as his own blossoming success and eventual romantic happiness. The Very Heart of It is a brilliant and bewitching look into the daily life of one of our most important literary figures, and a keepsake from a bygone era.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593801802?ic_referral=AKSWm3m5WRsx15L_5zcujyQMHzYNwc_r2gtAEyZoj1swM4_vKP91TTRKngjw0NaQcaFyzK1_TbanX-lfkti2CQgiD4H5-Zg47EAHR5PJGY7Z_MPkFU4nX39HqyVf9gNUBr2YJeM

Thomas Mallon is the author of eleven novels, including Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman, Fellow Travelers, Watergate, Landfall, and Up With the Sun. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and other publications. In 2011 he received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' Harold D. Vursell Memori al Award for prose style. He has been the literary editor of GQ and the deputy chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in Washington, D.C.

Mallon is in conversation with Lisa Page. Page is co-editor of We Wear The Mask: 15 True Stories of Passing in America,  (Beacon Press).  Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, LitHub Weekly, The Crisis, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, Playboy, the Washington Post Book World, Playbill, The Chicago Tribune, and other publications and anthologies, including Skin Deep: Black Women & White Women Write About Race (Doubleday). She has worked as a freelance writer, editor, speechwriter, lyricist, instructor, actor and  literary consultant. She created the Playboy College Fiction Contest. She is the former President of the PEN/Faulkner Foundation. Lisa Page is assistant professor of English and Director of Creative Writing at the George Washington University where she previously served as Interim Director of Africana Studies. She is also a resident faculty member of the Yale Writers’ Workshop. She lives outside Washington, DC.

*recorded 6/11/2025

Juliet Bellow traces Rodin's interactions with dance makers and performers during his late career (1890-1912) through a series of interrelated case studies. His exchanges with Loïe Fuller, Vaslav Nijinsky, and members of the Cambodian Royal Ballet troupe were central to Rodin's development of a modern sculptural aesthetic and the construction of his artistic celebrity. But this was not a simple case of one-way influence. These performers actively courted an affiliation with Rodin, wielding sculpture's cultural authority to move dance from the realm of commercial entertainment to that of "high art."

Bringing together art history and performance studies, Rodin's Dancers demonstrates that in their search for innovation, dancers and sculptors experimented with one another's means of expression, sites of display, and techniques of publicity. The book provides more than a new interpretation of Rodin's art: it considers how and why the name "Rodin" came to stand for a powerful constellation of ideas about art, authorship, and creative genius within the vibrant spectacle culture of Belle Époque Paris.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780300275162?ic_referral=V2Y9e2-sCXQlcUKEAyImN-JpKiZ5Hay5p7CT8SyRoakwM5Tv9UxP_8ECUBwf9KnIVmabHUs2xzmN4uSX2mAEhaxBVmKg_9u9PXn9OENPi2aMJizwAy9lawqgX62amFM9XVPN1Q

Juliet Bellow is Associate Professor of Art History at American University. She is author of Modernism on Stage: The Ballets Russes and the Parisian Avant-Garde and served as a Consulting Scholar for the 2013 exhibition 'Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes, 1909-1929: When Art Danced With Music' at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She has published articles in the Art Bulletin and Art Journal, among others, and contributed to The Cambridge Companion to Ballet as well as international exhibition catalogues on Sonia Delaunay, Merce Cunningham and Henri Matisse.

Bellow is in conversation with Mary Morton. Morton received her PhD in the history of art and architecture in 1998 from Brown University. The former associate curator of paintings at the J. Paul Getty Museum (2004–2010) and associate curator of European art at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA), Houston (1998–2004), she joined the curatorial staff of the National Gallery of Art in 2010. She is currently Curator and Head of the Department of French Paintings at the NGA.

*recorded 6/12/2025

When Emilia Fletcher finds herself trapped inside a Washington, DC Metro elevator, getting out is the least of her problems. Sharing the confined space with her are Em, a troubled teenager plagued by suicidal thoughts, and Millie, an elderly woman yearning to mend ties with her estranged daughter. As the hours drag on, hunger, exhaustion, and panic set in, revealing an almost incomprehensible truth: they are the same person. Locked in an uncompromising match of memories, the three women excavate and attempt to reckon with the shared shame and suffering stemming from an unresolved trauma that has cast a profound shadow over their lives. Brimming with biting humor, compassion, and quick-witted insight, Just Emilia is remarkable journey of self-discovery.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781646035779?ic_referral=0ftyjWMhDx96luRnwxvmTd3y1JWQVc6d0cTfoB5TElQwM3ZxrAgAJO16dltg-SQ2iyhA0RdQel8kSN8dag84b2qIYXDbHMURM5vNAgfcDZd2DbRLTkBRbO6Pq75mo0nECc5eOw

Jennifer Oko is a writer, journalist, and filmmaker. Her memoir, Lying Together, was a New York Times Book Review "Editor's Choice." She is also the author of two previous novels; Gloss, a satire of morning television which was a USA Today " Hot Summer Read," and Head Case, a comic mystery about psycho-pharmaceutical trafficking which she swears is not autobiographical in any way. She lives in Washington, DC with her family.

Oko is in conversation with Angie Kim, a Korean immigrant, former editor of the Harvard Law Review, and debut author of the international bestseller and Edgar winner Miracle Creek, named a "Best Book of the Year" by Time, The Washington Post, Kirkus, and The Today Show, among others. Kim has written for Vogue, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Glamour, and numerous literary journals.

*recorded 6/10/2025

Charles Sumner is mainly known as the abolitionist statesman who suffered a brutal caning on the Senate floor by the proslavery congressman Preston Brooks in 1856. This violent episode has obscured Sumner's status as the most passionate champion of equal rights and multiracial democracy of his time. A friend of Alexis de Tocqueville, an ally of Frederick Douglass, and an adviser to Abraham Lincoln, Sumner helped the Union win the Civil War and ordain the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth Amendment, the Freedmen's Bureau, and the Civil Rights Act of 1875.

In a comprehensive but fast-paced narrative, Zaakir Tameez presents Sumner as one of America's forgotten founding fathers, a constitutional visionary who helped to rewrite the post-Civil War Constitution and give birth to modern civil rights law. He argues that Sumner was a gay man who battled with love and heartbreak at a time when homosexuality wasn't well understood or accepted. And he explores Sumner's critical partnerships with the nation's first generation of Black lawyers and civil rights leaders, whose legal contributions to Reconstruction have been overlooked for far too long.

An extraordinary achievement of historical and constitutional scholarship, Charles Sumner brings back to life one of America's most inspiring statesmen, whose formidable ideas remain relevant to a nation still divided over questions of race, democracy, and constitutional law.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781250362551?ic_referral=7EyETd2ed_tRuirY63rMU1BmEnxajXm_wANsfyt2hRYwMxdnwTvy0LauO701acIbhmY9dArH7_AnKYz9oIHiq56LXf4qh16qum07oq7_sOynQJISxFsW5fBHCNWz46xYO3T6tKw

Zaakir Tameez is an emerging scholar of antitrust and constitutional law. A graduate of Yale Law School and the University of Virginia, he is a Fulbright Scholar from Houston, Texas.

Tameez is in conversation with Rep. Eric Swalwell. 

*recorded 6/9/2025

In 1951, with the publication of God and Man at Yale, a scathing attack on his alma mater, twenty-five-year-old William F. Buckley, Jr., seized the public stage--and commanded it for the next half century as he led a new generation of conservative activists and ideologues to the peak of political power and cultural influence.

Ten years before his death in 2008, Buckley chose prize-winning biographer Sam Tanenhaus to tell the full, uncensored story of his life and times, granting him extensive interviews and exclusive access to his most private papers. Thus began a deep investigation into the vast and often hidden universe of Bill Buckley and the modern conservative revolution.

Buckley vividly captures its subject in all his facets and phases: founding editor of National Review, the twentieth century's most influential political journal; syndicated columnist, Emmy-winning TV debater, and bestselling spy novelist; ally of Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater; mentor to Ronald Reagan; game-changing candidate for mayor of New York.

Tanenhaus also has uncovered the darker trail of Bill Buckley's secret exploits, including CIA missions in Latin America, dark collusions with Watergate felon Howard Hunt, and Buckley's struggle in his last years to hold together a movement coming apart over the AIDS epidemic, culture wars, and the invasion of Iraq--even as his own media empire was unraveling.

At a crucial moment in American history, Buckley offers a gripping and powerfully relevant story about the birth of modern politics and those who shaped it.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780375502347?ic_referral=wJWvGqjdLhNI5WZqVlF6tuIRyFhs4CAAI2tQBEdapw0wM-NoGwHTg8nykp27J9MuTf-9SBf6ConhsuKl3GpxqoAumRtiaP1PsG_VB6bYEyaP0vq-TVrcswL_Xrm52nRWF95MOZA

Sam Tanenhaus, the former editor of The New York Times Book Review, is the author of the national bestsellers Whittaker Chambers: A Biography (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize) and The Death of Conservatism. His feature articles and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, and many other publications in the United States and abroad.

Tanenhaus is in conversation with Elisabeth Bumiller. Bumiller is a writer-at-large for The New York Times. She was most recently Washington bureau chief. Previously, she held the position of Washington editor and before that, deputy Washington bureau chief, overseeing White House and domestic policy reporting. She covered the Pentagon, John McCain's 2008 campaign and, from 2001 to 2006, she was a White House correspondent.

*recorded 6/8/2025

When a group of young Native Americans launches a series of protests against climate change and its effects on the waters and woods of Maine, veteran FBI agent Ryan Tapia is assigned to monitor the movement. The protestors, who become determined to split away from American society, are led by "Peeled Paul" Soco, a Malpense hermit who played a key role in one of Tapia's previous investigations. When the marchers begin making camps on the lawns of luxurious summer mansions along the Maine coast, they win national media attention--and the wrath of a reactionary president.

Tapia soon finds himself torn. He wants to do right by Soco and the protestors, but his bosses at the Bureau are eager to please a president itching to crack down on them. Growing increasingly sympathetic to the protestors and their cause, he tells them about a possible refuge--a secret CIA base hidden away in the depths of the Maine woods on the Canadian border.

Enraged by the protestors' actions, the White House sends a U.S. Army unit to track down the protestors on their stealth march through the evergreen forests. Meanwhile, Tapia's bosses, vexed and embarrassed, fire him and threaten arrest. Undaunted, Tapia snowmobiles through the wilderness on a wintry night to warn the Indian protestors of the impending attack.

Building to a dizzying, wind-whipped climax, We Can't Save You establishes Ryan Tapia as one of the most compelling and nuanced investigators in crime fiction.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781639369072?ic_referral=wld09A_4RT_i6lYGrDyqdY4r2YOnQ8ZqoiIg9m6sYt4wM7caxVoAh8fwEt3KDjtxcA4T_2lniRxLndJEYnFYVceMBnKSp36jHCFAIF44OGBu2AL9aaG_kHnsJBk0HMeD5Crqtw

Thomas E. Ricks is the author of five New York Times bestsellers, including the #1 bestseller Fiasco, a history of the beginning of the Iraq War. As a reporter at the W ashington Post and the Wall Street Journal, he was a member of two teams that won the Pulitzer Prize. He worked in the Maine woods in his youth and trapped lobsters when living on an island in Penobscot Bay. He now divides his time between Texas and Maine.

There is no flash of light, no crumbling, no quaking. Each person in New York wakes up on an unfamiliar block when the buildings all switch locations overnight. The power grid has snapped, thousands of residents are missing, and the Empire State Building is on Coney Island--for now. The next night, it happens again.

Esme Green and Arjun Varma work for the City of New York's Emergency Management team and are tasked with disaster response for "The Unmapping." As Esme tries to wade through the bureaucratic nightmare of an endlessly shuffling city, she's distracted by the ongoing search for her missing fiancé. Meanwhile, Arjun focuses on the ground-level rescue of disoriented New Yorkers, hoping to become the hero the city needs.

While scientists scramble to find a solution--or at least a means to cope--and mysterious "red cloak" cults crop up in the disaster's wake, New York begins to reckon with a new reality no one recognizes. For Esme and Arjun, the fight to hold the city together will mean tackling questions about themselves that they were too afraid to ask--and facing answers they never expected. With themes of climate change, political unrest, and life in a state of emergency, The Unmapping is a timely and captivating debut.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781964721064?ic_referral=HCHejk1IUJ4Ja1h642yzLZDIQv8tEM2oviqnTOuAJG0wM31rLei3r0_3TC-RKtE0ayoZztA7WfN4-7dPmir3Kf4D90nlWWa_NdNwRonM0xqEQl4RYj1zWtfR0JCI8YSz9uf6jg

Denise S. Robbins is a Pushcart Prize-nominated author and finalist for the University of Louisville's Calvino Prize. Her stories have appeared in The Barcelona Review, Gulf Coast, and more.

Robbins is in conversation with Hannah Grieco and Marines Alvarez. Grieco is the author of First Kicking, Then Not, forthcoming from Stanchion in 2025. She writes a literary column for Washington City Paper, edits prose at a variety of small presses and literary journals, and teaches literature at Marymount University. You can read her work in The Washington Post, The Independent, Al Jazeera, Huffington Post, Brevity, Craft Literary, Poet Lore, Shenandoah, Fairy Tale Review, and more. Find her online at www.hgrieco.com and on most social media @writesloud.

Alvarez has been creating content across a variety of platforms since 2011, building a vibrant and engaged community of story lovers. Profiled by Rolling Stone and Vulture, Marines is a community builder on and offline, crafting reviews that invite readers to think critically about media and representation. She is also the cofounder of BookNet Fest, a yearly bookish event that brings together readers, authors, and reviewers around a shared love of books.

*recorded 6/6/2025

Hailed in the New York Times as "a naturalist who can unfurl a sentence with the breathless ease of a master angler," Robert Macfarlane brings his glittering style to a profound work of travel writing, reportage, and natural history. Is a River Alive? is a joyful, mind-expanding exploration of an ancient, urgent idea: that rivers are living beings who should be recognized as such in imagination and law.

Macfarlane takes readers on three unforgettable journeys teeming with extraordinary people, stories, and places: to the miraculous cloud-forests and mountain streams of Ecuador, to the wounded creeks and lagoons of India, and to the spectacular wild rivers of Canada--imperiled respectively by mining, pollution, and dams. Braiding these journeys is the life story of the fragile chalk stream a mile from Macfarlane's house, a stream who flows through his own years and days.

Powered by dazzling prose and lit throughout by other minds and voices, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, challenge perspectives, and remind us that our fate flows with that of rivers--and always has.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780393242133?ic_referral=RgSMJ0CCK7bSyrZK8P00JKV2HbxHILwW4QFmHEYsu1MwM8whrCz5JlZam_KdBckHYLy62xwDVh4-lSqhCLvNdoKIQCDEPrPR8lnKUUvafXFTaxYzByNNyMisFzKtWLW3g0XK1g

Robert Macfarlane is internationally renowned for his writing on nature, people, and place. His best-selling books include Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places, and Mountains of the Mind; they have been translated into more than thirty languages, won many prizes around the world and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio, and dance. He has also written operas, plays, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. He has collaborated with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Stanley Donwood, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally best-selling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E. M. Forster Prize for Literature. Macfarlane lives in Cambridge, England, where he is a fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

Macfarlane is in conversation with Ross Andersen. Andersen is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he covers science, technology, and culture. He is also at work on a book on the search for intelligent life elsewhere in the universe for Random House.

*recorded 6/5/2025

Seeking and achieving both a sense of self as an individual and a sense of belonging among others are two sides of the same coin. Our understanding and perception of these elements can have a profound effect on our lives, on our cultures, and on society as a whole. Writers often grapple with the nuances of the human condition, and indeed many of its mysteries can unfold in stories that explore identity and belonging. Tope Folarin engages with local authors Patricia Coral, Majda Gama, and Varun Gauri to discuss the challenges and triumphs of self-identification.

Tope Folarin is a Nigerian-American writer based in Washington DC. He serves as Director of the Institute for Policy Studies and the Lannan Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Georgetown University. He is the recipient of the Caine Prize for African Writing, the Whiting Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other awards. His reviews, essays and cultural criticism have been featured in The Atlantic, The Baffler, BBC, The Drift, High Country News, Lithub, Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times Book Review, Vulture, The Washington Post and elsewhere.Tope serves as a board member of the Avalon Theater in Washington DC, the Pen/Faulkner Foundation, and as a member of the President’s Council of Pathfinder. In addition, he will serve as the Bauder Writer-in-Residence in Howard County, Maryland for the 2024-25 school year and as the inaugural critic-at-large for The Georgia Review in 2025 He was educated at Morehouse College and the University of Oxford, where he earned two Masters’ degrees as a Rhodes Scholar. His debut novel, A Particular Kind of Black Man, was published by Simon & Schuster.

Varun Gauri was The Inner Loop’s March Author’s Corner spotlight. He worked for more than two decades on development economics and behavioral economics. He now teaches at Princeton University and lives with his family in Bethesda, Maryland. He was a summer writer-in-residence for The Inner Loop. His debut novel, For the Blessings of Jupiter and Venus, won the 2024 Carol Trawick Fiction Prize, was selected for NPR’s Books We Love 2024, and is a finalist for Foreword INDIES 2024 Book of the Year in General Adult Fiction. 

PURCHASE BOOKS HERE: https://politics-prose.com/inner-loop-panel2025

Patricia Coral was The Inner Loop’s April Author’s Corner spotlight. She is a bilingual Puerto Rican writer. She holds a BA in Hispanic Studies from the University of Puerto Rico, an MA in Spanish from the InterAmerican University of Puerto Rico, and an MFA in Creative Writing from American University, where she received the Myra Sklarew Award and where she was Editor-in-Chief of FOLIO. Patricia writes creative nonfiction, fiction, and poetry, but frequently her words find their home in-between. The former director of events for Politics and Prose Bookstore, she has contributed to numerous literary magazines and her work has been supported by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities. Her memoir Women Surrounded by Water is her first book and it was longlisted for the 2024 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography.

Majda Gama was The Inner Loop’s May Author’s Corner spotlight. She is the award-winning author of In the House of Modern Upbringing for Girls (Wandering Aengus Press) and The Call of Paradise, (Two Sylvia’s, 2023). Her poetry has been honored with the Graybeal Gowen award for Virginia poets from Shenandoah and the Gregory Djanikian scholar award for poetry from Adroit. 

*recorded 6/7/2025

Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of a famous woman, writer Erica Jong, whose sensational book Fear of Flying launched her into second-wave feminist stardom. She grew up yearning for a connection with her dreamy, glamorous, just out of reach mother, who always seemed to be heading somewhere that wasn't with Molly. When, in 2023, Erica was diagnosed with dementia just as Molly's husband discovered he had a rare cancer, Jong-Fast was catapulted into a transformative year.

How to Lose Your Mother is a compulsively readable memoir about an intense mother-daughter relationship, a sometimes chaotic upbringing with a fame-hungry parent, and the upheavals that challenge our hard-won adulthood. A pitch-perfect balance of acceptance and rage, humor and heart, How to Lose Your Mother tells a universal story of loss alongside a singular story of a literary life. This is a memoir that will stand alongside the classics of the genre.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593656471?ic_referral=FwogMMcGlG77egMX3qZdFNafvX64KA5PCZVUkv9FptMwM8Zst_K886KQcdgPaIgOYmP3iaw_NcYnDrDKADDN2Bb9oZnCMb1OCteg7__0-qwuvjzN-C99BXOcMTwv4vuF_C7s1OM

Molly Jong-Fast is a contributing writer at Vanity Fair, a political analyst at MSNBC News, and host of the podcast "Fast Politics." She is the author of three previous books. She lives in Manhattan.

Jong-Fast is in conversation with Maureen Dowd. Dowd is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times and author of Notorious. She is known for her sharp and incisive commentary on politics and culture. She is the author of three additional bestselling books: Bushworld, Are Men Necessary?, and The Year of Voting Dangerously. She lives in Washington, DC.

*recorded 6/5/2025