Politics and Prose Presents

Four years after their bitter divorce, Claire and Aaron Litvak get a phone call no parent is prepared for: their 22-year-old daughter Lindsey, teaching English in China during a college gap year, has been critically injured in a hit and run accident. At a Shanghai hospital they wait at her bedside, hoping for the best and preparing for the worst.

The accident unearths a deeper fissure in the family: the shocking event that ended the Litvaks' marriage and turned Lindsey against them. Estranged from her parents, she has confided only in her younger sister, Grace, adopted as an infant from China. As Claire and Aaron struggle to get their bearings in bustling, cosmopolitan Shanghai, the newly prosperous "miracle city," they face troubling questions about Lindsey's life there, in which nothing is quite as it seems.

With Jennifer Haigh's trademark psychological acuity, Rabbit Moon is a taut, suspenseful story about the ties of marriage that no divorce can sever, and the fabled red thread that pulls two sisters together across time and space. Haigh proves yet again that she is "an expertly nuanced storyteller...her work is gripping, real, and totally immersive" ( New York Times). 

Jennifer Haigh is the author of seven best-selling, critically acclaimed works of fiction. Her first, Mrs. Kimble, won the PEN Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Her latest, Mercy Street, was named a Best Book of 2022 by the New Yorker and won the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. A Guggenheim fellow and graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she lives in Boston.

Haigh will be in conversation with Aaron Hamburger, the author of four books, the story collection The View from Stalin's Head, winner of the Rome Prize in Literature, and the novels Faith For Beginners, Nirvana is Here, and Hotel Cuba. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, Tin House, Crazyhorse, Boulevard, Poets & Writers, O, the Oprah Magazine, and many others. He is the winner of the 2023 Jim Duggins, PhD Outstanding Mid-Career Novelist Prize from Lambda Literary. He has also won fellowships from Yaddo, Djerassi, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation. He teaches writing at the George Washington University and the Stonecoast MFA Program.

*recorded 4/13/2025

After decades of enduring his mother's physical and psychological torment, after years of trying in vain to set boundaries, Eamon Dolan took a radical step: he cut his mother out of his life. No more phone calls, no more visits, no more contact. Parting with his abuser gave him immediate relief and set him on a path toward freedom, confidence, and joy like none he had ever felt before.

In The Power of Parting, Dolan has written the book he wishes he'd had when he was struggling to free himself from his mother's abuse. In the process, he discovered how widespread estrangement really is. At least 27 percent of Americans are estranged from a parent, sibling, or other family member. He also learned why so much stigma surrounds this common--and often lifesaving--phenomenon. Even among therapists--the professionals who would seem most attuned to the pain relatives can inflict--there's a bias toward reconciliation, when millions of their patients need instead to escape their abusers' grip. Estrangement, Dolan realized, should be understood and embraced, not shrouded in shame.

Drawing on his own suffering and healing, as well as experts' advice and the testimony of other courageous survivors, Dolan first explains why abuse is much different and more prevalent than we may think, how it harms us in childhood and beyond, and why limiting or eliminating contact might be our best possible choice. Then, he walks readers through the steps of a successful, positive estrangement: how to take crucial time for yourself; how to make sure no one can gaslight you into minimizing or forgetting; how to set rules for your abuser and--if they can't or won't respect your limits--how to end a toxic relationship. He also offers valuable counsel on how to ease the guilt and grief that often accompany parting, and how to break the cycle of abuse that was likely passed down to you through many generations.

With a convincing blend of clarity and empathy, Dolan encourages others to do what he ultimately did for himself: determine whether the people in your life treat you with the care and concern you deserve--and part ways with them if they don't.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780593714126?ic_referral=em5ooWDTg8s--Jhjs7qVEFxGeMcrMEyAuzDZ9S1dw6EwM8p2oXrAUC6kTTXWzoRxK03rrdksxQHcEnsIk94pX2dtAjx--gFOFCCGSqm-tIwV8vdc96wPlYKSbq3pEEp0kPCkZw

Eamon Dolan has worked as an editor at HarperCollins, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Penguin Press. He is currently Vice President & Executive Editor at Simon & Schuster. He's also a professional photographer whose work has been shown at the International Center of Photography and elsewhere. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Dolan is in conversation with Hanna Rosin. Rosin is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the host of Radio Atlantic. She was the co-host of NPR’s Invisibilia and a longtime writer for The Atlantic. She is also the author of the best-selling The End of Men.

*recorded 4/11/2025

Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She's an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He's attractive, troubling, young--young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day - partner, parent, creator, muse - and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.

Taut and hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.

Katie Kitamura is the author of four previous novels, most recently A Separation and Intimacies, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award and was a finalist for a Joyce Carol Oates Prize . She is a recipient of the Rome Prize in Literature, a Lannan fellowship, and many other honors, and her work has been translated into twenty-one languages. She teaches in the creative writing program at New York University.

Kitamura will be in conversation with Kat Chow, a reporter and writer, and the author of Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir, named a Notable Book by The New York Times. She was a reporter at NPR, where she was a founding member of the Code Switch team and podcast. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The Paris Review, New York Magazine’s The Cut and on Radiolab, among others. She's a contributor to Pop Culture Happy Hour and Slate’s Culture Gabfest, and has hosted Slate’s The Waves. She’s received residency fellowships from Storyknife and Millay Arts, as well as an inaugural Yi Dae Up fellowship at the Jack Jones Literary Arts Retreat. She is the 2024-25 Jenny McKean Moore Writer-in-Washington at George Washington University where she will teach creative nonfiction.

*recorded 4/10/2025

Q&A for the End of the World is a new series of poems about science fiction movies from the 1950's and 1960's, including such classics as "Godzilla" and "The Day the Earth Stood Still." Written alternately by the two authors, the book's twenty poems act as a call-and-response for each movie. The poems address facets of film technique, pop culture, race, gender-as well as fears of nuclear war, dehumanization, and the "other"-with curiosity, skepticism, and affection.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781625494764?ic_referral=94rAhcTm4yp-XLI2i1_g4GdV4jJzvS62_DJfXEmZr5YwMzwE7ZlbCIb2FpxOwVRr0doqalExFB6_aulK9HbPXfqIyFqVJYps-V9nrWTajGHo4CtniAlv-zHLG4_AgQdPjHjLCSs

Michael Gushue's book Sympathy for the Monster was independently published in 2023. Within these pages, Gushue masterfully captures the essence of the silver screen, infusing his verses with the haunting allure of the celluloid world. 

Kim Roberts is the editor of the anthology By Broad Potomac’s Shore: Great Poems from the Early Days of our Nation’s Capital (University of Virginia Press, 2020), selected by the East Coast Centers for the Book for the 2021 Route 1 Reads program as the book that “best illuminates important aspects” of the culture of Washington, DC. She is the author of A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston (University of Virginia Press, 2018).

*recorded 4/9/2025

Leonard Bernstein, Mel Brooks, Betty Friedan, and Norman Mailer. Brilliant, brash, yet soulful, they were 100 percent Jewish and 100 percent American. They upended the restrained culture of their forebears and changed American life.

They worked in different fields, and, apart from clinking glasses at parties now and then, they hardly knew one another. But they shared a historical moment and a common temperament. For all four, their Jewish heritage was electrified by American liberty. The results were explosive.

As prosperity for Jews increased and anti-Semitism began to fade after World War II, these four creative giants stormed through the latter half of the twentieth century, altering the way people around the world listened to music, defined what was vulgar, comprehended the relations of men and women, and understood the American soul. They were not saints; they were turbulent and self-dissatisfied intellectuals who fearlessly wielded their own newly won freedom to charge up American culture.

Celebratory yet candid, at times fiercely critical, David Denby presents these four figures as egotistical and generous--larger-than-life, all of them, yet vulnerable, even heartbreaking, in their ambition, ferocity, and pride.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781250193407?ic_referral=6IKqlD2XypkAgkphYHeVoZ2FGxY57MzLHlxEPAHbbowwM9BYki_yw3a7I5tm-LR61cvUqCE0KXwVHVsbrIgoJCfImDxwhja76I4Dxim4VbZ63jbfga80AOITWCrNdZ_9UAYdmA

David Denby is the New York Times bestselling author of Great Books. His other books include American Sucker and Lit Up. He was a film critic for New York magazine and The New Yorker, where he is now a staff writer. His essays have appeared in The New Republic and The Atlantic. He lives in New York City with his wife, novelist Susan Rieger.

Denby is in conversation with Frank Foer. Foer is a staff writer at The Atlantic and the author of The Last Politician, World Without Mind and How Soccer Explains the World. For seven years, he edited The New Republic.

*recorded 4/9/2025

In this ode to the earth and all its living creatures, French Djiboutian poet, novelist, and essayist Abdourahman A. Waberi sounds the alarm about our imperiled planet, where "the Sahel rises in you, in me / the Red Sea boils in you, in me / Nunvut is melting in you, in me." This translation by Nancy Naomi Carlson preserves the rich musicality of the original French, as well as its frequent use of wordplay and often unusual word choice.

Waberi, a nomad at heart, takes us on a whirlwind tour across North America, Africa, and Europe, daring us to love the earth "beyond all rational thought" and to "turn into earth, both literally and figuratively," as we "turn from vanity, fears, and other pointless rustling." These lyrical, playful, and moving poems urge us to look for the truth and beauty hidden in our daily lives, singing of Waberi's own enduring love for our endangered planet and also, more forcefully, exhorting us to join him in the collective fight to save our planet from destruction.

Nancy Naomi Carlson is a poet, translator, and essayist. She is the recipient of two translation grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the winner of the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. She is the author or translator of fifteen books, including her poetry collection Piano in the Dark and her translation of Samira Negrouche's poetry collection Solio.

Carlson will be in conversation with Vivek Narayanan. Narayanan’s books of poems include The Kuruntokai and its Mirror and After.  His work has appeared in Poetry, The Paris Review, The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem, The Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poetry and elsewhere. He teaches in the MFA Poetry program at George Mason University.

Carlson and Narayanan are discussing the works of Abdourahman A. Waberi. Waberi is a poet, novelist, and essayist. He was born in what is now known as the Republic of Djibouti and is a major voice in African postcolonial studies. Waberi is the author of the novel In the United States of Africa (Bison Books, 2009) and has received a multitude of awards and honors, including a PEN France prize and, most recently, a medal from the French Academy. He is an associate professor of French at George Washington University.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781496241351?ic_referral=NFQj1_ULs7JX1WRK49fLjqypq5rpt5hmHBe1iEaKxuUwM8Y1veW2XT0F29o-s5qTouGpvNoE_AIqPQt-vlVTrQTFT8vo40YqNXFmas19JbK8HuVPVA0Yh2Nljeth46sXEjAZzf4

*recorded 4/7/2025

Paul Simon told Joe Boyd that when he first heard the accordion flourish that would open his multi-platinum album Graceland, it seemed to proclaim, "You haven't heard this before!" Yet the 1980s "world music" boom that Simon's album helped usher in had roots that extended back through the decades and across continents: tango on the eve of World War I, Latin dance across the '30s, '40s and '50s, reggae in the '70s, pre-War samba and pre-Beatles bossa nova, Eastern European ensembles filling capitalist concert halls during the Cold War, Indian ragas changing rock and roll in the 1960s, the folk music-inspired classical composers of the 19th and 20th centuries.

In this sweeping history compiled from more than a decade of travel, research, interviews, and deep listening, Boyd sets out to explore centuries of fascinating backstories to these sounds. He shows how personalities, events, and politics in places such as Havana, Lagos, Budapest, Kingston, and Rio are as colorful and momentous as anything that took place in New Orleans, Harlem, Laurel Canyon, or Liverpool. And, moreover, how jazz, rhythm and blues, and rock 'n' roll would never have happened if it weren't for the notes and rhythms emanating from over the horizon. The one-of-a-kind result is And the Roots of Rhythm Remain: a glorious, symphonic celebration of the music that shapes our world.

Joe Boyd is a record producer and writer, known for his acclaimed memoir, White Bicycles. Artists he has produced include Nick Drake, R.E.M., Toots and the Maytals, Richard Thompson, Pink Floyd, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, and ¡Cubanismo! among many others over the course of a nearly sixty-year career. After graduating from Harvard in 1964, he tour-managed Muddy Waters, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Rollins, Stan Getz and Astrud Gilberto, and others before serving as production manager for the historic 1965 Newport Folk and Jazz Festivals. He then moved to London to open Elektra Records' office and started the famous UFO club, which became the center of London's psychedelic revolution. In 1979 he launched his own label, Hannibal Records, which was at the forefront of bringing global artists to western audiences. As a film producer, his credits include Amazing Grace, Scandal, and Jimi Hendrix. A gifted raconteur, he appears frequently on radio, podcasts and documentaries.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9798988670056?ic_referral=AXc7nFR1nu4srEOFJ1C5zpYjlKaqz6BbMTnSXsBj6P4wM7dZS3WeBf7-Jln4FRzdSAFFIPERVHOBkdqA4U-Je9FBsEYjlT7Mfl1vkaS9zIjB3Nmm946jfP5vqB44l-53QY8s_Q*recorded 4/6/2025

The Louvre is the most famous museum in the world, attracting millions of visitors every year with its masterpieces. In Adventures in the Louvre, Elaine Sciolino immerses herself in this magical space and helps us fall in love with what was once a forbidding fortress.

Exploring galleries, basements, rooftops, and gardens, Sciolino demystifies the Louvre, introducing us to her favorite artworks, both legendary and overlooked, and to the people who are the museum's lifeblood: the curators, the artisans producing frames and engravings, the builders overseeing restorations, the firefighters protecting the aging structure.

Blending investigative journalism, travelogue, history, and memoir, Sciolino walks her readers through the museum's front gates and immerses them in its irresistible, engrossing world of beauty and culture. Adventures in the Louvre reveals the secrets of this grand monument of Paris and basks in its timeless, seductive power.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9781324021407?ic_referral=d89PWpVCPZp8SxeGibVyOm7nbuW2JP0-5X2_xVwGExswM8dOIDoZcIbkk_D6nF39D6vpJEG5bYD9YUttMvH4d9sWk0FPG3VYW4xEfxl-C0QoJHg4sgRyUYQgpyQaWHy-MZXN0g

Elaine Sciolino, contributing writer and former Paris bureau chief for the New York Times, is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Only Street in Paris, as well as The Seine and La Seduction. She lives in Paris.

Sciolino 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 4/5/2025

Shining a white-hot spotlight on America's famous, from Hollywood legends to Broadway stars to media moguls, Notorious is a captivating assortment of Maureen Dowd's most compelling style features and profiles. Using her signature wit and incisive commentary as a scalpel, Dowd dissects influential cultural elites, including:

Leading Hollywood women from Uma Thurman to Jane Fonda to Greta Gerwig; Silver screen foxes such as Paul Newman, Idris Elba, and Ralph Fiennes; Funny people like Tina Fey, Mel Brooks, and Larry David; Fashionistas from Andre Leon Talley to Ann Roth to Tom Ford; And media and tech titans like Elon Musk, Bob Iger, and Peter Thiel.

Notorious is the perfect antidote to our current political malaise and an intimate, gossipy romp through the culture of celebrity from a legend in American journalism.

PURCHASE BOOK HERE: https://politics-prose.com/book/9780063392229?ic_referral=Z8bVLr9pHi0HVPAhgtwNQ_vzKPej8j7MhjMipYOKA38wMzhaobQe4-LR2umx0WLQ4zuyb8zsZOsdED9PJthkwK_OkaXx0xkOB9EPjDnThq-G0hRjt3JvzHc1k7nUDXEZqJYR7g

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

Dowd is in conversation with Simon Godwin, Artistic Director at the Shakespeare Theatre Company. His directing credits at STC include Comedy of Errors, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing, Timon of Athens, and the 2024 production of Macbeth with Ralph Fiennes and Indira Varm. He is an Associate Director of the National Theatre of London, and has served as Associate Director of the Royal Court Theatre, the Bristol Old Vic, and the Royal and Derngate Theatres in Northampton. He has directed at the Royal Shakespeare Company, including productions of Timon of Athens with Kathryn Hunter in the titular role, which was reimagined in early 2020 for Theatre for a New Audience in New York City and Shakespeare Theatre Company, an acclaimed Hamlet, which toured to the Kennedy Center, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. In 2012, Simon was awarded the inaugural Evening Standard/Burberry Award for an Emerging Director. In 2023, Simon became the annual Harman/Eisner Residence Artist at the Aspen Institute.

*recorded 4/5/2025

How close can a person come to home when their family has deserted it? Guided by this question, the poems in Nida Sophasarun's Novice traverse natural, animal, and dream worlds, seeking intimacy in a snake coming in from the rain, a mother's body imagined as a house, and the moon serving as both the missing piece and the linchpin in a night sky. Organized by tropical seasons and unfolding in Asia and the American South, Novice proposes that home is monumental and ruined, remembered and forgotten, local and diffuse, peopled and haunted.

Nida Sophasarun is from Atlanta, Georgia, and holds degrees from Wellesley College and the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars. She has lived and worked in Bulgaria, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Myanmar, and Taiwan. Her poems appear in New England Review, Prairie Schooner, 32 Poems, wildness, and elsewhere.

Sprawling yet urgent, meditative yet lucid, the poems in Jennifer Chang's anticipated third collection, An Authentic Life, offer a bold examination of a world deeply influenced by war and patriarchy. In dialogues against literature, against philosophy, and against God, Chang interrogates the "fathers" who stand at the center of history. Poems navigate wounds opened by explorations of family and generational trauma, and draw on the author's experiences as a mother, as the daughter of immigrants, and as a citizen of our deeply divided nation. Here, the patriarchal violence of history becomes intimate, brought down to a domestic scale. A woman sweeping the floor cannot escape thoughts of war, or her dying mother, while another scene shows friends questioning the "despite-ness" of love. In poems where the lyric is reimagined as porous, discursive, and bursting open, Chang fearlessly confronts the forms of knowledge that hold power. Meticulous and masterful, An Authentic Life creates a world where we can begin "to unlearn everything."

Poet and scholar Jennifer Chang is the author of two previous collections. Her debut, The History of Anonymity (2008), was an inaugural selection for the Virginia Quarterly Review Poetry Series and a finalist for the Shenandoah/Glasgow Prize for Emerging Writers. Her second book, Some Say The Lark (Alice James Books), was longlisted for the 2018 PEN Open Book Award and won the 2018 William Carlos Williams Award. Her poems have appeared in The Nation, The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, and Poetry. Chang holds a BA from the University of Chicago and earned an MFA and Ph.D. from the University of Virginia. Since 2003, she has been the co-chair of the advisory board for Kundiman, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting Asian American literature. She teaches at the Michener Center for Writers in Austin, Texas.

In O'Nights, Cecily Parks constructs stunning manifestations of a modern Thoreauvian wilderness, investigating how the natural world gives shape to the self, body, and emotions. These lyrical, transcendental poems study the duality of nature's feminine and masculine identities, and in its simplicity, offers a space where humankind truly belongs. 

Cecily Parks is the editor of the anthology The Echoing Green: Poems of Fields, Meadows, and Grasses, and the author of three poetry collections, including most recently The Seeds, which is forthcoming from Alice James Books. Her poems appear in the New Yorker, A Public Space, the New Republic, The Best American Poetry, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA Program at Texas State University and lives in Austin, Texas.

PURCHASE BOOKS HERE: https://politics-prose.com/poetry-night*recorded 4/4/2025