Shelf Life

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Is there a more primal terror than a mother’s fear of losing a child. Helen Phillips, one of our greatest speculative writers, explored that terrain in her acclaimed 2020 novel, The Need, in which a mother fears her children are being abducted by her own doppelganger. She returns to that theme ih Hum, a novel set in a near-future when artificial intelligence and surveillance pose urgent questions of what it means to be human, and how a family is capable of finding intimacy in a world mediated by technology. The maternal instinct is at the heart, too, of Fever Dream, a claustrophobic, propulsive horror story by the acclaimed Argentinian writer, Samanta Schweblin, in which a mother realizes that control is an illusion. Phillips other choice for this episode is ed Chiang’s  short story, Exhalation, from the collection of the same name, in which a robot-scientist discovers that the world is running out of energy.  

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The musician Orenda Fink, best known for her early 2000s band, Azure Ray, purveyors of a dreamy, confessional pop, has now penned a frank, unsparing memoir, The Witch's Daughter, in which she grapples with her complicated family story in which her mother's profound emotional needs operated as a kind of centrifugal force.  “Life with my mother was like being in a trap,” she writes. “Once you entered there was no escaping.” There is no escape, either, for the children in the  books that Fink has chosen to talk about for this episode of Shelf Life: Jeannette Walls acclaimed memoir, The Glass Castle, and the Pulitzer-Prize winning play, August: Osage County by Tracy Letts, in which the disappearance of an alcoholic patriarch unlocks a family’s secrets.

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What does Charles Portis’s 1968 novel, True Grit, twice made into a Hollywood western,  have in common with Kay Thompson’s whimsical children's book, Eloise? Here to tell us is Jennifer Belle, the author of five novels, including most recently, Swanna in Love, an indelible, and often very funny portrait of a 14-year-old girl trapped in an artist’s commune in Vermont with her bohemian mother and her mother’s alcoholic lover. Belle is no novice at crafting novels that push readers outside their comfort zone, and heartily defends the right of all novelists to do the same. Here she talks about her early fame,  hanging out with Madonna, and why the campaign to cancel Jeanine Cummins, author of American Dirt, transformed publishing for the worst. 

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The author of seven novels and one collection of stories, Curtis Sittenfeld specializes in sharp-witted female protagonists in stories that reflect a Jane Austen-like cunning in using comedy as a vehicle for social observation.  For those who are familiar with her work, it may come as little surprise that Austen’s Pride & Prejudice is among her favorite books.  We also get an all access pass behind the scenes of Saturday Night Live thanks to Tina Fey's bestselling 2011 memoir, Bossypants. It so  happens that SNL and Tina Fey were instrumental in Sittenfeld's most recent novel, Romantic Comedy. Says Sittenfeld, “People say, ‘Write the book you want to read’, but I think I was actually writing the world I wanted to exist in.” 

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Loss, longing and melancholy dominate the strange and sometimes mordantly funny short stories of Eudora Welty, the writer whose debut 1941 collection, A Curtain of Green is among two books that Ada Zhang has chosen for Shelf Life. The other is William Maxwell's short, taut So Long, See You Tomorrow. Zhang's debut story collection, The Sorrows of Others is a tapestry of first and second generation Chinese immigrants dealing with cultural and geographical dislocation, women on the threshold of adulthood, and intergenerational misunderstanding. Her characters reveal as much about themselves in what they say as in what they don’t.  “Lies say a lot about people," Zhang has said.  "What we choose to lie about can be incredibly telling. Getting your characters to lie or hide the truth is a sure way to get to know them.”  (Audiobook clip from The Sorrows of Others courtesy of Audible).

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When did you first encounter Dylan Baker? Perhaps it was as the brazen wife killer Colin Sweeney in the long-running CBS show, The Good Wife. Or maybe it was the FBI bully-in-chief, J. Edgar Hoover in Ava DuVernay’s civil rights-era movie, Selma. Or was it much longer ago as the monster with the human face, Bill Maplewood in Todd Solendz’s 1998 movie Happiness.  He says, “I went into the business because I really enjoyed exploring dark places in human beings, it was always how I searched out roles.” But if his screen portrayals often show men abusing their power; his book choices for this episode of Shelf Life - Gore Vidal's Lincoln, and Robert Caro's The Path to Power -  show men who manipulated power for positive change, some bumps notwithstanding. 

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The bestselling  finance guru-turned-TV star, Ramit Sethi is on a mission to help all of us live what he calls our rich lives, but he's not just another finance bro. The son of Indian immigrants who were too poor to afford restaurants or overseas vacations, he has developed an extraordinary skill in helping people figure out how to spend money on the things that make our lives more enjoyable. One thing that separates Sethi from the crowd? He reads!  His choices for this episode of Shelf Life are Christopher Alexander’s  The Timeless Way of Building, a clarion call to think about buildings and urban environments in the context of community, and  Elliott Aronson’s The Social Animal, a touchstone of 20th century psychology that aims for nothing less than to understand "how we think, how we behave, what makes us aggressive, and what makes us loving." 

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In the quiet hush of winter, there's a particular inclination to fold into the pages of unexplored narratives. Since Shelf Life paused its pulse last summer, I've wandered through a constellation of worlds chosen by  a new group of celebrated bibliophiles, including the actor Dylan Baker, the finance guru Ramit Sethi,  and new voices in fiction like Ada Zhang and Ben Purkett. Stay tuned to find out what books they think you should read. 

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Each year  Deep Water Literary Festival in Narrowsburg, NY, identifies a unifying theme, often a particular literary work or an author, and builds a program to engage and interrogate the ways in which the theme resonates for contemporary audiences. In 2023 the festival explored the work of British novelist and journalist George Orwell. In this conversation the award-winning novelist, Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf and A Brief History of Seven Killings, and the poet and memoirist Hafizah Augustus Geter, author of The Black Period, parse the meaning and dynamics of dystopia, both literary and real-world. At a time when our lived reality feels like it's teetering on the edge of catastrophe, how does dystopian, apocalyptic, and speculative fiction speak to the world we live in, or help us to imagine alternatives. Find more information about the festival here. For Marlon James ten favorite books, head to One Grand Books here.

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The writer and biographer D.J. Taylor on the rich, complicated and too-short life of one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, George Orwell. Almost 75 years after his death we discuss why the author of 1984 matters as much, if not more, than ever. Includes an excerpt of Orwell's "Some Thoughts on the Common Today," read for Shelf Life by Tilda Swinton.