The Book Show

Pulitzer Prize–winning author Elizabeth Strout’s latest, “Tell Me Everything,” returns to the town of Crosby, Maine, and to her beloved cast of characters as they deal with a shocking crime in their midst, forge new friendships, make difficult decisions about love, and grapple with the question, as Lucy Barton puts it, “What does anyone’s life mean?”

Peter Heller is the best-selling author of "Burn," a novel about two men - friends since boyhood - who emerge from the woods of rural Maine to a dystopian country racked by bewildering violence.

In “Creation Lake” by Rachel Kushner, Sadie Smith, a 34 year old American undercover agent of ruthless tactics is sent by her mysterious but powerful employers to a remote corner of France. Her mission: to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists.

Helen Phillips is one of the most interesting and original writers working today. In her latest novel, “Hum,” she turns her eye to marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and artificial intelligence.

Known for her incredible research bestselling author Jodi Picoult brings to life the incomparable Emilia Bassano, the real-life and “too little considered” English poet believed to have authored many of Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets. Picoult’s new novel is “By Any Other Name.”

Simon Rich is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. He has written for “Saturday Night Live,” Pixar, and “The Simpsons” and is the creator of the TV shows “Man Seeking Woman” and “Miracle Workers.” His latest story collection, “Glory Days,” mourns the death of youthful innocence and hails the beginning of something approximating wisdom.

In 1993, in his hometown of Corpus Christi, Texas, Bret Anthony Johnston watched on live TV as flames engulfed a number of buildings in Waco – full of men, women, and children – during the FBI’s siege of the Branch Davidian compound. This time led to his writing the novel, “We Burn Daylight.”

“The Heart in Winter” by Kevin Barry is a big-hearted, violent, hypnotic, and lovelorn epic set against the iconic genre of the American Western. If features an unforgettable female protagonist and tackling the dislocation and self-invention of the Irish immigrant experience.

Doris Kearns Goodwin is one of America’s most beloved historians. She joins us to discuss her new book “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s,” where she artfully weaves together biography, memoir, and history.