WYPL Book Talk

Linda Lloyd welcomes Ashton Lee to the Book Talk studios to chat about Queen of the Cookbooks, the 5th installment of his Cherry Cola Book Club series. Librarian Maura Beth McShay is busy getting ready for the grand opening of Cherico, Mississippi's new, state-of-the-art library, when she is beset not just by skulduggery in the cook book competition, but also by protesters who want to control which books go on the library's shelves.

Beverly Lowry is a respected novelist and writer of non-fiction. In addition to biographies of Harriet Tubman and Madame C.J. Walker, her book Crossed Over: A Monster, A Memoir dealt with the unsolved crime of her son's death by a hit and run driver and her getting to know Karla Faye Tucker, the convicted murderer who became the first woman executed in Texas in over 100 years. In this episode, we are talking about her new book, Who Killed These Girls?, her investigation to the still unresolved murders of four teenage girls in a yogurt shop in Austin Texas in December of 1991.

Robert Olen Butler is one of America's most acclaimed writers of fiction, having not only won many literary honors, including the Pulitzer Prize, but he also had prize for short fiction named in his honor, which was award five times in the early 2000s. Early in his writing career, Butler wrote fiction about the Vietnam conflict from several different angles, and in his latest novel, Perfume River, he looks about how this war, and even wars before and since, have influenced the Quinlan family.