Shelf Life

Send us Fan MailFrancis Spufford’s new novel, Nonesuch, drops us into Blitz London—blackouts, random acts of violence, food rationing—and then, almost imperceptibly, the world acquires another layer. In this episode, Spufford, the author of Golden Hill and Light Perpetual, among others, talks about the “daft mixture of wartime finance, early TV, archangels, Renaissance magic, and falling bombs," that makes Nonesuch such an epic and invigorating read. We talk about the Blitz as a kind of permission slip for a writer: a time of exhaustion and improvisation, when ideals are tested in private, and when the fantasy of a “better” history starts to look like a dangerously tempting bargain. We also trace two companion texts that illuminate the book’s moral weather: John Crowley’s Four Freedoms, a wartime novel about ideals and compromise, and W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” that unsettled poem written as Europe tipped into catastrophe.

Send us Fan MailMadeleine Dunnigan’s fierce, unnerving coming-of-age novel, Jean, is set in the final weeks at Compton Manor, an all-boys school that sells itself as enlightened where desire moves like weather, and cruelty is a kind of social sport.In this episode Dunnigan explains why the boarding-school setting is such a useful framing device; what drew her to the late 1970s punk-era—close enough to the Second World War to feel its aftershocks, but far enough to watch a new, disillusioned generation take shape; and writing queer desire as a woman.The conversation also traces two key influences: Patrick Modiano’s Such Fine Boys, with its atmosphere of postwar drift and compromised authority, and Mavis Gallant’s “Potter,” “Baum, Gabriel, 1935–( ),” and “The Remission”—short stories about outsiders, social comedy, and lives shaped by prolonged waiting. 

Send us Fan MailFew cities lend themselves to myth quite like New York, a city that reinvents itself so often that each generation claims its own version. In this episode, we speak with journalist Jonathan Mahler about The Gods of New York, his sweeping portrait of the 1980s city of ambition and excess, when figures like Ed Koch, Donald Trump, and Al Sharpton weren’t just characters in the story—they were battling, in public, for the city’s soul. Mahler, best known for Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, traces how money, media, race, and power collided in a decade that helped shape the New York we live with now. We also talk about a very different but equally electrified New York dreamscape: Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and the comic-book imagination as a kind of hope machine.

Send us Fan MailBefore you can shape a story, you have to pay attention to the world as it really is—even when it’s messy, even when it stings. That lesson from Louise Fitzhugh’s classic Harriet the Spy has guided the career of reporter and biographer Laurie Gwen Shapiro. Her new book, The Aviator and the Showman, is the first major biography of Amelia Earhart in two decades, praised by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times for peeling back the myths around “Lady Lindy” to reveal the woman beneath the legend.Shapiro has long gravitated to improbable, irresistible tales. In The Stowaway (2018), she unearthed the story of Billy Gawronski, the teenager who swam the Hudson to join an Antarctic expedition—a book born of her own dogged persistence in tracking down his widow. Before turning to biography, she was an award-winning filmmaker, co-directing the unforgettable documentary Keep the River on Your Right.In this episode, Shapiro traces the arc of her storytelling life back to the notebooks of Harriet the Spy, and to the questions raised in a favorite Grace Paley short story, “A Conversation with My Father,” which wrestles with how to tell the truth about life without reducing it to cliché.

Send us Fan Mail“Anything Ada Calhoun wants to write is well worth reading,” declared Kirkus in its review of her new novel, Crush, a sharp and seductive exploration of midlife desire and the unruly force of infatuation. Calhoun is the author of the acclaimed history St. Marks Is Dead; the memoir Also a Poet, which chronicles her attempt to finish an abandoned biography of Frank O’Hara begun by her father, the critic Peter Schjeldahl; the essay collection Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give; and the cultural study Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis. Alongside her own books, she has ghostwritten more than thirty titles, an apprenticeship that sharpened her instinct for voice, candor, and structure. “There are a lot of ways to tell a true story,” she has said. “I like looking for the most generous and interesting ones.”In this episode, Calhoun discusses her journey from ghostwriter to memoirist to novelist, and the writers who guide her: Thornton Wilder, whose The Bridge of San Luis Rey remains a touchstone nearly a century after its publication, and Audre Lorde, whose essay The Use of the Erotic reframes desire as a source of knowledge and power.

Send us Fan MailFew writers dance across genres with as much wit, irreverence, and intellectual curiosity as Geoff Dyer. From Out of Sheer Rage, about his struggles to write a book on DH Lawrence, to the award-winning jazz meditations of But Beautiful, he's made a career of bending forms to his will. In Homework, his first memoir, Dyer turns that restless mind to his own post-war English childhood and proves that even the most straightforward narrative can't escape his signature style. Homework is quintessential Dyer: wry, digressive and unexpectedly poignant. He reconstructs his working class, childhood—the air fix models, the hand-me-down football kits, his parents quiet sacrifices—with a novelist's eye and a standup's timing.  We also explore some of Dyer's inspirations, including Ernie Pyle's Brave Men, the stark Second World War dispatches that imprinted themselves on his millions of readers, and Ada Collins poem "The News," with its knack for finding unease in the ordinary. 

Send us Fan MailWhat can we learn from Weimar Germany and its rapid unraveling in the 1930s? Lately that question has gained more urgency as the US turns away from the trans-Atlantic alliance that has underpinned European security for the past 80 years. For Katherine Bucknell, no writer was better placed than Christopher Isherwood for understanding the speed with which a country can slide into autocracy. It was his book Goodbye to Berlin that became the basis for the musical, Cabaret. Without Isherwood, no Sally Bowles. But the author’s legacy stretches far beyond Berlin, encompassing gay liberation, spiritual enlightenment, and what may be the 20th century’s most enduring May-December relationship–with his long-time partner Don Bachardy. Now Bucknell,  editor of Isherwood’s voluminous journals and letters, has taken her epic knowledge of the writer and written Christopher Isherwood, Inside Out, an 800-page biography befitting such a lion of literature. In this episode of Shelf Life we discuss the biographer’s craft, and why Isherwood’s slim novel, Prater Violet, resonates down the years.

Send us Fan MailNobel Laureate Rudyard Kipling is among the most derided of 20th century novelists, but in this episode of Shelf Life, the publishing legend Edwin Frank urges us to take a second look. As it happens, taking a second look was the impetus behind Frank's trailblazing publishing imprint, New York Review Books, built on the principle that too many great books had fallen out of print and deserved a second life. At my bookstore, One Grand Books, where titles are selected by celebrated bibliophiles there is hardly a shelf that does not contain an NYRB title, whether it’s CV Wedgwood’s The Thirty Years War, chosen by writer and thinker Ta-Nehisi Coates, In the Freud Archives by Janet Malcom, chosen by director and writer Mike White, or Balzac’s The Lilly in the Valley, chosen for us by director Francois Ozon. “I grew up between the pages of novels, and the better part of my adult life has been spent there, too,” Edwin Frank writes in the introduction to Stranger Than Fiction, his newly-published history of the 20th-century novel in which he explores, contextualizes, and interweaves the works of over 30 authors. We talk about Frank’s adventures in publishing, and what the 20th century novel can  teach us.

Send us Fan MailIt's been 40 years since Jeanette Winterson's debut novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, launched a confident and daring new voice in English fiction, one that wasn’t afraid to take risks in the service of craft. Many books have followed,  including The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body, and more recently Frankissstein: A Love Story. “I am an ambitious writer,” she has written. “I don’t see the point of being anything; no, not anything at all, if you don’t have ambition for it.”  Winterson's new collection, Night Side of the River, showcases her fascination with AI and technology within the classic form of the ghost story. As she says in this episode, "What's really fascinated me  with the rise of AI and Big Tech is that for the first time since the Enlightenment, science and religion are asking the same question: Is consciousness obliged to materiality, or could we go beyond the body?”. We also talk about one of Winterson’s literary touchstones, Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.

Send us Fan MailMemoir meets history meets politics in Jennifer Kabat’s book, The Eighth Moon, a fascinating account of moving to the Catskills in 2005, and stumbling on a history of America’s forgotten populist uprising, the Anti-Rent War, that culminated in 1845 with the murder of a police officer, Osman Steele. Drawing on archives, conversations, and her many hikes through the countryside, Kabat favors a writing style that feels akin to an overflowing mind, moving back and forth between eras and observations, daring the reader to keep pace. You could say something similar of Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal, the 2020 novel that Kabat has chosen to discuss for this episode. Her other pick is “Culture and Anarchy,” by the poet Adrienne Rich. 

Send us Fan MailA teenage prodigy who worshiped Joni Mitchell, Ricky Ian Gordon has made a career turning novels and poems into operas and song. “I was that kid who was invited to the party because I could play anything, no matter how hard, and incite everyone into singing all night,” he writes in his  memoir, Seeing Through: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs and Opera. But that exuberant talent has an undercurrent of pain and sadness that has shaped and colored his life and career. It’s there in his opera of John Steinbeck’s depression-era novel, The Grapes Wrath, as well as his musical interpretations of poems by Langston Hughes, ee cummings, Emily Dickinson and the contemporary poet, Marie Howe, whose poem “What the Living Do,” has become a deeply personal touchstone for his life and work.

Send us Fan MailRex Ogle’s series of YA memoirs, beginning with Free Lunch, about life as a poor kid in a wealthy school district, and culminating this year in Road Home, which chronicles his experience as a homeless teen have won acclaim for their frank ability to illuminate the shame and isolation that comes with poverty. In the words of Ogle’s mother, "being poor in America is like staring at an all-you-can-eat buffet. You can see all of this food piled high but you can’t have any of it.” Ogle’s mother turns out to be a hugely complicated figure who towers over Free Lunch, the polar opposite of Maia Kobabe’s mother in the graphic novel, Gender Queer, one of two books that Ogle has chosen to talk about for this episode. The other is Jacqueline Woodson’s Brown Girl Dreaming, a memoir of growing up as an African American in the 1960s and 70s. 

Send us Fan MailIs 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.  

Send us Fan MailThe 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.

Send us Fan MailWhat 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. 

Send us Fan MailThe 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.” 

Send us Fan MailLoss, 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).

Send us Fan MailWhen 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. 

Send us Fan MailThe 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." 

Send us Fan MailIn 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. 

Send us Fan MailEach 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.

Send us Fan MailThe 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.

Send us Fan MailNovelist Christopher Bollen has been writing twisty thrillers with emotional depth for over a decade. His latest, The Lost Americans, takes readers to Cairo for a deftly-plotted murder mystery set in the high-stakes world of arms traders and Egypt's authoritarian government. As with his writing, so with his book choices: we get intrigue and suspense in London during the Blitz, courtesy of Graham Greene’s 1943 espionage thriller, The Ministry of Fear, and a criminal mastermind in Agatha Christie's The Man in the Brown Suit, an early novel that helped establish the reputation of the Queen of Crime. 

Send us Fan MailFew of us need reminding that childhood can be a difficult and challenging time; but it can also be a magical one. That duality is at the heart of The Whalebone Theater, the best-selling debut novel of Joana Quinn. Childhood is central, also, to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 classic novel, The Secret Garden, in which a group of three young children discover the transformative magic of nature during the course of three seasons in a remote house in the Yorkshire moors. It is one of two books that Quinn has chosen for Shelf Life. The other is Michael Ondaatje’s prize-winning novel, The English Patient, a deeply poetic story of love and betrayal, identity and class that takes place in an abandoned Italian villa in the waning days of the Second World War. 

Send us Fan MailTender hearted children growing up in oppressive and claustrophobic societies dominate the two novels chosen by the journalist and musician, Ari Shapiro. The first is Douglas Stuart’s acclaimed sophomore novel, Young Mungo; the second is Belinda Huijuan Tang’s A Map for the Missing. As one of the hosts for NPR’s flagship program, All Things Considered, listeners will  be familiar with Shapiro's flair for bringing a lively curiosity to the world around us, whether it be reporting from India on rising sea levels, or Afghanistan in the company of the President. But while he has met more than his fair share of world leaders, scientists, and business executives, when he wants to really understand the world, he most often turns to novels. “The conversations that help me see the world most clearly are generally not with researchers, policy makers, or so-called experts,” Shapiro writes in his new book, The Best Strangers in the World. “They aren’t with the people journalists crassly call ‘newsmakers’ at all. They’re with artists–especially writers.” 

Send us Fan MailSera Gamble is perhaps best known as the screenwriter and showrunner for the hit Netflix show You, based on the novels of Caroline Kepnes, in which the romantic hero is not just a pretty face; he’s a serial killer as well. You is not the first book that Gamble has turned into darkly entertaining TV. She also created The Magicians for the SyFy Channel, based on the best-selling novel by Lev Grossman. And she was a showrunner on Supernatural, a haunting fantasy series which ran for 15 seasons. Gamble has said, “I’m a horror writer in my heart, in that I always like to ask myself what scares me, and what scares us universally when I’m approaching a story. To me there’s just about nothing scarier than the truth that we can never really know another person.” There are scares aplenty in the books she has chosen to talk about for Shelf Life: Stephen King’s classic nail-biter, Misery, and Kazuo Ishiguro’s tender and haunting dystopian novel Never Let Me Go. 

Send us Fan MailFor 22 years Brooke Gladstone has been demystifying the media for listeners of her indispensable public radio show, On the Media.  But her long career, which began in summer stock theater, has also included stints as editor NPR's Weekend Edition and All Things Considered, as well as a three-year posting to Moscow as a correspondent for NPR. We’ll get to see just how her knowledge of Russian history and language helps her appreciate her favorite novel, the Russian classic, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, in which the story of Jesus and Pontius Pilate is juxtaposed with a story of the Devil wreaks havoc in 1930s Moscow’s. 

Send us Fan MailA bus trip to Auschwitz in the company of the writer Jerry Stahl, who in 2016 set off for Poland to confront one of the darkest chapters in human history. The resulting book, Nein Nein Nein, is fast-paced, darkly absurd, and mordantly funny without ever minimizing the horrors at its center. In that regard it has something in common with Stahl’s best-selling memoir, Permanent Midnight, in which he mined both humor and pathos from his harrowing experience as a spiraling heroin addict trying to manage a high-flying script-writing career in 1980s Hollywood. That book was, was made into a 1998 movie starring Ben Stiller as Stahl, is also a brilliant satire of Hollywood, so it’s not surprising that he cites Nathaniel West’s classic Hollywood novel, Day of the Locust, as the book that inspired him to be a writer. 

Send us Fan MailIn this special holiday episode of Shelf Life, we took time out from our regular format to see what  guests old and new read in 2022. The episode starts with Joyce Maynard, who shot to fame with her 1998 memoir At Home in the World, in which she wrote candidly about the traumatic relationship she had with the author of Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger. But Maynard has also written many novels including Labor Day and To Die For, both made into acclaimed movies, as well as (more recently), Count the Ways.   After discovering what books found their way onto Joyce's reading list in 2022 we pose the same question to Darcey Steinke, author of Suicide Blonde, Jesus Saves, and Flash Count Diary, among others, before rounding out the show with the legendary Edmund White, now 82, a pioneer in contemporary queer fiction (A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty)  and still writing up a storm (a new novel is due in May 2023) and the irrepressible director, writer, and performer John Waters, a debut novelist himself in 2022 with Liarmouth: A Feel Bad Romance.

Send us Fan MailIf you sometimes fret that your opportunity to make your mark on the world has passed, take a leaf from Marion Nestle’s career.  At 50, she found herself divorced, out of a job, and not able to get a credit card. Despite that she persevered, going back to school, publishing her career-changing book, Food Politics,  at the age of 66. It changed her life. Now aged 86, Nestle is still very much a full-throated advocate for debunking popular food myths, and exposing the links between dietary misinformation and a rapacious food industry driven by the bottom line. In her new memoir, Slow Cooked, she recounts both her difficult upbringing as a child of a loveless marriage, and the various twists and turns that lead to her epiphany that food and nutrition was to be her subject in life. The book she has chosen to talk about in this episode  is Sidney Mintz’s groundbreaking study, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. 

Send us Fan MailIn this episode, Leila Taylor, the author of Darkly, an expansive rumination on the relationship between Gothic narratives and the Black experience in America, talks haunted houses courtesy of Shirley Jackson, meditations on a cockroach in a seminal work by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, and being a creepy kid who loved vampires and graveyards. But although Taylor gravitated to Goth culture, she was always aware that the mask never quite fit. “Whiteness was never something I aspired to, but I considered myself a member of this tribe,” she writes in Darkly. “I’ll admit, I sometimes felt a bit Blacula-ish in their presence—a Black version of a white story.”

Send us Fan MailDo good people make for good novels? In this episode, the author Lydia Millet, best known for The Children’s Bible, a National Book Award Finalist, talks about her latest novel, Dinosaurs,  the story of Gil, an unambiguously good man who is determined to make the world a better place.  “I think books should have an agenda, but I don’t think you should be able to deliver a one-liner about what that agenda is,” she has said. “It should be an agenda felt by the reader, sensed by the reader, but not fully known. In my work, often there’s a sort of agenda of empathy.” Later in the show we’ll discuss what agenda might be lurking between the lines of two of Lydia Millet’s favorite books - the short, tight prose pieces in Mary Ruefle’s collection, The Most of It, and in Mary Robinson’s 2001 novel, Why Did I Ever. And we'll hear from Mary Ruefle herself, as she reads from one of the pieces in The Most It.

Send us Fan MailHow do we synthesize a 1000-plus years of history into a 300–page book. The historian Orlando Figes, who has made the study of Russia his lifelong work, shows us how in his new book, The Story of Russia.  Coming at a moment when Russia's history is being used as a pretext for the war in Ukraine, the timing could not be more pertinent. In part two of the show, the historian shares his passion for Gustav Flaubert's great novel, Madame Bovary.  Figes has published ten books on Russian and European history, including the prizewinning study of the Russian Revolution, A People’s Tragedy, and has been a historical consultant on films such as Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightlye, and a BBC adaptation of War & Peace. Born in London in 1958, his mother was Eva Figes, a Jewish immigrant who fled Nazi Germany with her parents and would go on to become an acclaimed novelist herself, and perhaps a seminal influence on her son.

Send us Fan MailIn that esteemed group of soothsayers, we might  consider adding the novelist A.M. Homes. Homes has just published her eighth novel, The Unfolding, a wild trippy ride of a novel that opens on election night, 2008 and closes two months later at the inauguration of one Barack Hussein Obama.  Homes began the novel long before the 2016 election of Donald Trump, but much of it now reads more like non-fiction, an origins story of the January 6 coup, but with a novelist’s curiosity and a refreshing, caustic wit. She has said, “The oddity or the absurdity of everyday experience is part of what I’m capturing. My sense is that life itself can be so incredibly painful and disturbing that if one is to survive it, one has to find the humor in it.” There is humor, too, in Edward Albee’s one act play, An American Dream, one of the two works of fiction featured in this episode. The other is Richard Yates 1975 novel, Disturbing the Peace, a gimlet-eyed examination of a man in extremis.

Send us Fan MailJonathan Escoffery  navigates identity, belonging and the hollow promise of the American Dream in his mesmerizing debut If I Survive You, a book that has been long-listed for the National Book Award. Escoffery  has said, “I love a compelling narrative voice—a bit of personality, a bit of humor couched in some other emotion. I love a story that teaches me something.” In this episode we find out what Escoffery has learned from the hyper masculine and often violent short stories of Denis Johnson’s acclaimed collection, Jesus’s Son, and the vignettes in the electric coming-of-age novel, We The Animals by Justin Torres. In between, insights on living through Hurricane Andrew, sleeping in his car, and the joys of ackee.

Send us Fan MailIn his new memoir All Down Darkness Wide, the award-wining poet, Sean Hewitt, describes that experience of living with the chronically depressed in prose that glints and shimmers with a poetic sensibility influenced in part by his literary hero, Gerard Manley Hopkins, a 19th century poet and Jesuit priest who, like Hewitt, struggled with his sexual orientation. For Hewitt that struggle meant learning at a young age how to play act convincingly. “I realized while I was writing the memoir just how prevalent the theme of lying was in my own life,” he has said. “Whether that was lying before I came out or continuing to lie in certain ways afterwards as a way of protecting myself or to create certain fictions. Writing a memoir seemed like the perfect antidote to that because it is a truth-telling exercise.” You could say that different kinds of truth-telling are represented in Hewitt’s two book choices for this show. One is Alice Oswald’s book-length eco-poem, Dart, which tells the story of an English river through the conversations of people who live and work on it. The other is The Land of Spices, a deeply autobiographical novel set in an Irish convent by the writer Kate O’Brien, a book that was banned at the time of its publication in 1941.

Send us Fan MailMichael Cunningham is the author of seven novels, as well as a short story collection and several non-fiction books, including his travelogue, Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown. He had intended to become an artist, but when a girlfriend induced him to read Virginia Woolf a seed was planted that would eventually blossoming into his 1998 Pulitzer-winning novel, The Hours, in which three narratives of women's lives alternate and intersect to luminous effect. Of his own craft he has said, “in the writing of a novel one must find a balance between calculation and intuition. Too much calculation, and it’s just a Swiss music box, it just doesn’t feel alive; and too much intuition and it’s just a mess.” Getting that percentage of calculation to intuition right are the authors of the two books that Cunningham has selected to talk about today, including George Saunder’s Booker Prize winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, and Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. 

Send us Fan MailAnthony Fabian, the director of this summer's sleeper hit, Mrs Harris Goes to Paris,  is a long-time Paul Gallico fan, and for this episode of Shelf Life he has chosen the author’s beloved children’s book, Jennie (known as The Abandoned in the U.S.), about a boy’s metamorphosis into a cat, as one of his two favorite books. The other is Dancer, the mesmerizing 2003 novel by the Irish writer Colum McCann about the life of the legendary dancer Rudolf Nureyev.  

Send us Fan MailThe Scottish novelist Douglas Stuart is a master of writing about tender souls in tough spaces. He is a tender soul himself, having grown up gay in working class Glasgow with an alcoholic mother (she  died when he was 16), an experience that informs both his debut novel, Shuggie Bain, which won the Booker Prize, and his 2022 follow-up, Young Mungo. In both books, Stuart has created indelible portraits of complicated mothers and their conflicted sons trying to navigate a hostile and soul-sapping world. “I’m always writing about loneliness and belonging and love,” he has said. “That’s what keeps me coming back to the page.” Loneliness and belonging and love might also be what draws Stuart to the defiant heroine of Alan Warner’s 1995 novel, Morvern Callar, and the tempestuous and violent world of 17th century soldiers in Cromwell’s New Model Army in Maria McCann’s As Meat Loves Salt, the two books he has chosen to talk about in this episode of Shelf Life.

Send us Fan MailNorwegian pop star Sondre Lerche has been making music and releasing albums since he was a teenager, songs that ache with yearning and that are underpinned by swooning strings,  bossa nova rhythms, and jazz stylings. It was always clear that Lerche was a romantic, but a romantic with a sometimes aching, melancholy heart. If you needed evidence of that, look no further than the two books he’s chosen for this episode of shelf life - Marguerite Duras’s The Lover, and Geir Gulliksen’s The Story of a Marriage. Though very different, both novels are interested in the power dynamics of relationships, and the alchemy of love. 

Send us Fan MailIt took William Boyd three failed attempts at writing a novel before he hit gold with A Good Man in Africa, which won him both the Whitbread Book Award for a first novel and the Somerset Maugham Award. That was in 1981, and Boyd hasn’t stopped to draw breath since. His 16th novel, Trio, has just been published in paperback, and another novel will be published this year. Among his other achievements is bringing James Bond back to life, in the novel Solo–in which the martini-swigging spy undertakes a mission to the fictional country of Zanzarim, then in the midst of a civil war. As it happens, a fictional country on the brink of civil war is the conceit for Scoop, Evelyn Waugh’s famous comic novel of war reporters in the field, one of two books that Boyd has chosen for this episode of Shelf Life. The other is Muriel Spark’s A Far Cry from Kensington, a gimlet eyed portrait of London’s post-war publishing world. 

Send us Fan MailCourtney Maum, the author of three novels, including I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, Touch, and Costalegre,  inspired by the real life figure of Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter. Maum has also just published a memoir, The Year of the Horses, in which she writes about turning to a childhood passion for horses as a response to depression, and is the author of a best-selling guide for budding writers on navigating the travails of publishing. She has said that when she started writing her first book, in 2003, “I wasn’t professional about my writing: I didn’t research, I didn’t outline, I didn’t stress. I was very romantic and naïve about the process—I would wait until a mood hit me, and then I’d just start writing. But you can’t pay your mortgage by being verbally romantic! So now, I write like a goddamn professional.” Professionalism is one hallmark of the novels that Maum has chosen to talk about today, both of which feature two of the most distinctive voices I’ve yet to come across. The first, published in 2020, is Hex by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight,  about an expelled biology PHD candidate, obsessed with botanical toxins; the second is Wolf in White Van, a novel by the musician John Darnielle.  

Send us Fan MailHardboiled detective noir, and a multi-generational historical saga take center stage in the reading life of the actor Melissa Gilbert, best known for playing Laura Ingalls Wilder in the wildly successful TV series, Little House on the Prairie, which ran for nine years, and nine seasons. A quintessential bit of myth making of the America west, it gained new fans during the pandemic, thanks in part to its values of self-reliance and fortitude in the face of adversity. Gilbert recently  published a new memoir, Back to the Prairie, a funny, charming, and inspiring account of leaving behind her Hollywood life for a dilapidated cottage in the Catskills, where she and her husband, the actor Timothy Busfield, found a new community. my guest in this episode of Shelf Life. 

Send us Fan MailThe legendary British playwright Sir David Hare is widely regarded as British theater’s most fervent chronicler of his country’s moral failings, to use the words of New York Times critic Bill Brantley. Of himself,  Hare has said, “It’s usually assumed that there are two groups of people in the world, those who obey the rules and those who disobey the rules, but in fact there’s a third group to which I belong: the people who don’t understand the rules.” Luckily for us, that misunderstanding, or curiosity, has been channeled into 39 plays over 50 years, as well as notable adaptations of other works, including screenplays for Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Bernard Schlink’s The Reader, for both of which he received Academy Award nominations. But Hare’s entry into playwriting was something of a happy accident, after a theater troupe he was working with, found itself in sudden need of a play. Hare jumped in, turning around a script in four days. That work, which explored the then-nascent feminist movement, exhibited a keen interest in strong female protagonists that has marked his career ever since. It makes sense, then, that one of his book choices for Shelf Life is Mary Gabriel’s Ninth Street Women about the contribution of five female artists who did anything but play by the rules, as well as Wallace Shawn’s ominous short play, The Designated Mourner, dense with allusions to tyranny and complacency.

Send us Fan MailIt's summer, and we're ready for a nice, shady nook,  or a perfect beach, and some great new book recommendations. Since Shelf Life went  on hiatus in February, I've been busy reading more books selected by luminaries I admire, from Pulitzer-winner, Michael Cunningham and legendary playwright David Hare to Norwegian troubadour Sondre Lerche. Stay tuned to find out what books they think you should read. 

Send us Fan MailLove takes center stage in the short stories of the celebrated Irish writer Kevin Barry, best known for his 2019 novel, Night Boat to Tangier, long listed for The Booker Prize. Barry’s third collection of short stories, That Old Country Music, now out in paperback, is a masterclass in how to write about men undone or remade by love, by turns comic, troubling, and sometimes devastating. “I think every novel I’ve written and every story I’ve written is essentially about people who can’t escape their own past,” he has said. “They can never get past the blood, and they can never get past their background, and they’re constantly striving to break out of that shadow. Unable to escape his past is one way of describing Herzog, who elevated his creator, author Saul Bellow, into the pantheon of great American writers, and onto the bookshelves of a young Kevin Barry. The other book Barry has chosen is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard’s love song to the fecundity and cruelty and majesty of nature.

Send us Fan MailWhen the award-winning journalist Meredith Talusan published her memoir, Fairest, in 2020, it was widely praised for the unflinching honesty with which Talusan told a complex story of gender and identity in her own terms. It’s no surprise, then, to find a similar animating spirit -- at once vulnerable and forthright -- at the heart  of the two novels Talusan has picked as favorites for Shelf Life: Jamaica Kincaid’s modern classic, Lucy, published in 1990, and Susan Choi’s My Education, published in 2013. In both stories the reader is presented with assertive protagonists, alive to their passions and desires, people for whom identity is sometimes messy, often urgent, and always singular.  For Talusan, who made her name as a journalist exploring transgender identity, the personal and the political are never far apart.  “So many of us have to be Swiss Army knives,” she has said. “I can't just be an author. Trans people can't just be models or actors or doctors. We also have to perform the political and emotional labor of being activists.”

Send us Fan MailWe step into the world of a sinister gourmand, in John Lanchester’s novel of 90s hedonism, The Debt to Pleasure, take a trip to Florida’s orange groves in the genial company of John McPhee, and globe trot with our guest, the veteran BBC food journalist, Dan Saladino, author of Eating to Extinction, a timely and endlessly fascinating study of some of the world’s rarest foods and why we need to save them. A recipient of a James Beard Award, Saladino has spent the last two decades tracking down Indigenous and ancient foods that are on the brink of extinction, often hanging on with the help of a few dedicated farmers. “Food shows us where real power lies,” he writes. “It can explain conflicts and wars; showcase human creativity and invention; account for the rise and fall of empires; and expose the causes and consequences of disasters. Food stories are perhaps the most important stories of all.”

Send us Fan MailIn this episode of Shelf Life we are time traveling, courtesy of two 2021 National Book Award finalists: Anthony Doerr’s critically acclaimed Cloud Cuckoo Land which takes readers to 15th century Constantinople, 20th century Idaho, and the year 2064; and Hanif Abdurraqib's latest book of essays, A Little Devil in America, a collection that pirouettes between decades to celebrate the history of Black performance in America. Both are  favorites of Brendan Slocumb, a classically-trained musician who has just published The Violin Conspiracy, a page-turning mystery in which a young Black musical prodigy inherits a priceless Stradivarius only to have it stolen from his hotel room on the eve of performing at the world’s most prestigious music contest. Like his protagonist, Slocumb started playing violin at nine in a public schools music program, and has credited that experience for determining the shape of his life. “When my friends were out running the streets, I was in rehearsals,” he has said. “When they were breaking into houses, I was practicing Mozart or Dvořák."

Send us Fan MailBroome’s memoir, Punch Me Up to the Gods, the winner of the 2021 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, is a deeply felt account of growing up Black and gay in the 1980s. The writer, who joins Shelf Life to chat about Mary Karr's The Liar's Club and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, is also recipient of the grand prize in Carnegie Mellon University’s Martin Luther King Jr. Writing Awards, and is the K. Leroy Irvis Fellow and instructor in The Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh.  He  has said, “For a long time, I thought stories functioned mostly as an escape from the quotidian responsibilities and minutiae of life. But I don’t know that I believe stories are a way to escape anymore. I’m starting to believe that they are an essential part of life itself—a necessary element that keeps us moving forward.”