Book Club: Let’s Talk About Alan Holling...

Ben Lerner’s slender new novel, “Transcription,” is just 130 pages long, yet it cracks open some of our most colossal and enduring philosophical questions. The novel is told in three parts. We open with an unnamed narrator going to interview his mentor, Thomas — an acclaimed arti ... Show More

Today we are delighted to share an episode from our colleagues on “The Ezra Klein Show,” originally published on March 31. Ezra interviewed author Michael Pollan, whose best-selling books include “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” “In Defense of Food,” and “How to Change Your Mind.” Polla ... Show More

Matt Haig was already several books into his career as a writer by the time he published “The Midnight Library” in 2020. One of those books, the 2015 memoir “Reasons to Stay Alive,” had even been a best seller in England, his home nation. Yet, “The Midnight Library” was a true br ... Show More

In 2021, Jason Mott won the National Book Award for Hell of a Book. Now, he’s out with a new novel called People Like Us, in which two Black writers navigate life in the United States in an era of gun violence. Mott says the book is loosely based on himself – and leans into the a ... Show More

Zeyn Joukhadar talked about his book ‘The Thirty Names of Night: A Novel’.Zeyn Joukhadar is the author of the novels The Map of Salt and Stars, 2018, and The Thirty Names of Night, 2020 and a member of the Radius of Arab American Writers (RAWI). His work has appeared in KINK: Sto ... Show More

Put on your black turtleneck! Jacke starts the episode with a look at #22 on the list of The Greatest Books of All Time, The Stranger by Albert Camus. Then he talks to Jake Poller about British and American novelist and playwright Christopher Isherwood, whose Goodbye to Berlin wa ... Show More

The work of Douglas Adams - comic genius, futurologist and erstwhile hitchhiker - is the subject of this episode of Backlisted, in particular The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Original Radio Scripts, first published by Pan Books in 1985. H2G2, as it is known to fans, was ... Show More

This event is part of Conversations at the Kiln, a new event series at Kiln Theatre programmed by Intelligence Squared. For more events with speakers from the worlds of literature, art, poetry and politics, click here. Douglas Stuart, Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain ... Show More

It's October, the perfect month to celebrate the master of mystery and the macabre. In this episode, Jacke talks to author Richard Kopley about his book Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, a comprehensive critical biography that combines a narrative of Poe's enduring challenges (including h ... Show More

The year is 1816, and 18-year-old Mary Shelley has fled London with her lover, Percy Shelley, and her sister, Claire. They're on their way to visit Lord Byron's villa in Lake Geneva, Switzerland - and to change the course of literary history. In this episode, Jacke talks to Carol ... Show More

This month, Dua is joined by one of the most singular voices in American fiction – the acclaimed author Percival Everett whose novel The Trees was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize. It’s not an understatement to say that Percival is having a moment – his most recent novel Jam ... Show More

Responding to a special request from a listener, Jacke discusses Fyodor Dostoevsky, his novel The Brothers Karamazov, and the search for meaning in a meaningless world. This episode was originally released as episode #250 on October 7, 2020. For reasons Jacke discusses, it has no ... Show More