Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Tim O’Brien, best known over the past decades as the author of The Things They Carried, a book that changed my outlook on a lot of things, just as it did for one of the characters in this memoir, (or pretty modest level memoir.) Tim started off back in the 70s with If I Die In A Combat Zone, Box Me Up and Ship Me Home. He won the National Book Award for Northern Lights and Going After Cacciato. His othe...
Sep 28, 2019•45 sec
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Brought to you by my independent book store, Wellington Square Bookshop. Ann’s is Parnassus Books in Nashville. So our guest is Ann Patchett who really needs no introduction, but I’ll give one anyway. Anne has written seven novels including The Magician’s Assistant, State of Wonder and of course Bel Canto. She’s been the recipient of the Orange Prize, The PEN Faulkner award. And have been NYT Notable books, and so many aw...
Sep 24, 2019•52 min
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Brought to you by my independent book store, Wellington Square Bookshop. Ann’s is Parnassus Books in Nashville. So our guest is Ann Patchett who really needs no introduction, but I’ll give one anyway. Anne has written seven novels including The Magician’s Assistant, State of Wonder and of course Bel Canto. She’s been the recipient of the Orange Prize, The PEN Faulkner award. And have been NYT Notable books, and so many aw...
Sep 24, 2019•24 sec
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Edwidge Danticat. Her collection of short stories, Everything Inside was released last month by Knopf. Edwidge has won the Pushcart Prize, the Pen/Faulkner award the American Book Award. Her novels include The Art of Death, Claire of the Sea Light, Brother, I’m Dying, Breath, Eyes, Memory. The Farming of Bones, Behind the Mountain and the short story collection The Dew Breaker. Her work has also appeare...
Sep 09, 2019•1 hr 1 min
Good afternoon and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Helen Phillips author of The Need published in July by Simon and Schuster. The Need is Helen’s fifth book, preceded by her children’s book Here Where The Sunbeams are Green, And Yet They Were Happy, The Beautiful Bureaucrat and Some Possible Solutions Each of which have received various awards. She has also received and it is my favorite award ever—-The Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction. On my fabulist buc...
Sep 09, 2019•44 min
Good afternoon and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Helen Phillips author of The Need published in July by Simon and Schuster. The Need is Helen’s fifth book, preceded by her children’s book Here Where The Sunbeams are Green, And Yet They Were Happy, The Beautiful Bureaucrat and Some Possible Solutions Each of which have received various awards. She has also received and it is my favorite award ever—-The Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction. On my fabulist buc...
Sep 09, 2019•1 min
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is J. Ryan Stradal, author of The Lager Queen Of Minnesota published by Pamela Dorman Books in July. Ryan is the author of Kitchens Of The Great Midwest, which won numerous awards. He has written for the WSJ, Vanity Fair, McSweeney’s amongst many other publications. The Lager Queen Of Minnesota is a novel about beer. I guess to a certain extent, beer is one of the protagonists of this story. But the heroin...
Sep 09, 2019•39 min
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is J. Ryan Stradal, author of The Lager Queen Of Minnesota published by Pamela Dorman Books in July. Ryan is the author of Kitchens Of The Great Midwest, which won numerous awards. He has written for the WSJ, Vanity Fair, McSweeney’s amongst many other publications. The Lager Queen Of Minnesota is a novel about beer. I guess to a certain extent, beer is one of the protagonists of this story. But the heroin...
Sep 09, 2019•56 sec
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Orson Scott Card, whose latest novel is Lost And Found to be released tomorrow by Blackstone. Mr. Card needs no introduction but as is my wont, I will give one anyway. Nobody had won the Hugo and Nebula awards for two novels two years ago until Orson did. For Ender’s Game and Speaker For The Dead and the third of the Enders book Xenocide was just as good as the others and I read each the day that they w...
Sep 09, 2019•44 sec
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Adam Pelzman, an old friend of the show and of our bookshop. We last spoke after the publication of his last novel Troika after which he came to Philly and read and signed at the shop. All in all it’s been a pleasure working with Adam. He is a lawyer, as am I, and has worked in the financial and private equity world for many years. None of which have anything to do with writing nor the fact that Adam ha...
Sep 09, 2019•42 min
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Adam Pelzman, an old friend of the show and of our bookshop. We last spoke after the publication of his last novel Troika after which he came to Philly and read and signed at the shop. All in all it’s been a pleasure working with Adam. He is a lawyer, as am I, and has worked in the financial and private equity world for many years. None of which have anything to do with writing nor the fact that Adam ha...
Sep 09, 2019•2 min
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Amy Waldman, whose new novel A Door In The Earth was released by Little Brown in August of this year. Amy is a national correspondent for Atlantic Monthly. She, at the NYT collaborated on the Pulitzer Prize winning series Portraits Of Grief, which chronicled the lives of every victim of 9/11. Her novel, Submission (a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award) was published in 2001. A Door In The Earth explor...
Sep 09, 2019•27 min
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Amy Waldman, whose new novel A Door In The Earth was released by Little Brown in August of this year. Amy is a national correspondent for Atlantic Monthly. She, at the NYT collaborated on the Pulitzer Prize winning series Portraits Of Grief, which chronicled the lives of every victim of 9/11. Her novel, Submission (a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award) was published in 2001. A Door In The Earth explor...
Sep 09, 2019•2 min
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Ian Urbina, author of The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across The Last Untamed Frontier, published this month by Knopf. Ian is an investigative reporter who usually writes for the NYT and is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and contributes to The National Geographic as well He has received the Pulitzer Prize. Most of us ignore the ocean. Either we live “inland” so to speak, or our only experience w...
Sep 06, 2019•45 min
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Casey Cep author of Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, published by Knopf in May, her first book. Reverend Willie Maxwell was a man who loved life insurance. He loved it so much that in the 70s he took out, I guess, scores of policies inuring him to the benefits of the payouts, and then meticulously murdered and I guess allegedly, murdered five of his family members in order...
Sep 06, 2019•49 min
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Ian Urbina, author of The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across The Last Untamed Frontier, published this month by Knopf. Ian is an investigative reporter who usually writes for the NYT and is also a contributing editor for The Atlantic and contributes to The National Geographic as well He has received the Pulitzer Prize. Most of us ignore the ocean. Either we live “inland” so to speak, or our only experience w...
Sep 06, 2019•2 min
Good afternoon, everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Claire Lombardo, author of The Most Fun We Ever Had, Published in June by Doubleday. This is Claire’s first novel and debuted on The NYT best seller list. Her short fiction has appeared in Barrelhouse, Little Fiction and Longform amongst others. She is not a woodwind musician. But then again, either am I. She is working on her second novel. So the cover is Gingko leaves and there are four of them.Wendy...
Sep 06, 2019•50 min
Good afternoon, everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Claire Lombardo, author of The Most Fun We Ever Had, Published in June by Doubleday. This is Claire’s first novel and debuted on The NYT best seller list. Her short fiction has appeared in Barrelhouse, Little Fiction and Longform amongst others. She is not a woodwind musician. But then again, either am I. She is working on her second novel. So the cover is Gingko leaves and there are four of them.Wendy...
Sep 06, 2019•30 sec
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Casey Cep author of Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, published by Knopf in May, her first book. Reverend Willie Maxwell was a man who loved life insurance. He loved it so much that in the 70s he took out, I guess, scores of policies inuring him to the benefits of the payouts, and then meticulously murdered and I guess allegedly, murdered five of his family members in order...
Jul 26, 2019•50 sec
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Arkady Martine, a speculative fiction writer and in her secret identity as Dr. Anna Linden Weller, she is an historian of the Byzantine Empire and a city planner. She writes about border politics, rhetoric, propaganda and the edges of the world, and coincidentally all of this is wrapped into her first novel, A Memory Called Empire, published in March by Tor. A great publishing house for SF for the past ...
Jul 26, 2019•46 sec
Good afternoon, everyone and welcome to another addition of the avid reader. Today our guest is Xuan Juliana Wang, Author of Home Remedies - her first collection of short stories, published in May by Hogarth. Xuan’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Plowshares, Pushcart, and The Best American Non-Required Reading Anthologies. She is a fiction editor at Fence. She moved to Los Angeles around 7 years old and teaches at UCLA. Home Remedies is a collection of stories that seem disparate but in m...
Jul 24, 2019•46 min
Good afternoon, everyone and welcome to another addition of the avid reader. Today our guest is Xuan Juliana Wang, Author of Home Remedies - her first collection of short stories, published in May by Hogarth. Xuan’s writing has appeared in The Atlantic, Plowshares, Pushcart, and The Best American Non-Required Reading Anthologies. She is a fiction editor at Fence. She moved to Los Angeles around 7 years old and teaches at UCLA. Home Remedies is a collection of stories that seem disparate but in m...
Jul 24, 2019•49 sec
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Casey Cep author of Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee, published by Knopf in May, her first book. Reverend Willie Maxwell was a man who loved life insurance. He loved it so much that in the 70s he took out, I guess, scores of policies inuring him to the benefits of the payouts, and then meticulously murdered and I guess allegedly, murdered five of his family members in order...
Jul 24, 2019•49 min
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Arkady Martine, a speculative fiction writer and in her secret identity as Dr. Anna Linden Weller, she is an historian of the Byzantine Empire and a city planner. She writes about border politics, rhetoric, propaganda and the edges of the world, and coincidentally all of this is wrapped into her first novel, A Memory Called Empire, published in March by Tor. A great publishing house for SF for the past ...
Jul 24, 2019•48 min
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Katherine Eban author of Bottle Of Lies, The Inside Story Of The Generic Drug Boom, published in May by Ecco. Katherine’s resume is too long to recite here, but I’ll give it a go. Katherine is an investigative journalist, a Fortune Magazine contributor and an Andrew Carnegie Fellow as well as a Rhodes scholar. She has also written for Vanity Fair, the NYT, The Nation, the Observer and many other publica...
Jun 12, 2019•42 min
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Mona Awad author of Bunny, published June 11th by Viking. Mona is also author of the acclaimed 13 Ways Of Looking At A Fat Girl. Her writing has appeared in Time, Vice, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s,The LA Times and other publications. Bunny gives us the story of Samantha, a student at a prestigious University where she is a graduate seeking her MFA. From that point on things begin to go awry, to say...
Jun 12, 2019•34 min
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Mona Awad author of Bunny, published June 11th by Viking. Mona is also author of the acclaimed 13 Ways Of Looking At A Fat Girl. Her writing has appeared in Time, Vice, Electric Literature, McSweeney’s,The LA Times and other publications. Bunny gives us the story of Samantha, a student at a prestigious University where she is a graduate seeking her MFA. From that point on things begin to go awry, to say...
Jun 12, 2019•1 min
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Julie Orringer. Her latest novel, if it is a novel, is The Flight Portfolio published on May 7th by Knopf. Julie is the winner of many literary prizes to0 numerous to mention. Her stories have appeared in the Paris Review, McSweeneys, Ploughshare, the Pushcart Prize Anthology and tons others. She’s has written the Invisible Bridge How to Breath Underwater. And now The Flight Portfolio. The Flight Portfo...
Jun 12, 2019•52 min
Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Julie Orringer. Her latest novel, if it is a novel, is The Flight Portfolio published on May 7th by Knopf. Julie is the winner of many literary prizes to0 numerous to mention. Her stories have appeared in the Paris Review, McSweeneys, Ploughshare, the Pushcart Prize Anthology and tons others. She’s has written the Invisible Bridge How to Breath Underwater. And now The Flight Portfolio. The Flight Portfo...
Jun 12, 2019•2 min
Good afternoon and welcome to another editor of the Avid Reader. Today our guest is Anne Beattie, author of A Wonderful Stroke of Luck, the next in her series of many novels and short story collections. Published in April by Viking. Anne is incredibly prolific and after 40 years remains as relevant as she was in 1976. She’s had tons of short stories in The New Yorker, has won many awards including four O. Henrys, The PEN Malamud Award, been in Best American Short Stories and as I said, many othe...
Jun 12, 2019•30 min
