The Avid Reader Show

Interview with Chris Cleave, author of "Gold"

What would you sacrifice for the people you love? “Cleave goes for the gold and brings it home in his thrillingly written and emotionally rewarding novel about the world of professional cycling … Cleave expertly cycles through the characters’ tangled past and present, charting their ever-shifting dynamic as ultra-competitive Zoe and Kate are forced to decide whether winning means more to them than friendship … Cleave likewise pulls out all the stops getting inside the hearts and minds of his eng...

Interview with April Bernard author of "Miss Fuller"

What does one sensitive but ordinary woman makes of a publicly disgraced woman like Fuller, and how do women make use of what they learn from other women? Miss Fuller is a historical novel that also poses timeless questions about how we see and treat the exceptional and dangerous agents of change among us. And it shows the price that any one person might pay, who strives to change the world for the better.

Interview with April Bernard author of "Miss Fuller"

She was the most famous woman in America. And nobody knew who she was. It is 1850. Margaret Fuller--feminist, journalist, orator, and "the most famous woman in America"--is returning from Europe where she covered the Italian revolution for The New York Tribune. She is bringing home with her an Italian husband, the Count Ossoli, and their two-year-old son. But this is not the gala return of a beloved American heroine. This is a furtive, impoverished return under a cloud of suspicion and controver...

Interview with Jess Walter author of "Beautiful Ruins"

The acclaimed, award-winning author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets returns with his funniest, most romantic, and most purely enjoyable novel yet: the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962 … and is rekindled in Hollywood fifty years later. “A literary miracle.”—NPR’s Fresh Air “A high-wire feat of bravura storytelling.”—NYT Book Review “A masterpiece … damn near perfect.”—Salon

Interview with Gillian Flynn author of "Gone Girl"

On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick Dunne’s clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River.

Interview with Alice LaPlante author of "Turn of Mind"

Is the perfect murder the one you can’t forget or the one you can’t remember? Dr. Jennifer White, a brilliant former surgeon in the early grips of Alzheimer’s, is suspected of murdering her best friend, Amanda.

Interview with Stephen Greenblatt author of "The Swerve"

One of the world’s most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.

Interview with Susan Cain author of "Quiet"

Passionately argued, impressively researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet shows how dramatically we undervalue introverts, and how much we lose in doing so.

Interview with Tom Standage author of "An Edible History of Humanity"

More than simply sustenance, food historically has been a kind of technology, changing the course of human progress by helping to build empires, promote industrialization, and decide the outcomes of wars. Tom Standage draws on archaeology, anthropology, and economics to reveal how food has helped shape and transform societies around the world, from the emergence of farming in China by 7500 b.c. to the use of sugar cane and corn to make ethanol today. An Edible History of Humanity is a fully sati...

Interview with Ernest Cline author of " Ready Player One"

Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.

Interview with Jennifer Egan author of "A Visit from the Goon Squad"

Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.

Interview with Lionel Shriver author of "The New Republic"

A droll, playful novel, "The New Republic" addresses weighty issues like terrorism with the deft, tongue-in-cheek touch that is vintage Shriver. It also presses the more intimate question: What makes particular people so magnetic, while the rest of us inspire a shrug? What’s their secret? And in the end, who has the better life—the admired, or the admirer?

Interview with Joshua Foer author of "Moonwalking With Einstein"

Foer’s unlikely journey from chronically forgetful science journalist to U.S. Memory Champion frames a revelatory exploration of the vast, hidden impact of memory on every aspect of our lives.

Interview with Dana Spiotta author of "Stone Arabia"

"Stone Arabia", Dana Spiotta’s moving and intrepid third novel, is about family, obsession, memory, and the urge to create — in isolation, at the margins of our winner-take-all culture.

Interview with Stewart O'Nan author of "The Odds" and "Emily, Alone"

Unlike anyone else, O’Nan delivers a new book every year that speaks directly to the anxieties of our fearful times

Interview with Audrey Schulman author of "3 Weeks in December"

"Remarkably fresh, complex and memorable... Max’s adventure would be enough to fill any book." - New York Times Sunday Book Review

Interview with Liz Moore author of "Heft"

Former academic Arthur Opp weighs 550 pounds and hasn’t left his rambling Brooklyn home in a decade. Twenty miles away, in Yonkers, seventeen-year-old Kel Keller navigates life as the poor kid in a rich school and pins his hopes on what seems like a promising baseball career–if he can untangle himself from his family drama. The link between this unlikely pair is Kel’s mother, Charlene, a former student of Arthur’s.

Interview with Adam Wilson author of "Flatscreen"

"Flatscreen" tells the story of Eli Schwartz as he endures the loss of his home, the indifference of his parents, the success of his older brother, and the cruel and frequent dismissal of the opposite sex.

Interview with Margot Livesey author of "The Flight of Gemma Hardy"

A captivating tale, set in Scotland in the early 1960s, that is both an homage to and a modern variation on the enduring classic Jane Eyre.

Interview with Eleanor Brown author of "The Weird Sisters"

A major new talent tackles the complicated terrain of sisters. A winsome novel that explores sibling rivalry, the power of books, and the places we decide to call home.

Ben Marcus - The Flame Alphabet

Sam interviews Ben Marcus author of "The Flame Alphabet". Listen as Sam and Ben discuss Ben's new novel about how far we will go, and the sorrows we will endure, in order to protect our families.

Adam Johnson - The Orphan Master's Son

Join Sam and Adam as they discuss Adam's book "The Orphan Master's Son". An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master’s Son follows a young man’s journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea.

Interview with Alex Gilvarry author of "From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant"

Listen to Sam's and Alex discuss Alex's new book "From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant: A Novel". Fashionistas and g-men clash in a masterful debut.

Ryan Boudinot author of Blueprints of the Afterlife

Sam talks with the "wickedly talented" (Boston Globe) and "darkly funny" (New York Times Book Review) Ryan Boudinot, on his new book Blueprints of the Afterlife.

Jill McDevitt - Fighting The Crusade Against Sex

Take an attractive young blonde, a sex shop, a political candidate, and add a Catholic Church for good measure, and you have the recipe for a riveting controversy that riddled a wealthy Philadelphia suburb and divided a community. Follow the quandaries of Jill McDevitt, a determined recent college graduate with a degree in sexuality and a love of pushing the envelope.

Alexis Smith author of Glaciers

Isabel is a single, twentysomething thrift-store shopper and collector of remnants, things cast off or left behind by others. Glaciers follows Isabel through a day in her life in which work with damaged books in the basement of a library, unrequited love for the former soldier who fixes her computer, and dreams of the perfect vintage dress move over a backdrop of deteriorating urban architecture and the imminent loss of the glaciers she knew as a young girl in Alaska. Glaciers unfolds internally...

American Dervish by Ayad Akhtar

What a pleasure to encounter a first novel as self-assured and effortlessly told as Ayad Akhtar’s “American Dervish.” Mr. Akhtar, a first-generation Pakistani-American, has written an immensely entertaining coming-of-age story set during the early 1980s among the Pakistanis in the author’s hometown, Milwaukee.

Julia Scheeres, author of A Thousand Lives: The Untold Story of Hope, Deception, and Survival at Jonestown

Diana Abu Jaber, author of Birds Of Paradise

Anne Enright, author of The Forgotten Waltz