Harlan Coben is as successful a mystery writer as we have in the country today. He is probably known best for his page-turner plots. In his more than 35 books published to date he keeps you guessing throughout. I Will Find You is his latest - just out. And it’s a bit of a departure for Coben as he will tell you - a little more than half way through the book you find out who the bad guys are. That’s rare for a Coben thriller, but none the less gripping and it will still keep you guessing. Also, a...
Mar 23, 2023•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Quite a few of you have written us that you would be interested in hearing from a book editor, so we went out and find one of the best. Beverly Horowitz, Senior Vice President of Delacorte Press which is a division of Random House, joins us for a fascinating talk about what she does and how she does it. She has been editing for decades and recently has taken to adapting popular and important non fiction books for YA readers, a process that also fascinated us. After talking to Beverly, one of her...
Mar 16, 2023•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast It's Oscar Week! A week we’ll always love… even if we haven’t seen the all the movies. Our guest this week is Michael Schulman, author of Oscar Wars, a definitive bio of the awards ceremony and the organization that created it. From the catfights of Joan Fontaine and Olivia de Havilland to the slap heard round the world, this book has it all. Halle Berry, Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, John Wayne, Dennis Hopper, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Citizen Kanes, they are all here and you don’t want to...
Mar 09, 2023•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, The Book Case welcomes journalist Alex Prud’homme! His new book Dinner with the President explores the long history of food and American diplomacy. Did you know that the purchase of Pearl Harbor came about because of the first official state dinner ever? Did you know that many believe our involvement in WWII was predicated on a king and hot dog? These are all great stories and this book is packed with them. Find out why Julia Child played and still plays a central role in White House ...
Mar 02, 2023•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Five years ago Rebecca Makkai was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book award. Now, in what is a treat for readers, Rebecca Makkai has just released a brand new novel, “I Have Some Questions for You”. It is a marvelously plotted mystery/novel about a podcaster, Bodie Kane, who returns to her prep school to teach a mini-course. One of her students wants to reinvestigate, with a podcast, a murder that occurred when Bodie was a student and for which a school staffer may have been wr...
Feb 23, 2023•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast Amity Gaige is our featured author this week - her latest book is Sea Wife. But when we say latest - it’s been out for almost three years. With apologies, we just discovered it. Shame on us. It’s a book about a couple struggling with marital problems who decide (well the husband decides) to buy a sailboat and head for open waters. His wife isn’t crazy about the idea of sailing around the world so they settle on the Caribbean. That proves to be difficult enough. Amity makes marvelous use of fores...
Feb 16, 2023•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast Julie Otsuka doesn't just write, she crafts. Trained as a painter, Otsuka took up writing as her second career, and man oh man are we lucky she did. Her latest, The Swimmers, is just coming out in paperback and it is one of the most lyrical rich character portraits we have read. Julie joins us to talk about her unique style, and to tell us how she has kept each one of her novels to less than 200 pages. Trust us, each page is packed with beauty. Our bookstore this week is Book Ends in Winchester ...
Feb 09, 2023•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast Stuart Gibbs is a man who loves his audience and his audience loves him. He has written six series of books for kids and all them offer a glimpse into the glee that Stuart Gibbs takes in the stories he tells. Whether it’s blowing up whales, going to a secretly run CIA training school for kids or a knight who never meant to become one, Stuart Gibbs takes real pleasure in entertaining his readers. One of his newest passions is turning his best selling work into graphic novels. His first series bei...
Feb 02, 2023•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast Ayana Gray doesn't just write books, she creates worlds. At 29 years old, she is already one of the best selling YA authors on the market (yes, it's ok to be jealous). Her series, which became Beasts of Prey and the more recently released Beasts of Ruin, presents a lush Pan-African fantasy world that will suck you in and won't let go. As page turners with mature themes, these books are the perfect way for The Book Case to start talking about fantasy. Books Mentioned in the podcast: Beasts of Rui...
Jan 26, 2023•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast You may have noticed that most weeks in our ‘rapid fire’ questions to featured authors, we ask if they have a favorite author. Little secret: Sometimes we are looking for ideas. A few weeks ago, John Irving told us he would read anything John Boyne has written just because Boyne wrote it. So we got busy reading John Boyne. It turns out he has a new book released just this past November, All the Broken Places, that is a continuation of sorts of a book released many years ago that was made into a ...
Jan 19, 2023•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week it is David Sedaris part two - or David Sedaris redux. We loved our conversation with him and as we said last week, were we to limit the conversation to just one podcast, we’d have to cut out some of the good stuff. This week David talks about his empathy for those who come to hear him speak or who ask him to sign a book, his love for reading appearances, how he tries out new material on audiences, and how those audiences don’t seem to remember any of what he read. Listen to the end fo...
Jan 12, 2023•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast David Sedaris is our guest this week and next. Our conversation with him was so delightful and insightful that we could find no way to edit our conversation to just one podcast without leaving out too much of the “good stuff’. David is unique. He writes marvelous essays of observation about modern life drawing much of his material from audiences who come to listen to him read and with whom he spends considerable time interacting. He writes about serious family issues he’s encountered with great ...
Jan 05, 2023•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast It might seem a bit presumptuous to write a three volume autobiography about the first 29 years of your life, wouldn’t you think? But Esmerelda Santiago lived an almost unbelievable first thirty years and writes in such a personal fashion, that reading her story makes you feel as if you’re in the company of a good friend speaking just to you. The first volume, When I was Puerto Rican tells the story of growing up in abject poverty in Puerto Rico with no expectations of anything more. The second ...
Dec 22, 2022•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast After you’ve bought Sister Sally the alpaca sweater, brother Billy his baseball bat, Mom her mixer and Dad his golf ball retriever, what small presents should you add? A book, of course! Everyone appreciates the thought that goes into giving just the right book. So have no fear, Kate and Charlie are here with what will be our annual “just the right book for everyone’s End-of-year book list.” If you can't find it here, you can’t find it anywhere. Mitchell Kaplan of Florida’s "Books and Books" giv...
Dec 15, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast The book is Demon Copperhead , the author is Barbara Kingsolver. That should be enough said. If you read it and don’t come away thinking it is the best book you’ve read this year, it will be among the best. Her book is a prodigious feat on many levels. It is beautifully written. It gives you a sense of a part of America often ignored. It has wonderful characters. It is funny, and she writes it as a parallel to David Copperfield , Charles Dickens' most personal novel. She’s a great writer and a g...
Dec 08, 2022•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast Nelson DeMille - to meet him you’d think of him as the prototypical grandfatherly guy, mild-of-manner with a gentle soul. And you’d be right. It would be most unlikely that you’d also spot him as a guy who has written dozens of murder mysteries, spy novels and thrillers that have gained him a devoted audience. He has devised lots of ways to bump off his characters. You must watch out for those grandfatherly types. With 23 books in circulation and over 50 million sold, DeMille still debuts on the...
Dec 01, 2022•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Let’s do the math. A human’s average life span: 80 years. Years after Similac and Gerbers: say 75 years. At approximately 1000 meals per year, that’s a lifetime of 75,000 meals. What if you had a different recipe for every one of those 75,000 meals? Celia Sack does. She is one of the owners of Omnivore Books in San Francisco. They sell nothing but cookbooks and books about food and drink. You don’t go into her store asking, “What should I be reading?” but instead, “What should I be cooking or ba...
Nov 24, 2022•35 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week on the Book Case we have two more authors from the Brooklyn Book Festival. You can find Angeline Boulley's The Firekeeper's Daughter on the YA shelves of your local library or bookstore, but the book transcends the genre. She'll talk about how she approaches world-building and gives us a sneak preview of her highly-anticipated new novel coming out next spring. Kate also catches up with Book Case favorite Sidik Fofana and sits down with Jory Southurst, the manager of the bookstore at th...
Nov 17, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Cleyvis Natera took 15 years to write Neruda on the Park, and you can see why when you read the novel. There many pieces of the book that speak to Natera's life: navigating America with and on behalf of her parents, seeing gentrification slowly creep into the neighborhoods she has loved, the flawed and complex relationships between generations of women within one community. Kate had a chance to sit down with Cleyvis at the recent Brooklyn Book Festival and they talked about how Cleyvis' growth a...
Nov 10, 2022•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast When this podcast was in its infancy, John Irving joined us to talk about his work and what he described as “his last big novel,” that was, at the time, still being written. It is now “in better bookstores everywhere” as they say. And “big” is something of an understatement. “The Last Chairlift” is close to 900 pages! Is it worth that much an investment of time? If you’re a John Irving admirer—how can you say no? And we are among John’s many admirers. The novel has all of John’s familiar themes:...
Nov 03, 2022•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast A quick Google search will tell you there are over 15,000 books about Abraham Lincoln. Do we need another? Well yes, considering that none of them so far has been written by Jon Meacham who is one of America’s best biographers. “And There Was Light” has just been released. It is a most readable 420 page biography of our 16th President and it is timely. America is probably more divided now that at any time since Lincoln’s. Jon writes, “A President who led a divided country in which an implacable ...
Oct 27, 2022•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast Doug Bauer has written a love story, "The Beckoning World". A man and a woman. A father and son. A love for a more innocent time. A lovely homage to America’s midwest. And a love story about baseball. It’s a simple book really—until it’s not. Boy meets girl. Boy is a promising pitcher. Girl's father says, "You pick: my daughter or baseball." He picks the girl. But then the book veers back to baseball and the protagonist pitcher and his son are barnstorming across America with Babe Ruth and Lou G...
Oct 20, 2022•40 min•Transcript available on Metacast Once again it was a title that caught our eye, leading us to a the book that was even more intriguing than the title. The book is How Not to Drown in a Glass of Water. The author is Angie Cruz. The book is a fascinating character study of Cara Romero, a Dominican immigrant who came to this country more than 25 years ago. She needs a job. There are 12 chapters— each a transcription of one of Cara’s meetings with a professional job counselor. You come to know Cara - or do you really? As she talks ...
Oct 13, 2022•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast We have expressed a desire to keep The Book Case non-political. But there is one issue we feel should not be a source of contention - and that is book banning and book challenges. We have been looking for a relatively safe way to approach the issue and think we’ve found it in a book by Amy Sarig King entitled Attack of the Black Rectangles. The "black rectangles" to which she refers are those black stripes that represent redactions of language. Amy writes for young people— target audience probab...
Oct 06, 2022•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast So you’re in your mid-50s, you’ve got a great career going as a television personality in Great Britain, so what might be enjoyable to do next? Why write a hugely successful series of mysteries of course. And that is what Richard Osman has done. His novel The Thursday Murder Club is about four bold septuagenarian friends who meet to discuss about unsolved crimes in their retirement village. The Man Who Died Twice and The Bullet That Missed are two riveting extensions of The Thursday Murder Club....
Sep 29, 2022•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast Elizabeth Strout is our guest this week, and our conversation couldn’t be more timely. First, her novel, Oh William! has just been short listed for the Booker Prize - perhaps the most prestigious award for a writer of literary fiction. And second, her latest novel in the Lucy Barton series has just been published - Lucy by the Sea. For those who love her writing, and we are among her greatest admirers, you know that Lucy by the Sea represents a continuation of the series that includes Oh William...
Sep 22, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sue Miller is one of America’s finest and most admired authors. From the time of her first published novel in 1986, (The Good Mother), to her most recent, (Monogamy), Sue has developed a legion of devoted readers. Her plots often involve major events, but her greatest skill is the intimate understanding she has of her characters. She knows their head and their heart, or maybe it is that they know hers. How she writes, how she develops those characters, and what they mean to her are all subjects ...
Sep 15, 2022•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast It was just a year ago that the U.S. withdrew its troops from Afghanistan. On that date, Nahid Shahalimi, an Afghan female writer living in Germany, realized that she needed to hurry to record the stories of prominent Afghan women who soon would try to escape their country, or stay and risk death. She did so, and compiled their stories in “We Are Still Here.” The world’s attention has turned to the crisis in Ukraine, but Afghanistan is still there and should not be forgotten, particularly the st...
Sep 08, 2022•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Stuart Gibbs is this week’s guest and begins what we intend to be a periodic look at children's’ literature, or in the parlance of the day, “kids’ books”. Stuart has five different series of kids’s books in print - all successful, each aimed at the middle grades. His latest Spy School book is just out. Kate and I (grown-up who like to believe) loved it, as did our 12-year-old grandson and nephew, Lang (but then Stuart is his favorite author). To be a successful author of kids’ books we believe y...
Sep 01, 2022•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our author this week is David Koepp. You may not realize it, but you’ve been exposed to David’s writing. Probably many times. Did you see the first two Jurassic Park movies? Spider-Man? Indiana Jones? Mission Impossible? David has worked on the screenplays of some of the most successful movies ever. Indeed, movies he has written have sold almost $2.5 billion in tickets. He also writes novels. “Aurora” is his latest. It’s an enjoyable, and even thought-provoking read. Why write novels when you’re...
Aug 25, 2022•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
