Andrew Sean Greer’s novels include T he Story of a Marriage , The Confessions of Max Tivoli, and a satire of the literary world, Less - which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2018. Now, he’s out with the followup, Less is Lost , which catches up with the lovable Arthur Less as he and his pug travel across the country in a rusty camper van on a literary tour. Greer is the winner of the California Book Award, the New York Public Library Young Lions Award, and his work has appeared in E...
Oct 02, 2022•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast Andy Borowitz is an award-winning comedian and New York Times bestselling author. He grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and graduated from Harvard College, where he became President of the Harvard Lampoon . In 1998, he began contributing humor to The New Yorker ‘s “Shouts and Murmurs” and “Talk of the Town” departments, and in 2001, he created “The Borowitz Report,” a satirical news column, which has millions of readers around the world. In 2012, The New Yorker began publishing “The Borowitz Report.” A...
Sep 25, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast Angela Garbes ’s first book, Like a Mother, looked at the science, myths, and inequities surrounding pregnancy and motherhood. Her latest book, Essential Labor: Mothering as Social Change , continues to examine obstacles and injustices faced by parents and other caregivers. In this book, Garbes also looks at her own family’s history as members of the Filipino American community, many of whom are tasked with the least desirable caregiving duties. On September 9, 2022, Garbes spoke with Shereen Ma...
Sep 18, 2022•1 hr 13 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dave Eggers is the author of many books, including Zeitoun , What Is the What , and You Shall Know Our Velocity. In 2000, Eggers made his enormously popular literary debut with his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. His latest book, The Every , is a follow-up to his 2013 dystopian novel, The Circle. It follows protagonist Delaney Wells as she tries to take down a dangerous monopoly from the inside. Eggers is founder and editor of McSweeney’s and co-founder of 826 Valencia, a nonpr...
Sep 11, 2022•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mary Roach is the author of the books Stiff , Spook , Bonk , Gulp , Grunt , and Packing for Mars , all of which bring her distinctly funny voice to popular science subjects. Her new book Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, combines little-known forensic science and conservation genetics with a motley cast of laser scarecrows, trespassing squirrels, and more of “nature’s lawbreakers,” offering hope for compassionate coexistence in our ever-expanding human habitat. Roach has written for National Geo...
Sep 04, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, a story of transformation with Los Angeles chef and restaurateur Keith Corbin. Corbin grew up in Watts, his early years entangled in drugs and gangs. After serving time in one of California’s most notorious maximum security prisons, Corbin experienced the employment challenges all too common for the formerly incarcerated. A model employee at one of his jobs, Corbin was promoted to a manager, only to be fired simply for having a criminal record. Then he encountered a restaurant startup...
Aug 28, 2022•1 hr 6 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, we’re going into the City Arts and Lectures archives for highlights from the many times Salman Rushdie has come to San Francisco. Rushdie is the author of fifteen novels, including Victory City, which is expected to be published in early 2023, as well as non-fiction works and short stories. Of course, he’s much in our thoughts these days after being attacked on August 12th, 2022, minutes before he was to appear onstage in New York. In the first half of this program, we’ll hear part of...
Aug 21, 2022•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast Mohsin Hamid is the author of five novels, including The Reluctant Fundamentalist, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia , and Exit West. All display Hamid’s lyrical prose, his acute understanding of some of the most dire conflicts faced by our modern world, and his belief in the immense and near-magical power of fiction. In his newest novel The Last White Man , Hamid writes about racial metamorphosis. On August 2, 2022, Mohsin Hamid came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco for an o...
Aug 14, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast For more than thirty years, Michael Pollan has been writing books and articles about the places where the human and natural worlds intersect: on our plates, in our farms and gardens, and in our minds. His many acclaimed titles include How to Change Your Mind , The Omnivore’s Dilemma , and The Botany of Desire . In his recent essay collection, This is Your Mind on Plants , Pollan takes a deep dive into three psychoactive plants: opium, caffeine, and mescaline. Pollan co-founded the UC Berkeley Ce...
Aug 07, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, we look at the connection between the state of our bodies and the state of the planet, with physician Rupa Marya and journalist Raj Patel , Their new book Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice , draws on Dr. Marya’s work as a physician, as well as scientific research and scholarship on the social and environmental causes of poor health. On July 21, 2022, the two spoke to author Anna Lappé about how we ought to be re-thinking medicine, and the links between illnesses tha...
Jul 31, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast An encore of a two-part miniseries from 2020, in which past City Arts & Lectures guests talk across, among, and around one another. In the second half of Crosstalk, our guests discuss genre. What is a novel? What is autofiction? What is poetry, a fable, creative nonfiction, a short story? Does perfect writing exist? Then, some of our writers speak to cancel culture – the contentious concept of striking from the cultural ledger figures who have villainous personal histories, whose actions are...
Jul 24, 2022•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast An encore presentation from 2020: Crosstalk is a two-part series of compiled conversations between City Arts & Lectures guests from recent years discussing literary identity and the sometimes pleasurable, sometimes painful, act of writing. Guests include Ocean Vuong, Zadie Smith, Marlon James, Ottessa Moshfegh, Tommy Orange, Eileen Myles, Rebecca Solnit, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Crosstalk is produced by Juliet Gelfman-Randazzo.
Jul 17, 2022•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast A conversation on the science of sleep and how we can improve it for better health with Dr. Matt Walker. Walker is a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley and the director of the Center for Human Sleep Science whose research examines the impact of sleep on human health and disease. He is the author of Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreaming and over 100 scientific research studies on everything from sleep’s effects on memory, diet and motor skills to the consequ...
Jul 10, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast In The Ministry for the Future , science fiction novelist Kim Stanley Robinson imagines a near-future where climate change has wreaked havoc, from severe heat waves, to flooding, limited resources, and a global refugee crisis. It’s a terrifying set of circumstances. But it’s not without hope - and Robinson brings to life a possible path for survival. Robinson has also published a memoir, The High Sierra: A Love Story. On June 7, 2022, Kim Stanley Robinson talked with his friend, author and envir...
Jul 03, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, a conversation with one of today’s most beloved and historically imaginative authors: Amor Towles. Towles earned wide critical acclaim and a loyal international audience with his 2016 novel, A Gentleman in Moscow. His new book, The Lincoln Highway, follows four boys on an exhilarating ten-day trip across America, from the farmlands of Nebraska to the bustling streets of New York City. On June 7, 2022, Amor Towles came to the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco to talk with Steve...
Jun 26, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast Our guest is writer, scholar, and activist Angela Davis. For more than 5 decades, Davis has been fighting for Black liberation, equal rights for women, queer and transgender people. Davis first received national attention in 1969, after being removed from her teaching position at UCLA for her social activism and membership to the Communist Party. In 1970, she was placed on the FBI’s “Ten Most Wanted List” on false charges, which culminated in one of the most famous trials in recent U.S. history....
Jun 19, 2022•1 hr 9 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, we’ll listen to a conversation with David Mitchell and Pico Iyer, recorded on May 8, 2021. David Mitchell’s many novels include Cloud Atlas, The Bone Clocks , and Ghostwritten . . His most recent novel, Utopia Avenue, follows the strangest British band you’ve never heard of. Mitchell’s stories often weave together the supernatural and the philosophical. He’s also one of the most structurally inventive writers of our time, featuring nonlinear storylines and multiple genres within a sin...
Jun 12, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, journalist Michael Lewis is in conversation with his fellow writer and friend Dave Eggers. Michael Lewis is the author of books including Moneyball and The Big Short, and most recently The Premonition: A Pandemic Story . It’s a nonfiction thriller filled with the unforgettable characters that Lewis is known for . His knack for storytelling is also what makes his podcast Against the Rules so captivating. It’s about the state of “fairness” in American life – and each episode tackles the...
Jun 05, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, our guest is Neil Gaiman. He’s been called one of the modern masters of fantasy writing, but his work includes other genres too, from novels like American Gods and Neverwhere , to song lyrics, and poetry. His groundbreaking series The Sandman was the first comic ever to receive a literary award. It’s now being adapted into a show on Netflix. Coraline , his dark fantasy for children, was made into a movie too. On May 3, 2022, Neil Gaiman appeared at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San ...
May 29, 2022•1 hr 8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Neil Gaiman has been called one of the modern masters of fantasy writing, but his work includes other genres too, from novels like American Gods and Neverwhere , to song lyrics, and poetry. His groundbreaking series The Sandman was the first comic ever to receive a literary award. It’s now being adapted into a show on Netflix. Coraline , his dark fantasy for children, was made into a movie too. In this bonus podcast taken from his appearance at the Sydney Goldstein Theater in San Francisco on Ma...
May 29, 2022•59 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, our guest is Richard Powers. He’s the author of thirteen novels on everything from neuroscience, to artificial intelligence to the environment. His book, “The Overstory” earned him a Pulitzer prize in fiction. The Financial Times called it “A Great American Eco-Novel.” His latest book is called “Bewilderment”, and it also deals with environmental catastrophe. It’s the story of a widowed father and his son, and their journey into the wilderness. On April twenty-fifth, 2022, Richard Pow...
May 22, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, a conversation between two accomplished multi-disciplinary minds - writer Jennifer Egan and computer scientist and artist Jaron Lanier. Egan won a Pulitzer Prize for her novel A Visit from The Goon Squad . Now, a decade later, she’s written a sort of sibling to that book. It’s called The Candy House and it imagines a technology that allows people to access every memory they’ve ever had, and give away those recollections in exchange for access to the memories of other people. Technolog...
May 15, 2022•1 hr 14 min•Transcript available on Metacast Musician, actor, and fashion icon Janelle Monáe has long been creating sci-fi worlds through her albums and performances. With her new short story collection The Memory Librarian, Monáe, along with a team of collaborators, expands on the Afrofuturistic world of one of her critically acclaimed albums, Dirty Computer. Dirty Computer introduced us to a world where people’s memories—a key to self-expression and self-understanding—could be controlled or erased by an increasingly powerful few. And whe...
May 08, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, our guest is Krista Tippett, host of the On Being podcast. Tippett started the program in 2003. It features conversations about faith, ethics and moral wisdom. Tippett often begins her interviews by asking guests what their relationship to faith was like growing up. It’s a prompt that grounds them in memory before Tippett takes the conversation into an expansive examination of their views on everything from their work, to how they see the world and what wisdom they can impart. On Apri...
May 01, 2022•1 hr 16 min•Transcript available on Metacast Lauren Groff is a two-time National Book Award finalist and the author of four novels and two collections of short stories. The relatively young author gathered major attention for her novel Fates and Furies – from literary awards to a nod from President Barack Obama. Her newest novel, Matrix, imagines the life of Marie du France, a medieval writer who became France’s first woman poet. Her work regularly appears in The New Yorker , The Atlantic , and elsewhere, and she was named one of Granta ’s...
Apr 24, 2022•1 hr 10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Rachel Cusk is a writer of considerable range and depth, and her most recent works, dubbed the Outline Trilogy, embody a new and distinctive style. The novels take the form of a succession of monologues delivered not by the protagonist, but by the people she encounters. Little is revealed about a central character who serves principally as a conduit for others. The themes and questions that arise from those stories are weighty – as is Cusk’s choice to subvert traditional positions and form. On A...
Apr 17, 2022•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast This week, our guest is author and academic Azar Nafisi. Her books include Reading Lolita in Tehran and Things I’ve Been Silent About. Nafisi was born in Iran, and first came to the United States to study in the 1970s. After earning her Ph.D., she returned to her home country to teach at the University of Tehran, where in 1981, she was expelled for refusing to wear the mandatory Islamic veil. Nafisi went back to teaching six years later, with a series of lectures that examined the role of Wester...
Apr 10, 2022•1 hr 4 min•Transcript available on Metacast This week, we’re listening back to a conversation on creativity from 2018 with two artists whose work span multiple genres. Boots Riley is the leader of the radical funk/hip-hop band “The Coup,” and the director of the 2018 film “Sorry to Bother You.” Ahmir Khalib Thompson, better known as Questlove, is the drummer and joint frontman for The Roots, author of several books, and as of March 27, 2022 - an Academy Award-winning director. His debut film documentary Summer of Soul is about the 1969 Ha...
Apr 03, 2022•1 hr 15 min•Transcript available on Metacast San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin was elected to office in 2020 after a campaign focused on improving public safety and reforming the criminal justice system. Kimberly M. Foxx is the first African American woman to lead the Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office –the second largest prosecutor’s office in the country– with a vision for transforming the office into a fairer, more forward-thinking agency focused on rebuilding the public trust, promoting transparency, and being proactive i...
Apr 03, 2022•1 hr 5 min•Transcript available on Metacast We’re celebrating the life of the late Madeleine Albright this week with an encore of her 2008 City Arts & Lectures appearance.. Madeleine Albright was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia in 1937. She and her family were refugees who fled Nazi invaders, eventually emigrating to the US in 1948. Albright went on to earn 8 academic degrees, including both a master’s and doctorate from Columbia University. Her tenacity and flair for foreign policy led Bill Clinton to appoint her as the first female S...
Mar 27, 2022•1 hr 12 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
