Book Dreams: Recent Episodes
Eve Yohalem and Julie Sternberg / The Podglomerate
Book Dreams is a podcast for everyone who loves books and misses English class. In each episode co-hosts Julie Sternberg and Eve Yohalem explore a book-related topic they can’t stop thinking about, everything from the genius of your favorite picture books to books bound in human skin. Julie and Eve are both award-winning authors, which allows them to come at interviews with an insider’s knowledge as well as all the wonder associated with storytelling.
Book Dreams is brought to you by The Podglomerate and is a member of Lit Hub Radio. New episodes run every Thursday.
Find Book Dreams on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.
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Eve read so much during the weeks since our last episode, she gave herself a repetitive reading injury. But it was worth it! In this episode she shares thoughts about books with mesmerizing voice, memorable characters, sweeping scope, and poetic brilliance. Meanwhile, Julie--who has managed thus far to avoid reading-related injury--talks about a critically acclaimed novel set in Berlin around the time of the fall of the wall, and a buzzy satire of the publishing industry.
Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.
We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more.
Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy.
Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What have Julie and Eve been reading lately? Find out in this new bonus episode, in which Eve talks about the legacy of her dad, a constant reader, the brilliance of Helen Dewitt (again), the searing poetry of Louise Glück, and a light and highly readable beach read. Meanwhile, Julie’s been pursuing a reading vision, discovering the propulsive, mind-expanding books—and book recommendations—of S. A. Cosby.
Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.
We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more.
Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy.
Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What is it like to create a modern, feminist retelling of an ancient, foundational text? Vaishnavi Patel–author of the instant New York Times bestselling novel Kaikeyi, a reimagining of the Hindu epic the Ramayana–paints a vivid picture in this episode of Book Dreams. Vaishnavi’s novel “tells the story of the evil stepmother character [Kaikeyi], who sets off the whole epic by exiling Rama, and then just sort of disappears. [The novel] asks, What if she had reasons for doing what she did? What if the story was a little bit different and we can understand her actions rather than them just being spur-of-the-moment jealousy, which is what we get in the Ramayana?” In this conversation with Eve and Julie, Vaishnavi relates why she became fascinated by Kaikeyi’s story; how her research led her to surprising evidence of feminism in the Ramayana source material; how she’s handled backlash from people who “believe in some sort of Hindu supremacy” and who deem her novel a threat; and why the novel in fact strengthened her relationship with Hinduism, as well as the connection of some of her readers to their Hindu faith.
Vaishnavi Patel is an attorney focusing on constitutional law and civil rights and the author of the New York Times bestselling novel Kaikeyi. She writes at the intersection of Indian myth, feminism, and anti-colonialism.
One more thing: Book Dreams Inc.—a nonprofit that Julie and Eve founded that provides books to kids who lack them—is co-hosting a holiday event for students at the Monarch School, which serves homeless children in San Diego. They’re covering the cost of filling a bookmobile with books for all 300 students. The bookmobile will arrive at the school, and each child will be able to choose a book for themselves, just in time for the holidays. If you’d like to help, go here and click on the yellow donate button. No amount is too small, and any extra funds will add books to the school library. All donations are tax-deductible. And as a thank you, the Book Dreams podcast will send you a list of book recommendations from more than 50 Book Dreams guests, some of whom are probably among your favorite authors.
Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.
We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more.
Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy.
Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What are the raw materials of our lives? Who are the authors, the singers and songwriters, the actors and artists whose work resonates with each of us and makes us who we are? It’s a question that is brilliantly and masterfully explored by arts critic Margo Jefferson in her new memoir, Constructing a Nervous System, in which she weaves her personal history with those of the artists who are part of her “nervous system,” setting it all within a wider cultural context. In this spirited and wide-ranging conversation, Julie and Eve talk with Margo about deriving power from our heroes and our anti-heros, how accepting complexity can be a better course than cancellation when we encounter racism and other biases in cherished artists and their works, how critics can betray their readers, and so much more.
Margo Jefferson won a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and previously served as Books and Arts Critic for Newsweek and The New York Times. Constructing a Nervous System was long listed for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. It was named a Best Book of the Year for The New Yorker and Publishers Weekly, and a Most Anticipated Book for The New York Times, Time, Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Observer, Vanity Fair, Bustle, Buzzfeed, and more. Margo's earlier memoir, Negroland, received the National Book Critic Circle Award for Autobiography. She's also the author of On Michael Jackson and is a professor of writing at Columbia University School of the Arts.
One more thing: Book Dreams Inc.—a nonprofit that Julie and Eve founded that provides books to kids who lack them—is co-hosting a holiday event for students at the Monarch School, which serves homeless children in San Diego. They’re covering the cost of filling a bookmobile with books for all 300 students. The bookmobile will arrive at the school, and each child will be able to choose a book for themselves, just in time for the holidays. If you’d like to help, go here and click on the yellow donate button. No amount is too small, and any extra funds will add books to the school library. All donations are tax-deductible. And as a thank you, the Book Dreams podcast will send you a list of book recommendations from more than 50 Book Dreams guests, some of whom are probably among your favorite authors.
Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.
We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more.
Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy.
Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How can reading a novel become an act of political rebellion? This is one of the important questions we take up with Azar Nafisi, author of the memoir Reading Lolita in Tehran. Azar’s latest book is Read Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times. In it, she focuses on the parallels and connections between the totalitarian mindset in Iran and totalitarian tendencies in the United States. Azar notes that tyrants and writers in both countries seek to recreate reality, tyrants by telling us that the truth is what they say it is, and writers by excavating the actual truth.
“In Iran, like all totalitarian states,” Azar says, “the regime pays too much attention to poets and writers, harassing, jailing, and even killing them. The problem in America is that too little attention is paid to them.” The solution? “Reading literature and philosophy will teach you to have an independent mindset,” Azar explains. “It teaches you to be generous towards others, to not live on hate. … One of the things that is fascinating to me about fiction is that by structure, it is democratic. … A novel is comprised of different characters from different backgrounds–gender, race, ethnicity, religion. … The plot moves forward through creating tensions within and between these characters. Even the villain, even the bad guy has a voice of his own. So fiction becomes dangerous. These two aspects of it are anti-totalitarian: its democratic structure and its search for truth.”
Azar Nafisi is the author of the multi-award-winning New York Times bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, as well as Things I've Been Silent About and The Republic of Imagination. Formerly a fellow at Johns Hopkins University's Foreign Policy Institute, she's taught at Oxford and several universities in Tehran, and she's currently Centennial Fellow at Georgetown University's Walsh School of Foreign Service. Azar's writing has appeared in publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and The Wall Street Journal.
Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.
We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more.
Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy.
Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
If we want to understand America today, we must first understand the South. This is both a central premise of Imani Perry’s latest book, South to America: A Journey Below the Mason-Dixon to Understand the Soul of a Nation, which is a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award for Nonfiction, and a proposition she explores in depth in this episode of Book Dreams. During her conversation with Eve and Julie, Imani illuminates the connections between Southern history and pivotal aspects of contemporary American society–everything from the overturning of Roe v. Wade, to episodes of mass violence, to the treatment of immigrants at the border. She also makes the case that the South could have a better claim to the name “Heartland of America” than the Midwest, because “the way Americans relate to the use of land and labor is so shaped by the South.”
Imani vividly conveys, too, a duality that has pervaded the South over the course of its history, particularly for those oppressed there: on the one hand, grief, pain, and atrocity; on the other, joy, vibrancy, and beauty. “I spent a lot of time,” she says, “thinking about how much the violence of the country was associated with sources of pleasure: … slavery, and rum and tobacco and sugar. … Then there's also the fact of people who have lived incredibly hardscrabble lives, through dispossession and also, you know, the South has been home to the deepest poverty and many forms of exploitation. And from that people have tapped into their humanity to create incredible beauty and meaning.” A professor who has taught both history and law, Imani also explains why the Supreme Court's recent tethering of the constitution to the “intent of the founding fathers” is both bad history and bad law.
Imani Perry is the Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University and a faculty associate with the Programs in Law and Public Affairs, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Jazz Studies. Her prior books include Looking for Lorraine: The Radiant and Radical Life of Lorraine Hansberry, which won the 2019 Bograd Weld Award for Biography from the PEN America Foundation and the Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQ Non-Fiction and was a New York Times notable book, among other accolades. She’s also the author of Breathe: A Letter to My Sons, a Kirkus best nonfiction book of 2019 and a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Nonfiction; Vexy Thing: On Gender and Liberation; and May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, also a finalist for the NAACP Image Award in Nonfiction.
Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.
We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more.
Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy.
Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“I think the narratives about capital are an even more fundamental myth in America than those about the frontier.”
Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Hernan Diaz takes on nothing less than American capitalism in his latest novel, Trust. In this episode of Book Dreams, he speaks with Eve and Julie about why he chose Trust’s innovative and surprising structure, and how that structure first reinforces and then deconstructs misconceptions about money. In a surprise move, he deliberately designed one segment of the book to be “a little off-putting … even a little boring, because that is the way we are spoken to when it comes to money and power machinations. … The message is, don't bother yourself with this.” Hernan also discusses his views on everything from the ways in which fiction shapes reality, to the societal implications of the “How was your experience?” buttons that are now appearing in airport bathrooms across the nation.
Hernan Diaz is a Pulitzer Prize and PEN Faulkner Award finalist, and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. His first novel, In the Distance, was the winner of the Saroyan International Prize and was named one of Publisher’s Weekly’s top 10 books of the year and one of Lit Hub’s 20 best novels of the decade, among many other accolades. He has published stories and essays in The Paris Review, Granta, and McSweeney’s. Trust is his second novel. It was long-listed for the Booker Prize and is a finalist for the Kirkus Prize.
Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.
We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more.
Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy.
Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“A monk asked, ‘What is meditation?’ The Master said, ‘It is not meditation.’ The monk said, ‘Why is it “not meditation”?’ The Master said, ‘It’s alive, it’s alive!’” –Chao-Chou, 8th century Buddhist master
How can traditional psychotherapy, with its emphasis on the self, work with Zen practices like meditation, with their de-emphasizing of the ego, to make us feel better? In this episode of Book Dreams, Dr. Mark Epstein–psychiatrist, Zen practitioner, and author of The Zen of Buddhism: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life–joins Julie and Eve to talk about ways in which Buddhist thought and Western psychotherapy can work in tandem. Their conversation ranges from the Dalai Lama’s surprising insistence on the significance of self; to the benefits and limitations of a Zen approach in times of political turmoil; to the tension between a desire to make our mark, on the one hand, and our inconsequentiality in the scope of the universe, on the other. Dr. Epstein also explains to Julie why “the self is just a construct” is maybe not the most helpful advice for teenage children during stressful moments.
Dr. Mark Epstein is a psychiatrist in private practice in New York City and a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at New York University. He is also the author of a number of books about the interface of Buddhism and psychotherapy, including Advice Not Given, The Trauma of Everyday Life, Thoughts Without a Thinker, Going to Pieces Without Falling Apart, and The Zen of Therapy: Uncovering a Hidden Kindness in Life.
Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.
We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more.
Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy.
Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
An exciting announcement from Eve and Julie about the past, present, and future of humanity! (And also a small schedule change.)
Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.
We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more.
Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy.
Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“I get so upset during conversations about politics with certain family members, I feel like my body’s on the verge of explosion, with body parts flying off and blood splattering all over walls.”
Do you ever feel like Julie does when you’re trying to have a meaningful discussion with someone with whom you vehemently disagree? Then you’re going to love this episode with journalist Mónica Guzmán, author of the book I Never Thought Of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times. As the loving liberal daughter of Mexican immigrants who voted twice for Donald Trump, Mónica knows from personal experience how hard these conversations can be. Now she joins Julie and Eve to explain why we’re so polarized, how–whether you’re red or blue–your perceptions of the other side of the political divide are grossly overblown, and how you can talk to people whose worldviews are different from yours in a way that feels productive (or at least in a way that keeps the walls clean and everybody’s limbs intact). “We've got facts,” Mónica says, “too many facts. What we need is trust.”
Mónica Guzmán is the Director of Digital and Storytelling at Braver Angels, a nonprofit working to depolarize America, and host of the Crosscut interview series, Northwest Newsmakers. She was a 2019 Fellow at the Henry M. Jackson Foundation, where she studied social and political division, and a 2016 Fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University, where she studied how journalists can better meet the needs of a participatory public. Before committing to the project of helping people understand each other across the political divide, Mónica co-founded the award-winning Seattle newsletter, The Evergrey. She was named one of the 50 Most Influential Women in Seattle and served twice as a juror for the Pulitzer Prizes. She is the author of the recent book, I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times.
Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.
We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more.
Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy.
Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We Own This City–written by Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Justin Fenton and the basis for David Simon’s HBO miniseries–tells the shocking, true story of a massive police corruption scandal. Baltimore had been struggling with high rates of violent crime for decades when, in 2007, the police department established the Gun Trace Task Force, a unit of plain-clothed police officers whose mandate was to go after gun traffickers by conducting sophisticated investigations. Instead, the officers mainly patrolled the streets and stopped people, often without sufficient cause. They abused their power to steal money, to steal drugs that they sometimes resold, to plant evidence, and to lie about their activities, which were in many instances unconstitutional. The story broke in 2017, two years after the murder of Freddie Gray, another tragedy that rocked the city.
In this episode, Julie and Eve talk to Justin about what the Gun Trace Task Force corruption scandal reveals about the war on drugs, police corruption, the relationship between politics and policing, the struggles between law enforcement and the communities they serve, and the suffering of those communities.
Justin Fenton is an investigative reporter for the Baltimore Banner, a new nonprofit dedicated to supporting local journalism. He previously spent 17 years at the Baltimore Sun, covering the criminal justice system. He was part of the Pulitzer Prize finalist team for the coverage of the death of Freddie Gray and was a two-time finalist for the National Livingston Award for Young Journalists. He is the author of We Own This City: A True Story of Crime, Cops, and Corruption, as well as a consultant on the HBO TV series adaptation of the same name.
Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.
We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more.
Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy.
Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“It’s a testament to [Jo Ann] Beard, a towering talent, that she ... deliver[s] a book as forceful as it is fine, leaving us both awed and unsettled.” -- New York Times review of Festival Days
(RE-RELEASE) In this week’s episode, Eve and Julie talk to Jo Ann Beard about Festival Days, her extraordinary new collection of essays, some of which took decades to write. Jo Ann describes her deeply reflective, painstaking process and shares why so many of the pieces in Festival Days involve life and death moments and the kinds of reminiscences that emerge from thoughts about death. She discusses, too, her most famous essay, “The Fourth State of Matter” and wonders aloud about herself, “Why are you talking about this essay that you never talk about?” Published in The New Yorker in 1996, “The Fourth State of Matter” depicts a mass shooting at the University of Iowa lab where Jo Ann worked. “How do you take something like that, which is essentially meaningless, and infuse it with meaning?” Jo Ann asks during this Book Dreams episode. And she offers an answer to that heartbreaking question. (This episode was originally released on 8/12/21.)
Jo Ann has received a Whiting Foundation Award and nonfiction fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She’s the author of the groundbreaking collection of autobiographical essays The Boys of My Youth and the novel In Zanesville. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and the O. Henry Prize anthologies. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.
Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.
We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more.
Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy.
Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Today, we’d like to introduce you to the new podcast from The Podglomerate, Missing Pages. Missing Pages is an all-new investigative podcast hosted by world-renowned literary critic and publishing insider Bethanne Patrick.
In its first season, Missing Pages uncovers the power struggles, mistaken identities, and unfathomably bad behavior within the secretive world of book publishing. Learn about the untold story behind alleged Harvard plagiarist Kaavya Viswanathan and the web of lies told by the author of The Woman in the Window.
Each episode brings in authors, experts, publishing insiders, and a circus of NYC media elites to tell the real story; unfit for print. Missing Pages is available now. Listen here or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.
We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more.
Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy.
Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome back to another installment of our favorite bibliophilic game, You Want Me to Read WHAT? The rules are simple: Julie, Eve, and a guest assign each other off-the-beaten path books and then gather to talk about them! This time around, Julie picked the Japanese thriller Seventeen by author Hideo Yokoyama for guest Marc Acito; Marc picked Colette’s feminist novella Gigi (which Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe turned into an anti-feminist musical–remember the 1958 movie that starred Leslie Caron, Louis Jordan, and Maurice Chevalier?) for Eve; and for Julie, Eve picked E. B. White’s classic ode to New York City, Here is New York, which opens, unforgettably: “On any person who desires such queer prizes, New York will bestow the gift of loneliness and the gift of privacy.” … So stay tuned to find out whether these books are keepers or never-repeaters!
Marc Acito writes and directs musicals, including the upcoming film Mad Woman, starring and featuring the music of Storm Large. He also writes about musicals, including his thinly-veiled, autobiographical novel, How I Paid for College. And Marc is also a treasured former guest of Book Dreams from Episode 23, “Test-driving the A.I. That Claims to Predict & Help Create Bestsellers.”
Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.
We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more.
Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy.
Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Constance Baker Motley was a groundbreaking civil rights lawyer and the first Black woman to become a federal judge. Her “world-changing accomplishments, which made her a ‘queen’ in her time, should place her in the pantheon of great American leaders,” alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thurgood Marshall. And yet,“far too few Americans today know Motley’s name and deeds. Students do not routinely study her work and example—[she was] King’s lawyer, Marshall’s co-counsel, and a tactician praised by both as phenomenally talented. Despite her tremendous role in the effort to slay Jim Crow, most books and articles on the civil rights movement understate her importance.”
Addressing this deficit, Tomiko Brown-Nagin has written a definitive biography, Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality. In this episode of Book Dreams, we speak with Dean Brown-Nagin about Motley’s trailblazing accomplishments as both attorney and judge; the discrimination Motley faced as a result of her race and sex; the societal forces in play as she and her colleagues sought to transform civil rights law; the highs and lows of her formative and longlasting professional relationship with Thurgood Marshall; and her likely reaction to the inequities Black Americans confront still today.
Dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin is Dean of Harvard's Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Daniel P.S. Paul Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard Law School, and Professor of History at Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Science. In 2019, she was appointed Chair of the Presidential Committee on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery. She is the author of Civil Rights Queen: Constance Baker Motley and the Struggle for Equality. Her previous book, Courage to Dissent, won the Bancroft prize in 2011. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
One pivotal afternoon, Erika Krouse met an attorney in a bookstore when they both reached for the same Paul Auster novel. Much to his surprise, he soon found himself confiding in her. She told him not to worry–strangers divulged secrets to her all the time–whereupon he offered her a job as a private investigator. And so, with no prior experience, Erika wound up investigating sexual assaults by members of a Division I college football team for what because the first Title IX sexual assault case in the country. She did so notwithstanding her own history as a victim of sexual assault by a family member–a history her mother refuses to acknowledge.
Now, Erika has written a memoir, Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation, about the case and her related life experience. In this episode of Book Dreams, Erika speaks with Julie and Eve about the techniques she used to get people to talk when they were often deeply reluctant to do so; what it was like to meet with football players who had been told, in essence, that she was the enemy; and why she sometimes thinks the subtitle of the memoir should be How I Became an Asshole. Erika relays, too, the many complicated ways that her family trauma intertwined with her pursuit of justice in the Title IX case.
Erika Krouse’s short story collection, Come Up and See Me Sometime, won the Patterson Fiction Award, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and is translated into six languages. Her short fiction has been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and many other publications. Her stories have been shortlisted for Best American Short Stories, Best American NonRequired Reading, and the Pushcart Prize. She's also the author of the novel Contenders. Tell Me Everything is her first nonfiction book. It was a Book of the Month Club Pick, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and a People Magazine People Pick.
Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.
We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more.
Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy.
Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tensions are running high at Book Dreams! Why? The fantasy novels of author Susanna Clarke, that's why. After Julie--and multiple Book Dreams guests--strongly recommended Clarke's novel Piranesi, Eve gave it a try, only to quickly toss it on her DNR pile. Outraged, Julie insisted that Eve not only finish Piranesi, but also dig into Clarke's 800-page doorstopper Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Can Eve see the error of her ways? (Can you tell who is writing this description?) Is she still speaking to Julie? Should you read the work of this divisive maestro? Take a listen to this week's episode to find out.
Susanna Clarke's debut novel, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, was first published in more than 34 countries and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Guardian First Book Award. It won British Book Awards Newcomer of the Year, the Hugo Award, and the World Fantasy Award in 2005. The Ladies of Grace Adieu, her collection of short stories, some set in the world of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, was published by Bloomsbury in 2006. Piranesi was a New York Times and Sunday Times bestseller, and shortlisted for the Costa Novel of the Year Award, the RSL Encore Award, and the Women's Prize for Fiction.
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Fiction can invite the reader into unknown worlds and perspectives, or it can hold up a mirror so that we can see the familiar more clearly. In this episode of Book Dreams, Eve and Julie talk to first-time novelist Vauhini Vara about her new book, The Immortal King Rao. Together they explore how fiction helps us understand the path we’re on now, whether we can or should transcend global capitalism, how technology has played a role in the fracturing of family relationships and can also help give voice to what was once inexpressible–and the reason we exist at all.
Vauhini Vara has worked as a Wall Street Journal technology reporter and as the business editor for The New Yorker. From a Dalit background, she is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an O. Henry Prize winner. The Immortal King Rao was her first novel. It was a New York Times Editor's Choice and was named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and Esquire.
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What makes us human? It’s a question we keep coming back to, in part because it's got no definitive answer. In this week’s episode we explore the ultimate existential query by looking at two of our most recent human ancestors–Homo floresiensis and Neanderthals–with two experts, anthropologist Gregory Forth and archeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes.
Discovered by archeologists in 2003 on the Indonesian island Flores, Homo floresiensis were nicknamed “Hobbits” for their small stature and large feet. They hunted and may have used fire and made stone tools. Despite their small brains, some scientists believe they may have had mental abilities similar to ours. As for Neanderthals, the last thirty years of research have led to a portrait of a species that is very far from bumbling cavemen wielding heavy clubs. In fact, Neanderthals were sophisticated thinkers, creators, explorers, and innovators, much like Homo sapiens. Eve and Julie talk with Gregory and then Rebecca about what our ancient relatives teach us about ourselves–and whether it’s possible that one of these hominins is still alive today.
Gregory Forth received his doctorate at the University of Oxford and was a professor of anthropology at the University of Alberta for more than three decades. He's a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and is the author of more than a hundred scholarly papers and several academic books. Between Ape and Human: An Anthropologist on the Trail of a Hidden Hominoid is his first book for a general audience.
Rebecca Wragg Sykes is an archeologist, author, and honorary Fellow in the School of Archeology, Classics, and Egyptology at the University of Liverpool. Her doctoral thesis, awarded in 2010, was the first synthesis of evidence for late Neanderthals in Britain. Her critically acclaimed and bestselling first book, Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death and Art, is a deep dive into the 21st century science and understanding of these ancient relatives. Kindred won the 2021 PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize for History, was awarded Book of the Year by Current Archeology, and was selected as one of 2021’s 100 Notable Books by The New York Times and a Book of the Year by the Sunday Times.
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(RE-RELEASE) How do you write a trailblazing woman back into history after her iconic colleagues wrote her out? Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner--founder and executive director of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation and Center for Social Justice Dialogue; a founder of one the first college-level women’s studies programs in the United States; and author of The Women’s Suffrage Movement and Sisters in Spirit--introduces Eve and Julie to Matilda Joslyn Gage, the should-be household name of the suffrage movement whom Gloria Steinem called “the woman who was ahead of the women who were ahead of their time.” Sally has dedicated her life’s work to restoring Gage to her rightful place in history. In this episode, Sally, Eve, and Julie explore how power dynamics (in politics, in social changes movements) followed a familiar playbook in the 19th century; how Indigenous women modeled an egalitarian society for 19th century feminists; why L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz was a gender-bending, revolutionary text ahead of its time, in no small part because of Matilda Gage; and how Susan B. Anthony erased Matilda Gage’s name from the pages of history. (This episode was originally released on 4/1/21.)
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Sometimes finding hope requires shifting our gaze from humanity. In this episode of Book Dreams, we take an up-close and uplifting look at the four-eyed spook fish, the great gray owl, the star-nosed mole, and even the bloodthirsty vampire bat. Our guest, Jackie Higgins–author of Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses–shares riveting details about the sensory capabilities of these animals: the great gray owl’s soundlessness and uncanny hearing, for instance; the spook fish’s ability to see in the lightless depths of the ocean; the star-nosed mole’s lightning-fast touch. Jackie explains, too, how a consideration of the sensory capabilities of these creatures helps us, in turn, better understand similar talents that often lie dormant within us. Finally, we talk with Jackie about how an in-depth knowledge of the sensory capacities of other animals is helping scientists who are grappling with issues like noise pollution and sustainable development.
Jackie Higgins is a science writer whose first book, Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses, was deemed a “masterpiece of science and nature writing” by The Washington Post. A graduate of Oxford University with an MA in zoology, Jackie has worked for Oxford Scientific Films for over a decade, as well as for National Geographic, PBS Nova, and the Discovery Channel. She has also written, directed, and produced films at the BBC Science Department.
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Fairy tales. Why have they survived a thousand years of re-telling? How do they adapt to reflect changing times, places, and storytellers? And what is it about them that captivates us from early childhood and continues to intrigue us throughout our lives? In this episode of Book Dreams, Eve and Julie explore the magic of these familiar stories with scholar, author, and teacher Jack Zipes, one of the world’s leading authorities on fairy tales, folklore, and children’s literature. They talk about the lasting power of classics like Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, and also about Jack’s new translation of The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest, by the Austro-Hungarian Jewish writer Felix Salten, which was the source material for the 1942 Disney film.
Jack explains that the novel is “a brilliant and profound story of how minority groups throughout the world have been brutally treated,” an “allegory about the weak and powerless” that is both “dystopic and sobering.” By contrast, “The stupidity of the movie is so outrageous that as I was doing research on this book, I literally almost threw up.” They talk, too, about how Jack’s experiences as an activist leader during the social upheavals of the 1960s lead him to a career in children’s literature: “I realized if there's going to be a movement that really digs in and has roots in the majority of people, we have to learn how to teach critically and develop methods in which children would be able to begin to think for themselves and continue to be curious, ask questions, and also take interest in groups in the United States with which they are not familiar.”
Jack Zipes is Professor Emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. He has written, translated, and edited dozens of books, including The Original Folk and Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm, Why Fairy Tales Stick, and Don't Bet on the Prince: Contemporary Feminist Fairy Tales of North America and England. In addition to his scholarly work, Jack is an active storyteller in public schools and has worked with children's theaters in Europe and the United States. Among his many awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, the International Brothers Grimm Award, and the World Fantasy Convention Award for Lifetime Achievement. In 2018, Jack founded the publishing house, Little Mole & Honey Bear, which republishes historical children’s books with timeless values in order to “preserve the things that make us human and stand up to forces that would tear our society apart.”
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"I always think of that moment in North by Northwest, the Hitchcock movie, when someone is falling off one of the mountains in Mount Rushmore, and he grabs someone's hand, and then he loses their hand, and then he grabs their jacket. And then the jacket starts to rip."
In this week's episode of Book Dreams, beloved mystery writer Sara Gran talks about how suspense writers create that "compelling unputdownable quality" that keeps readers turning pages from the start to finish. With refreshing candor, Sara also assesses the traditional publishing business, which she refers to as "Simon's Random House of Penguins," and reveals why she has launched–with tremendous early success–a new small press called Dreamland Books. With characteristic incisiveness, Sara says of her decision to release books outside of the traditional publishing industry after spending more than twenty years as an author within it, "I feel like if you are not a successful writer, get the fck out of the industry 'cause it's not working for you. And if you are a successful writer, get the fck out of the industry because you can."
Sara Gran is the author of the Claire DeWitt mystery series. One of our prior guests, Nancy Pearl–a librarian so renowned, she inspired a librarian action figure–has this to say about the first book in the series: "The more I think about it (and I've been thinking about it a lot), the more I believe that Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead is one of the very best mysteries I've ever read." Sara's latest novel, The Book of the Most Precious Substance, which the New York Times deems "palpably seductive,” was published by Sara's new small press, Dreamland Books.
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The best cookbooks are so much more than collections of recipes. They’re windows into a life or a place or a time or a way of thinking. The very best cookbooks are all of these things at once. Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora is one of these rare books. Edited by author-activist Bryant Terry, and published by his new imprint 4 Color Books, Black Food is the work of more than a hundred chefs, artists, and scholars who contributed recipes, artwork, and essays to a book that is as visually stunning as it is thought-provoking. Think Toni Morrison’s The Black Book (which served as a template for Black Food), but also think sweet potato leaves with eggplant and butter beans, and peach cobbler with nutmeg sauce.
In this episode of Book Dreams, Eve and Julie talk with Bryant about the making of Black Food, his childhood experiences on his grandfather’s urban farm, and his evolution from carnivorous high school athlete to vegan cookbook author. They also discuss the future of 4 Color Books and its mission to “push forward more diversity within the food system” by publishing visually arresting books by authors of color.
Bryant is the author of six cookbooks. He's also a James Beard and NAACP Image Award-winning chef, educator, and author, renowned for his activism to create a healthy, just, and sustainable food system. Bryant is the Founder and Editor in Chief of 4 Color Books, a new imprint of Penguin Random House and Ten Speed Press. Since 2015, he has been the Chef in Residence at the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, where he creates public programming at the intersection of food, farming, health, activism, art, and culture. Bryant's most recent book, Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora, was the first book to be published by his new imprint and the most critically acclaimed American cookbook published in 2021. It landed on the Best Of lists of The New Yorker, Boston Globe, The Washington Post, NPR, Los Angeles Times, Glamour, and many other publications.
San Francisco Magazine included Bryant among the 11 Smartest People in the Bay Area Food Scene and Fast Company named him one of Nine People Who Are Changing the Future of Food. Bryant's mentor, Alice Waters, says, “Bryant Terry knows that good food should be an everyday right, and not a privilege.”
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How should we, as a country, execute our military power, and what role should we, as citizens, play in military policy? In what ways does our current engagement in modern warfare, as it has evolved during the war on terror, fall short of the ideal, and what’s the impact of that shortfall? What’s the connection between our deep polarization at home and the endless, invisible conflicts we’re mired in overseas? What does the conflict in Ukraine teach us about the power and significance of a clear and meaningful military mission, and about the inevitable tragedy of war? Phil Klay–a U.S Marine Corps veteran and the author most recently of the thought-provoking essay collection Uncertain Ground: Citizenship and an Age of Endless, Invisible War–tackles these questions and more with Eve and Julie on this episode of Book Dreams.
Phil Klay is a veteran of the U.S. Marine Corps. His first book, Redeployment, is a collection of short stories set in wartime Iraq. It won the National Book Award and was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of the Year by The New York Times. His debut novel, Missionaries, also involves the military tactics of U.S. soldiers. It was named as one of the 10 Best Books of 2020 by The Wall Street Journal and chosen by former President Barack Obama as one of his Favorite Books of 2020. Now, Phil has published a collection of essays called Uncertain Ground: Citizenship and an Age of Endless, Invisible War.
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What makes us human?
In this episode, Eve and Julie explore one of our favorite questions with James Suzman, PhD, in a wide-ranging conversation about his book Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots. They talk about which aspects of work are specific to our species and how so much of what we believe to be intrinsic to work is actually just a product of our culture. James also discusses how the way we evolved to find purpose and meaning in work is what distinguishes us from bacteria; why modern people work far more hours a week than we need to; and how we may be in a “plastic moment” where radical changes in the way we work may be possible.
A noted anthropologist specializing in the Khoisan peoples of Southern Africa, James Suzman spent thirty years studying the Ju/’hoansi people, a hunter-gatherer society in southern Africa’s Kalihari desert, whose economic models provide a fascinating contrast to our own. A recipient of the Smuts Commonwealth Fellowship in African Studies at Cambridge University, he is now the Director of Anthropos Limited, a think tank that applies anthropological methods to solving contemporary, social, and economic problems. James’s first book, Affluence Without Abundance: What We Can Learn from the World's Most Successful Civilisation, was a 2019 NPR Best Book of the Year and a Washington Post Notable Book. Work: A Deep History from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots was an Amazon Best Book of the Month. James’s writing has appeared in outlets, including The New York Times, Salon, The Guardian, and Financial Times.
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Ellen McGarrahan was a young reporter at the Miami Herald when she volunteered to witness the execution of Jesse Tafero, who’d been convicted of killing two police officers. That execution went horrifically awry, and watching it changed the course of Ellen’s life. She left journalism, became a private investigator, and reinvestigated the murders attributed to Jesse Tafero, in an effort to determine whether she’d witnessed the execution of an innocent man. Ellen details her reexamination of the crime, and the surprising evidence she uncovered, in Two Truths and a Lie: A Murder, a Private Investigator, and Her Search for Justice, an Edgar Award finalist, a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, and one of Marie Claire's 10 Best True Crime Books of the Year.
In this episode of Book Dreams, Ellen talks with Julie and Eve about the reasons that Jesse Tefaro’s execution “began to really feel like a haunting”; the forces that drove her to put her life on hold 25 years after his death to re-examine the crime that two noted death penalty scholars and many others believed he hadn’t committed; and the investigative skills she used to uncover evidence that goes far beyond what was revealed by the criminal justice system.
Ellen McGarrahan is the author of Two Truths and a Lie: A Murder, a Private Investigator, and Her Search for Justice. She worked for 10 years as an investigative reporter and staff writer at newspapers, including The Village Voice, The Miami Herald, and SF Weekly. In 1996, she began working as a private detective and has since founded a private investigation agency.
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What do wild bears and libertarians have in common? Turns out, more than you might think.
In 2004 a group of libertarians founded the Free Town Project, a movement to take over a town and turn it into a libertarian utopia. After some research, the Free Towners decided that Grafton, New Hampshire, a town with a history of resistance to taxation that goes back to the American Revolution, seemed like the perfect place for their experiment.
Enter investigative reporter Matt Hongoltz-Hetling. Matt was in Grafton working on an unrelated story when he discovered, quite by chance, that the bears in the area were acting very strangely. He dug deeper and discovered surprising reasons for their behavior connected to the Free Town movement, a journey he details in his book, A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears).
Now, Julie and Eve talk to Matt about what happens when a group of outsiders undertakes “the boldest social experiment in modern American history,” why Grafton’s bears were eating its cats and attacking its people, and whether an insidious parasite may be contributing to the mayhem.
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling is a freelance journalist specializing in narrative features and investigative reporting, and the author of A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear: The Utopian Plot to Liberate an American Town (And Some Bears). He has been named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, won a George Polk Award, and been voted Journalist of the Year by the Maine Press association, among numerous other honors. Matt's work has appeared in Foreign Policy, USA Today, Popular Science, Atavist Magazine, The Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, The Associated Press, and elsewhere.
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This week we’re running an episode from the fabulous podcast, History of Literature, about one of our favorite authors, Jane Austen. Each week on his podcast, literature enthusiast–and dear friend of Book Dreams–Jacke Wilson journeys through the history of literature, from ancient epics to contemporary classics. Recent episodes include conversations about Kafka; about the wonderful world of mysteries; and about poet-novelist Stephen Crane.
Here’s Jacke’s description of the episode we’re airing now on Book Dreams: “‘I am never too busy to think of S&S,’ Jane Austen wrote to her sister, referring to her 1811 novel by its initials. ‘I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her suckling child.’ Sense & Sensibility was Jane Austen’s first published novel. First begun when she was in the throes of her doomed dalliance with Thomas Lefroy, the novel contains the familiar Austen project of a Hero, a Heroine, a Search for Love, and the Obstacle Called Money. In this case, the heroines are two sisters named Elinor and Marianne, representing the ‘sense’ (prudence, restraint) and ‘sensibility’ (passion, impulsiveness) of the title. In this episode, Jacke takes a look at the writing of Sense & Sensibility; the still common themes contained within this classic novel; and the 1995 film adaptation, in which Emma Thompson, herself in the midst of an Austen-like entanglement, nevertheless drives a shiv into Jacke’s battered old heart.”
Listen to History of Literature on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
You can find Book Dreams on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.
Book Dreams is a part Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. We encourage you to visit the website and sign up for our newsletter for more information about our shows, launches, and events. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy.
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“My people are from Wisconsin. We used to be from New York. We had a little real estate problem.” -Charlie Hill, comedian and member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin.
(RE-RELEASE) In this week’s episode, Julie and Eve talk to comedian, writer, and actor Adrianne Chalepah and comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff about Native Americans and comedy. In her conversation with Eve and Julie, Adrianne describes how before becoming a professional comedian, she was kicked out of public school for being a class clown and then sent to a U.S. government-run boarding school for Native American children. She also discusses whether the increasing success of Native American comedians like herself and others is indicative of lasting change. Kliph also shares stories about Charlie Hill, the first Native American comedian to appear on network television and how he revolutionized opportunities for Native American comedians. (This episode was originally released on 9/2/21.)
An enrolled member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma and a member of the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, Adrianne Chalepah has been a stand-up comedian for more than a decade. She’s the founder of the indigenous femme comedy troupe, Ladies of Native Comedy, and she plays the role of Shannon Diabo on Peacock’s hit show “Rutherford Falls.”
Kliph Nesteroff was a stand-up comic for eight years. He’s the author of The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy and, most recently, We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans & Comedy.
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In 2011, a 27-year-old Austin Kleon gave a talk to college students outlining a simple list: 10 things he wished someone had told him about being creative when he was their age. Austin posted the advice to his blog after the talk, and the list went viral. A year later, his New York Times bestselling book Steal Like an Artist was born.
Now, in 2022, Austin joins returning guest host (and Book Dreams producer) Gianfranco Lentini to muse on the 10th anniversary of the publication of Steal Like an Artist, as well as on its bestselling sequels, Show Your Work and Keep Going. Austin explores where to find the inspiration for art and the permission to create it, whether from without or within. He also shares his reservations, a decade after writing his initial book, about using the word “steal” in the title, and his thoughts on the nuances of “like an artist,” which some of his readers have seemed to miss. Finally, Austin gives a brief, impromptu workshop–much to Gianfranco’s excitement–on the difference between imagination and creativity.
Austin Kleon is the author of the New York Times bestselling trilogy of books on creativity: Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work, and Keep Going. He is also the author of Newspaper Blackout, a collection of poems made by redacting the newspaper with a permanent marker. His books have been translated into dozens of languages and have sold over a million copies worldwide. He's been featured on NPR Morning Edition and PBS NewsHour, as well as in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He speaks for organizations such as Pixar, Google, South by Southwest (SXSW), TEDx, and The Economist.
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“When Dostoyevsky was 28, he was arrested in the pre-dawn hours by the Czar's political police. ... [Nine months later] the men were brought out into a square in the middle of St. Petersburg in December. Three men were tied to stakes; there were hoods pulled over their heads. A firing squad came out to aim their rifles. Dostoyevsky was next in line to be executed.”
Thus begins our Book Dreams interview this week with Kevin Birmingham, author of The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece. We discuss with Kevin the many extraordinary twists and turns of Dostoevsky’s life that helped shape the writing of Crime and Punishment and other novels. Dostoevsky endured ten years of exile in Siberia, four of them in a Siberian labor camp among murderers, and he battled a gambling addiction that repeatedly brought him to the brink of ruin. Kevin explains how these experiences and more contributed to “[t]wo decades of hardship, contemplation, and experimentation [that] brought [Dostoevsky] to a spectacular period of creativity in which he wrote four of the greatest novels in Russian literature—in all literature.” Kevin also recounts the story of Pierre-François Lacenaire, the real-life criminal who became the model for Raskolnikov, the murderer depicted in Crime and Punishment.
Kevin Birmingham is the author of The Sinner and the Saint: Dostoevsky and the Gentleman Murderer Who Inspired a Masterpiece, which was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. He is also the author of the New York Times bestseller The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, which won the PEN New England Award and The Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. Kevin has been named a Public Scholar by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and he received his PhD in English from Harvard. His writing has appeared in Harpers, The New York Times Book Review, Slate, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.
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We did it! We reached our 100th episode of Book Dreams! In celebration, we went back to our guests and asked them this question: What's one book you love and why do you love it? And so now, have we got book recommendations for you! Twenty-eight beloved books from twenty-four of our beloved guests. From old favorites to new discoveries, from short stories to epic doorstoppers, we’ve got your reading list mapped out for you for at least the next 100 episodes. Enjoy! And thanks, as always, for book dreaming with us.
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It was a story that captured the attention of the public and art critics worldwide: A treasure trove of exceptional photographs was discovered after a storage locker auction in 2007. The then unknown photographer? Vivian Maier, a woman who worked her whole life as a nanny. Even after two documentaries were made about Vivian–one of which, “Finding Vivian Maier,” was nominated for an Oscar–many questions remained about her life and art. After watching “Finding Vivian Maier,” retired executive Ann Marks spent years trying to answer those questions, becoming one of the few people who have seen all of Vivian’s personal records and the complete archive of her 140,000 images. That material, along with countless interviews and other research, became the basis for Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny, a gorgeous book replete with Vivian’s photographs and telling details from Vivian’s life. In this week’s episode of Book Dreams, Ann talks with Julie and Eve about everything from the moment that Vivian’s photographs were discovered, to her astonishing talent and some of the reasons it remained hidden from the public for as long as it did, to the dysfunction in her family that contributed to the mystery surrounding her.
Ann Marks spent thirty years as a senior executive in large corporations and served as Chief Marketing Officer of Dow Jones/The Wall Street Journal. She is now an internationally renowned resource on Vivian Maier’s life and work. Her research has been featured in major media outlets, including the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and the Associated Press.
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Is it possible for one person to write both award-winning literary speculative fiction and Marvel's newest “Captain America” series and also be a former civil rights lawyer, a film school graduate, and be less than 35 years old? If the person in question is author Tochi Onyebuchi, the answer is yes.
In this episode, Julie and Eve talk with Tochi about his new novel, Goliath, a sweeping science fiction epic set in a post-apocalyptic America only thirty years from today. They also talk about Tochi’s other new big project: in April Marvel Comics is debuting a new “Captain America” series, written by Tochi, that stars Sam Wilson as the first Black Captain America. In this wide ranging interview, Julie, Eve, and Tochi discuss everything from how he interwove themes of race, class, gentrification, climate change, and allyship in Goliath to what it was like for Tochi to go from being a Marvel fan to a Marvel author. Tochi describes, too, the array of themes that he is exploring with this new “Captain America” series: “If Captain America is a mimesis or even a synecdoche of America, then…what is it gonna look like if Captain America, as embodied in Sam Wilson, is enlisted in an effort at regime change? … What is that going to mean for Captain America, as is the subtitle of the book, ‘a symbol of truth’?”
Tochi Onyebuchi is the author of the new novel Goliath, which is a New York Times Editor's Choice pick and the most anticipated pick for USA Today, Bustle, Buzzfeed, Goodreads, and Nerdist. He is also the author of the “Beasts Made of Night” series, “The War Girls” series, Marvel's “Black Panther Legends” limited series, and Marvel’s upcoming “Captain America: Symbol of Truth” series. His first novel for adults, Riot Baby, was a finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and NAACP Image awards, and winner of the New England Book Award for Fiction, the Ignite Award for Best Novella, and the World Fantasy Award.
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How’s this for fun? Take 27 incredible writers–including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, PEN Awards, Women's Prize for Fiction, Edgar Award, and more–and invite each of them to write an erotic short story. Then publish the collection in one steamy anthology with the authors listed alphabetically at the beginning of the book but none of the stories attributed, so nobody knows who wrote what. We're talking about authors Robert Olen Butler, Louise Erdrich, Julia Glass, Rebecca Makkai, Helen Oyeyemi. Mary-Louise Parker, Jason Reynolds, Paul Theroux, Luis Alberto Urrea, Edmund White, and more.
The idea was the brainchild of authors Hillary Jordan and Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, and the book is called Anonymous Sex. In this episode, Hillary and Cheryl join Julie and Eve to discuss the responses they got when they reached out to authors, how the freedom of anonymity allowed authors to write outside their own identities, and what surprised them most about the collection (“there is a lot of cunnilingus in this book”).
Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan is author of the international bestsellers Sarong Party Girls and A Tiger in the Kitchen: A Memoir of Food and Family. She's also the editor of the fiction anthology, Singapore Noir. Cheryl was a staff writer at The Wall Street Journal, In Style, and The Baltimore Sun, and her stories and reviews have also appeared in The New York Times, Times Literary Supplement, The Paris Review, The Washington Post, and Bon Appétit, among others.
Hillary Jordan is the author of the novels Mudbound and When She Woke. Mudbound was an international bestseller that won multiple awards and was adapted into a critically acclaimed Netflix film that earned four academy award nominations. Hillary is also a screenwriter, essayist, and poet whose work has been published in The New York Times, McSweeney's, and Outside Magazine, among others.
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“Wussy” European vampires. African folklore and mythology, and how they help establish that “homophobia is not African.” How reading Jackie Collins and Leon Uris during childhood fosters a lifelong passion for books. The structuring of an immersive, propulsive fantasy trilogy. This week on Book Dreams, Eve and Julie discuss all of this and so much more with Marlon James, the powerhouse author of A Brief History of Seven Killings, which won the 2015 Man Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. Marlon talks about his new novel, Moon Witch, Spider King, the follow-up to the New York Times bestselling Black Leopard, Red Wolf, which was a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 2019. Marlon shares with Julie and Eve how certain experiences in his own life have shown up in his work, and he previews “Get Millie Black,” the crime drama he is writing and producing for HBO, which his mother “will say is inspired by her, because she is a detective. It’s not. Please stop that, mother.”
Marlon James was born in Jamaica in 1970. In addition to A Brief History of Seven Killings and the first two books of the “Dark Star” trilogy–Black Leopard, Red Wolf and Moon Witch, Spider King–he is also the author of The Book of Night Women, which won the 2010 Dayton Literary Peace Prize and the Minnesota Book Award and was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in Fiction and an NAACP Image Award. His first novel John Crow’s Devil was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction and the Commonwealth Writers Prize and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Marlon is the co-host of the podcast “Marlon and Jake Read Dead People,” where he and his editor, Jake Morrissey, discuss the classics.
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How did a forensic and psychiatric nurse transform the way that the FBI studies, profiles, and catches serial killers? In this week’s episode of Book Dreams, Julie and Eve speak with Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess, the inspiration for the psychological expert, Wendy Carr, on one of Eve and Julie’s favorite Netflix series, “Mindhunter,” as well as her co-author Stephen Matthew Constantine.
In the 1970s a small team of agents in the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit decided to interview convicted serial killers in an attempt to begin to understand their motives. However, the agents weren’t trained in research methods or psychology, and there was concern that all they had were recordings of “a bunch of sickos fantasizing about their crimes and not offering much else.” Impressed by Dr. Burgess’s revolutionary research into the offenders and victims of sexual crimes, they sought her advice. Initially the only woman in the unit, she directed their methodology and spent the next two decades helping to develop what became the FBI’s system of criminal profiling.
Ann and Steven discuss her new memoir, which Steven co-authored, A Killer by Design: Murderers, Mindhunters, and My Quest to Decipher the Criminal Mind. They talk about some of the earliest instances–and validating successes–of profiling serial killers like BTK; how the team’s methods allowed them to predict key characteristics of the killers with astonishing detail; and why a focus on the victim often plays a pivotal role. Ann also describes what serial killers are like in person and how she was able to overcome the gruesome nature of the crimes and remain focused on the work.
Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess is a leading forensic and psychiatric nurse who worked with the FBI for over two decades. She's received numerous awards nationally and internationally for her professional work. She's currently a professor at the Boston College Connell School of Nursing, and she lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
Stephen Constantine is the assistant director of marketing and communications at the Boston College Connell School of Nursing. He holds an MFA from the Bennington College Writing Seminars, and he lives in Boston, Massachusetts.
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In 2019, a librarian at the Central Library in Bristol, England, uncovered a mystery. Pasted to the bindings of four Renaissance books were scraps of parchment from a medieval manuscript. And on these scraps, written in old French, were two names that have captivated readers for almost a millennium: Merlin and Arthur.
In this week’s episode, Eve and Julie talk about the origins and the enduring power of the Arthurian legends with Dr. Laura Chuhan Campbell, part of an interdisciplinary team of scholars who worked for two years to decipher the scraps and determine their provenance. What exactly did the scraps say? How did they make their way from a 13th century bookshop in France, where they were written, to inside the bindings of four Renaissance books in England? And could the fragments of this Arthurian legend manuscript–written less than 50 years after the original King Arthur story–change our understanding of Merlin and King Arthur? Laura describes in detail the extensive expertise employed by the team, and she shares why the “British national myth” of King Arthur has endured today. Eve also gets to finally put to use her “teeny tiny sliver” of knowledge of early modern demonic texts.
Dr. Laura Chuhan Campbell is an Assistant Professor in the School of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University and a member of the Institute of Medieval and Modern Studies. Her research interests include medieval French and Italian literature, particularly the area of cultural adaptations of literary texts. Her first book, The Medieval Merlin Tradition in France and Italy: Prophecy, Paradox, and Translation, examines vernacular translations of the story of Merlin in French and Italian medieval literature. Now, along with Professor Leah Tether and Dr. Benjamin Pohl, Laura is a co-author of The Bristol Merlin: Revealing the Secrets of a Medieval Fragment.
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Can an author write a novel about a classical musician and get all the details right? And can he make that world the backdrop for a gripping contemporary thriller? If the author is Brendan Slocumb, then the answer is a resounding yes. In this episode, Brendan joins Eve and Julie to talk about his debut novel, The Violin Conspiracy, about a concert violinist whose Stradivarius is stolen while he's preparing for one of the most important classical music competitions in the world. A concert violinist himself, as well as a novelist, Brendan describes how his instrument feels “like a piece of my soul,” the joy and discipline of lifelong practice, teachers like the J.K. Simmons character in the movie Whiplash, and what it felt like when his own violin was stolen. Brendan also discusses his experience with racism in the classical music world. As he says in his book, “Here's what you do if you're a Black guy, trying to make it work in an unfamiliar world, you just put your head down and you do the work. You do twice as much work as the white guy sitting next to you. And you do it twice as often, and you get half as far, but you do it. … And all of those extra hours of practice, they build themselves into the marrow of your bones. They electrify the nerve endings on the tips of your fingers until they become habit.”
Brendan Slocumb was raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and holds a degree in music education with concentrations in violin and viola from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He's performed with orchestras and chamber groups throughout northern Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, D.C., and currently serves as the concertmaster for the Nova Annandale symphony orchestra. Brendan has been a public and private school music educator for more than 20 years, and he serves as an educational consultant for the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. The Violin Conspiracy is Brendan's first novel. It was named a Good Morning America Book Club Pick and one of The Seattle Times “Most Anticipated Books of the Year.”
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After hearing New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul call Ian Urbina’s The Outlaw Ocean “one of the best narrative non-fiction books by a journalist I've ever read,” we instantly decided to invite Ian on Book Dreams and were thrilled when he accepted. A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, Ian based The Outlaw Ocean on five years of reporting on the lawlessness of the high seas. We spoke with Ian about atrocities committed at sea–including murder, human trafficking, and environmental devastation–and why the oceans “often get exploited more than protected.” We talked, too, about what there is to learn about human nature and the potentially devastating consequences of capitalism in the absence of just and enforced governance. Our conversation took an unexpected and shocking turn when we asked Ian about the dangers he has faced while reporting from some of the most perilous places in the world. This is an episode you will want to listen to until the very end.
Ian Urbina spent roughly 17 years as a staff reporter for The New York Times. He's received various journalism awards, including a Pulitzer Prize, a George Polk Award, and an Emmy nomination. The Outlaw Ocean: Journeys Across the Last Untamed Frontier is a New York Times bestseller. Ian is now Director of The Outlaw Ocean Project, a nonprofit journalism organization based in Washington, D.C. that produces investigative stories about human rights, environment, and labor concerns on the two-thirds of the planet that is covered by water.
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If you like hearing about the craft of writing and the writing life, you’ll love this bonus episode from The #AmWriting Podcast. #AmWriting focuses on fun, practical, actionable advice for writers of all kinds, and they have a long history of conducting great interviews with great authors. In this episode, hosts KJ, Sarina, and Jess talk with author Jenny Lawson–whose most recent bestseller is Broken (in the Best Possible Way)–about imposter syndrome, being years late on a deadline, sending your editor proof of life, and the deep inner conviction that people only buy your book because they feel sorry for you. If you love this episode—and we think you will—we hope you’ll look for #AmWriting in your podcast player and subscribe, or check it out here: amwriting.substack.com/
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What does the natural world look like after human beings abandon it? Nuclear waste sites, war zones, slag heaps, ghost towns–journalist Cal Flyn delves into the history and rebirth of these neglected places in her book, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape. In this episode of Book Dreams, Cal shares with Eve and Julie some of these strange cautionary tales, and how she finds hope and beauty in the devastation. From the wilding of domesticated cows turned feral in the Scottish islands to the resilience of killifish in Newark Bay, examples abound of how nature survives and flourishes without us. They discuss, too, how our attempts to reverse the damage done by invasive species and urban dereliction sometimes create more problems than they solve. “That's the warning from the past,” Cal says. “We thought we knew what we were doing, and we didn't. So just be careful."
Cal Flyn is an author, investigative journalist, and a MacDowell fellow from the Highlands of Scotland. She's worked as a reporter for The Sunday Times and The Telegraph and has contributed to publications, including Granta, The Guardian, The Times, The Observer, and others. Her first book, Thicker Than Water, was one of The Times’ Best Books of 2016. Islands of Abandonment is a finalist for the Wainwright Prize and was one of The Washington Post's Best Travel Books of 2021.
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“It always looked like the women outside of the church were having the most fun. They were wearing the tight jeans and the heels, and I was like, ‘It's so unfortunate. They're going to hell.’” –Deesha Philyaw
Even as a child, author Deesha Philyaw understood that church teachings about women and sexuality didn’t “really align with what we know to be the nuance and the complexity of human experience.” Now, in her debut short story collection, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Deesha explores the struggle and liberation of women when they dare not to be good. In her conversation with Julie and Eve, Deesha describes the personal journey she took away from the Church and how she began to follow her own desires, just as the characters in her stories do. She discusses, too, why she is “adamant about … writing in a way where the only gaze is the Black gaze,” and how “we can write very culturally specific stories that other people who don't share those cultural specifics can still connect with. That's the beauty, that the more specific our stories, the more engrossing, the more powerful, and yet people who haven't lived those exact same lives can still find these entry points.” As Deesha explains, this is a book that, for many reasons, should not have succeeded. But it has, wildly, and this conversation illustrates why.
Deesha is a Kimbilio Fiction Fellow and will be the 2022-2023 John and Renée Grisham Writer-in-Residence at the University of Mississippi. Her writing about race, parenting, gender, and culture has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, McSweeney's, The Rumpus, and Harvard Review. The Secret Lives of Church Ladies won the 2021 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the 2020/2021 Story Prize, and the 2020 LA Times Book Prize: The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction. It was also a finalist for the 2020 National Book Award for Fiction. HBO Max is currently adapting the book for TV, with Tessa Thompson executive producing.
A special thank you to our friends at Miami Book Fair who coordinated this episode with Deesha. Miami Book Fair is an “eight day literary party” founded by Miami Dade College that’s been held every November in Miami, Florida, since 1984. The Fair plays host to more than 450 international authors reading and discussing their work, as well as more than 250 publishers and booksellers exhibiting and selling books, with special appearances by antiquarians showcasing signed first editions, original manuscripts, and other collectibles.
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Deep beneath the asphalt streets of New York City lurks a breed of creature that’s haunted the subway’s subterranean labyrinth for over a century. No, it’s not sewer alligators or radioactive rats. Instead, we’re speaking of…bookworms. And documentarian Uli Beutter Cohen has been on the hunt to capture their travels.
In 2014, Uli founded the viral Instagram account Subway Book Review, which documents her conversations with subway riders about the books they’re reading. After spending nearly a decade exploring the literary landscape of the underground, Uli has learned: “Readers will tell you what's coming in culture.” Now she’s compiled 170 of her favorite bibliophile encounters in her first book, Between the Lines: Stories from the Underground, which features conversations about books with notable authors like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Min Jin Lee, Roxane Gay, and more. In his debut episode as a guest host, Book Dreams producer Gianfranco Lentini sits down with Uli to discuss her experiences and to consider…what does it mean to belong in a city of 8 million people?
Subway Book Review has been featured on TV, in print, and online by New York Magazine, Esquire, Forbes Women, Glamour, Bustle, Vogue, The Guardian, Refinery 29, The Atlantic, BBC and more. Uli’s interview work and writing about human connection and belonging has been published by The Washington Post, Here Magazine, The Creative Independent, and HuffPost. Today, contributors to Subway Book Review are reporting from 20 cities around the world.
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“I think a lot about how to map the scale of our own lives against the scale of existence.” –Kathyrn Schulz
Not long after Kathryn Schulz fell in love with the woman she would marry, her beloved father died. Now she’s written a memoir, Lost & Found, in which she shares these deeply personal stories and expands them into a consideration of the ways that loss and discovery and joy and grief affect, and intermingle in, all of our lives. In our Book Dreams conversation with Kathryn, we discuss everything from the jaw-droppingly fascinating childhood of Kathryn’s father, to the surprisingly rich history–and all-too-often overlooked complexity–of the word “and,” to the meaning that scarcity bestows on life.
Kathryn Schulz has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing and a National Magazine Award for “The Really Big One,” an article about seismic risk in the Pacific Northwest. Her memoir Lost & Found grew out of a piece called “Losing Streak,” which was originally published in The New Yorker and later anthologized in The Best American Essays. Her other essays and reporting have appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing, The Best American Travel Writing, and The Best American Food Writing. Kathryn is also the author of the bestselling book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin.
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What are dreams made of? What role can they play in predicting the future, and why? To what extent have they shaped the past? What can we glean when we know the content of our dreams, and what does science have to say about why that is? And should we all be taking naps?
In this Book Dreams episode on–you guessed it–a book on dreams, Brazilian neuroscientist and dream researcher Sidarta Ribeiro offers answers to these questions and more. Author of The Oracle of Night: The History and Science of Dreams, Sidarta discusses with Julie and Eve the profound impact dreams have had on the history and evolution of humanity. He says, “Dreams are an integral part of our past. And if we are to have a future, they must be rescued.” Sidarta also talks about why a connection to dreaming has been lost for many people today and what can be done to restore it.
Sidarta Ribeiro is the Founder and Vice Director of the Brain Institute at Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil where he currently serves as the Professor of Neuroscience. He received a PhD in animal behavior from Rockefeller University. His research topics encompass: memory, sleep and dreams, neuroplasticity, symbolic competence in non-human animals, computational psychiatry, and psychedelics.
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(RE-RELEASE) What happens when a Harvard professor puts the weight of her reputation behind an alleged ancient gospel with monumental implications for the Roman Catholic Church, and the gospel turns out to be a fake? In 2012, Karen King, the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard’s Divinity School, announced the discovery of a gospel in which Jesus refers to “my wife.” Investigative reporter Ariel Sabar, author of Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, was present at the announcement and helped uncover the actuality of the gospel’s forgery.
Ariel talks with Eve and Julie about what it was like to be in the room, across the street from the Vatican itself, when Karen King unveiled the alleged gospel. He describes the steps taken to establish that the document was forged, and his own, successful efforts to identify the man who is almost certainly the mastermind behind the forgery. And he discusses what this saga illustrates about the nature of truth and the significance of authenticity, with a consideration of the influence of Karen King’s postmodernist thinking. (This episode was originally released on 9/2/21.)
Ariel Sabar is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He's worked as a staff writer at the Providence Journal, The Baltimore Sun, and Christian Science Monitor. Ariel won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his first book, My Father's Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past. Veritas, his book about Karen King and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, was a finalist for the Edgar Award for best true crime book of the year and for the investigative reporters and editors book award.
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LIVE EPISODE: If you love Jane Smiley, this episode is for you. Eve and Julie are joined by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author in an interview that was recorded live for Miami Book Fair 2021. They discuss Jane’s most recent book, Perestroika in Paris, as well as Jane’s writing process, beloved pets, and what it’s like to be a writer in Paris.
Unlike every other interview we’ve aired so far, this interview is completely unedited. Typically, our interviews last close to an hour, and then we edit them down to 20-25 minutes before adding our own interstitials to make an episode. If you’ve ever wondered how we do what we do, here’s your chance to experience the “before” of the Book-Dream process.
Miami Book Fair is an “eight day literary party” founded by Miami Dade College that’s been held every November in Miami, Florida since 1984. The Fair plays host to more than 450 international authors reading and discussing their work, as well as more than 250 publishers and booksellers exhibiting and selling books, with special appearances by antiquarians showcasing signed first editions, original manuscripts, and other collectibles. Many thanks to our friends at Miami Book Fair for coordinating this episode with Jane.
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MINI EPISODE: Do you lose your keys, your wallet, your glasses…in your own home? Do you forget the names of people you met two minutes ago? How often do you start a sentence with what’s that word I’m thinking of? Yeah, us too.
This is the second in a series of “mini episodes” where Eve or Julie picks a book on a topic she needs help with, and then they come together to assess whether the book actually helped. In this episode, Eve seeks explanations for why “my memory sucks, and it gets worse as I get older.” She turns to Remember: The Science of Memory and the Art of Forgetting, by neuroscientist Lisa Genova, author of the New York Times bestselling novel Still Alice (the basis for the 2014 award-winning film of the same name starring Julianne Moore). The book demystifies absentmindedness by breaking down the three types of memory and explains why “memory failures are normal outcomes of our brain's design.” Tune in to find out whether Eve is able to remember what she read.
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“Today we're learning things as fundamental as the shape of our universe, or how the universe might've begun or ended. We are learning new things about planets and solar systems beyond our own that could potentially host life. And these … [findings are] fundamental to who we are as humans and who we are as planet citizens.”
In this episode of Book Dreams, award-winning astronomer Emily Levesque joins Eve and Julie for an exhilarating exchange about the cosmos. Author of The Last Stargazers: The Enduring Story of Astronomy's Vanishing Explorers, Emily shares what it’s like–and why it matters–when scientists search the heavens with massive telescopes using mirrors that can measure twenty, thirty, and even forty feet across. Emily explains red supergiants and how they help us understand the universe, how she and her colleague discovered a new type of star, and how ladybugs and cobras can derail years of work in a matter of minutes. If you’ve ever sat through a physics class feeling clueless and frustrated, this is the episode for you! And, yes, Julie asks whether there’s intelligent life out there.
Emily Levesque, a professor in the University of Washington's astronomy department, is the recipient of the 2020 Newton Lacy Pierce Prize and the 2014 Annie Jump Cannon Award from the American Astronomical Society. She's also a 2019 Cottrell Scholar and a 2017 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow. Her research program is focused on improving our overall understanding of how massive stars evolve and die. The Last Stargazers, Emily's first popular science book, is an Amazon Best Book of 2020, a finalist for the PEN/EO Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, a finalist for the AAAS/Subaru SB&F Prize for Excellence in Science Books, and a 2021 Alex Award official nominee.
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“It's a piece of family lore or legend that I've been hearing since I was a quite young boy.” In this week’s episode of Book Dreams, acclaimed author Sunjeev Sahota shares with Eve and Julie the family and personal experiences that helped shape his latest, transfixing novel, China Room. Set in both 1920s rural India and 1990s small-town England, the book originates with the story of Sunjeev’s great-grandmother, who as a young bride didn’t know which of four brothers was her new husband. Woven into both the novel and our conversation are themes of connection, belonging, heritage, class, and reputation. The two intergenerational storylines reveal a “mutual haunting” of future and past, with the past shaping the future and the future “reverb[ing] back” to transform the past.
Sunjeev Sahota was named one of Granta’s 20 Best of Young British Novelists of the Decade in 2013. In addition to China Room, he's the author of Ours Are the Streets and The Year of the Runaways, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize, and was awarded a European Union Prize for Literature. China Room was longlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize and a finalist for the American Library Association’s Carnegie Medal.
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Belle da Costa Greene. Morgan Library visionary. One of the most prominent and influential librarians in history. Democratizer of museums. And, until two decades after her death, no one outside her family knew she was passing as white.
We know a lot about public-facing Belle: she was JP Morgan's personal librarian from 1905 until his death in 1913, and she continued to build and direct The Morgan Library until shortly before her own death in 1950. She was responsible for shaping the museum’s collections, and her vision was no less than to tell the history and importance of the early printed word. One of the most powerful people in the art world, she traveled the globe, buying art and manuscripts at auction and socializing with Astors and Vanderbilts. Constantly featured in newspapers and magazines, she was widely known for her gorgeous clothes and her glittering personality. But that extravagant personal style life was a mask meant to distract the public from the real Belle who was in fact the daughter of Richard T. Greener, one of the most prominent Black civil rights activists of his day.
In this episode of Book Dreams, Julie and Eve talk about Belle with Victoria Christopher Murray and Marie Benedict, co-authors of the novel The Personal Librarian–a New York Times bestseller and Good Morning America Book Club Pick–which gives us a fully formed sense of inner Belle. They discuss Belle's upbringing, her intimate relationship with JP Morgan, her motivations and struggles, and the sacrifices she made in order to conceal her identity.
Victoria Christopher Murray is the New York Times bestselling author of more than 30 novels. Her novel Stand Your Ground won the NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work of Fiction. Two of her novels, Lust and Envy, have been made into TV movies for Lifetime.
Marie Benedict is a novelist dedicated to unearthing the hidden historical stories of women. She's the author of the USA Today bestselling Carnegie's Maid; the New York Times bestseller The Only Woman in the Room; the international bestseller Lady Clementine; and the New York Times and USA Today bestselling The Mystery of Mrs. Christie.
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Pigeons: rats with wings or wonder birds? Rosemary Mosco, science writer and naturalist, enters the dovecote with Eve and Julie to settle the debate. The author and illustrator of A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching: Getting to Know the World’s Most Misunderstood Bird, Rosemary defends her feral, feathered friends with an extraordinary (yet widely unknown) historical and anatomical tour. She discusses how the once-wild rock pigeon grew into a domesticated military tool capable of turning “the global tide of politics.” And, in a Book Dreams first, Rosemary illustrates what it would mean for a pigeon to be endowed--yes, that kind of endowed. As Julie’s grandmother would say, this episode has “got some sexy in it.”
Rosemary Mosco is a science communicator, acclaimed cartoonist, and speaker on all things bird. She’s the creator of the web comic Bird and Moon, which won the National Cartoonists Society's Award for Best Online Short Form Comic. Rosemary is the author of many science books for young people, including The New York Times bestselling Atlas Obscura Explorer’s Guide for the World's Most Adventurous Kid. She's also a writer for the PBS kids show Elinor Wonders Why.
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What happens when an author takes a genre that's considered a bedrock of American culture and flips the wagon upside-down? As Tom Lin puts it, “I’m not following the rules of the American Western.” The author of the debut novel The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, Tom subverts the “old, old notions of what makes an American” and redefines the classic genre by telling his story through the eyes of a Chinese American gunslinger assassin in the 1860s. Tom discusses with Eve and Julie how the American Western evolved into mythology, not only glorifying the westward expansion of the American people but also justifying the violence, colonialism, and genocide used to achieve it. He also shares why, almost 150 years later, Americans continue to return to the Western and the potential connection the genre has to the “consciousness of ourselves.”
Tom Lin is an author based in Davis, California, where he is currently a PhD student in English at the University of California, Davis. The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu has been shortlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medals for Excellence in Fiction and Nonfiction.
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What if our experience of ancient Greek plays, rather than involving stultifying boredom, could instead evoke powerful emotions? Bryan Doerries–author of many books involving ancient Greek plays and Artistic Director of Theater of War Productions–talks with Julie and Eve about the tragic loss in his life that caused Greek plays to suddenly begin “sp[eaking] directly to me as if they've been written for me.” As a director, he has since sought “audience[s] that have experienced the extremities of life”--he’s performed at hospitals, for the military, in prisons, for addicts, and for the survivors of natural disasters. Bryan discusses what it is about ancient Greek plays that make them resonate all these centuries later. He also details why the audience discussions that follow the play can be more meaningful than the performances themselves. Finally, Bryan explains how the protocols of theatergoing today are a “kind of violence.”
Bryan Doerries is a writer, director, and translator. His theater company presents dramatic readings of seminal plays and texts to frame community conversations about pressing issues of public health and social justice. He has received an honorary doctorate of humane letters from Kenyon College. And he was named Public Artist in Residence for the city of New York. Bryan’s most recent book, which offers a contemporary translation of ancient Greek tragedies, is Oedipus Trilogy: New Versions of Sophocles' Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone.
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A modern western set in hell. A tale of revenge between Krampus and Santa. One man's determined trek through the brutal landscape of purgatory. These dark stories, and more, all sprang from the imagination of the author and American gothic fantasy artist known simply as Brom.
In this episode, Julie and Eve talk to Brom about what it’s like to both write and illustrate his books, which include his gorgeous, creepy, lush, atmospheric paintings. He describes the relationship between the writer and the visual artist in him--and what happens when they’re in conflict. They talk, too, about the creative challenges raised by Brom’s latest novel, Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery, a horror novel set in colonial America, and why Norman Rockwell is perhaps Brom’s biggest inspiration. They also discuss how Brom’s books have found a devoted audience while defying certain traditional publishing norms. And in a nod to Halloween, Eve shares a story about a psychic experience that was the most frightening night of her life.
At age twenty, Brom began working full-time as a commercial illustrator in Atlanta, Georgia. Three years later he entered the field of fantastic art. He has since lent his distinctive vision to everything from novels and games, to comics and film. Brom is the award-winning author and illustrator of the novels The Plucker; The Devil’s Rose; The Child Thief; Krampus, the Yule Lord; Lost Gods, and Slewfoot: A Tale of Bewitchery.
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If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is the worth of a word? David Shariatmadari, author of Don't Believe A Word: The Surprising Truth About Language, talks with Julie and Eve about little-known origins of words and how their modern-day usage both reflects and impacts culture. For example, the word “happiness” no longer suggests a fleeting state of mind, as it did before the 18th century; instead, English speakers have come to believe happiness can be a permanent condition. Even the lowly toilet has important cultural connotations! David, Julie, and Eve discuss the evolution of “toilet” as an example of how a word can start out as a euphemism and over time become unsavory and even taboo--and why that phenomenon matters. Julie, Book Dreams’ grammar queen, also investigates whether the rise in texting and decline in the number of words in picture books signify the end of civilization as we know it.
David Shariatmadari is the non-fiction books editor at The Guardian. He studied linguistics at Cambridge University and the School of Oriental and African Studies in London.
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What’s it like for a professional ballerina to try a sedentary art form like writing? Georgina Pazcoguin, soloist with the New York City Ballet, talks with Eve and Julie about the creation of her debut memoir, Swan Dive: The Making of a Rogue Ballerina, in which she shakes the “stereotype of the uptight ballerina to bits.” Georgina takes Eve and Julie behind the curtain of the ballet and describes her experiences as NYCB’s first Asian American soloist. She also discusses the abuse inflicted by Peter Martins during his time as Artistic Director of NYCB, and its lingering effects on the dancers.
Georgina Pazcoguin joined the New York City Ballet in 2002 and became a soloist in 2013, the first Asian American ever to be promoted to the company's upper tier. In addition to her many appearances at City Ballet, including a celebrated portrayal of Anita in Jerome Robbins’ West Side Story Suite, her credits include the award-winning film NY Export: Opus Jazz, Ivy in the Broadway revival of On the Town, and Victoria in the Broadway revival of CATS. Georgina is a passionate activist for The Orphaned Starfish Foundation, and she’s a co-founder of the globally recognized diversity initiative, Final Bow for Yellowface.
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Even when history has been overlooked, ignored, or suppressed, that doesn’t mean it’s hidden. Researching and writing her novels, Kaitlyn Greenidge--author of Libertie and We Love You, Charlie Freeman--“approach[es] Black history from a place of abundance, from the idea that Black people have always been multifaceted, have always been fighting for freedom, and have always been coming up with ingenious ways to combat the world around us.” This week on Book Dreams, Kaitlyn discusses with Eve and Julie how society has emphasized exceptionalism in Black history to the detriment of Black people. She searches in unexpected places for evidence of the inner lives of the unexceptional, like Black spirituals. She also examines the difference between Black artists being forgotten and choosing not to be found.
Kaitlyn Greenidge is the recipient of fellowships from The Whiting Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, The Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, and The Guggenheim Foundation. She's currently the Features Director at Harper's Bazaar as well as a contributing writer for The New York Times. Her writing has also appeared in Vogue, Glamour, The Wall Street Journal, Elle, Buzzfeed and The Believer, among many other places. Her debut novel, We Love You, Charlie Freeman, was one of The New York Times critic’s “top 10 books of 2016.” Libertie, her second novel, was named “one of the most anticipated books of 2021” by O the Oprah Magazine, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, The Rumpus, Book Page, Harper's Bizarre, News Magazine, and more.
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Magic. It’s just a bunch of hocus pocus…or is it? World-renowned magician Joshua Jay--author of the new book How Magicians Think: Misdirection, Deception, and Why Magic Matters--lays his cards on the table for Eve and Julie as they explore the artistry and mastery of the craft. They discuss what draws people to magic and why some devote their entire lives to it; the difference between surprise and wonder--and how a ham sandwich factors in; and how Joshua continues to find joy in his craft as his “doorway to wonder” closes. Joshua also gives Eve and Julie a peek behind the curtain of his mentorship with the mysterious and nocturnal magic artist Juan Tamariz, whom magic scholars consider the greatest living magician of this century.
Joshua Jay is a former world champion in close-up magic and a Guinness record holder for card tricks. He makes frequent appearances on TV shows like Jimmy Fallon and The Late Late Show with James Corden, and he even fooled Penn & Teller on Fool Us. He's performed in lecture halls all over the world and has authored four books on magic in addition to How Magicians Think.
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Hidden behind an Olympic gymnast’s smile or a classical ballerina’s serene grace is a darker reality, one involving grueling work and, often, physical and emotional pain. Megan Abbott, Edgar Award-winning author of the recent novel The Turnout, explores the insular worlds of gymnastics, ballet, and cheerleading and uses them to spotlight the damage that patriarchy can inflict on girls. Megan discusses with Eve and Julie how these microcosms reflect our tortured and damaging treatment of female sexuality generally and girls’ bodies more specifically. They talk, too, about the fleeting nature of beauty, and of our bodies’ strength, and why that adds to the appeal of these worlds. Megan also addresses various responses to actions taken by Simone Biles to protect her mental health during the Olympics, and how those responses highlight how far we have--and haven’t--progressed.
Megan Abbott is the Edgar Award-winning author of the novels Give Me Your Hand, You Will Know Me, The Fever, Dare Me, The End of Everything, Bury Me Deep, Queenpin, The Song Is You, and Die A Little. Megan's writing has appeared in The New York Times, Salon, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, and The Believer. Her work has won or been nominated for the CWA Steel Dagger, The International Thriller Writers Award, and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Formerly a staff writer on the HBO series The Deuce, starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Megan is now a co-creator, executive producer, and showrunner of the USA Network show Dare Me, which was based upon her novel.
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What does it say about the American Dream if immigrants achieve financial success but their children, and their children’s children, still experience a lack of belonging? What does it mean to be part of groups that are both privileged and treated as outsiders? What are the flaws in the stories we tell ourselves about our parents’ generation, and what are their consequences? What are the forces, internal and external, that shape our ambition? And when might ambition become our downfall? This week on Book Dreams, Sanjena Sathian--using the particular stories of two Indian American families in her debut novel Gold Diggers to access a universal story--shares thoughts on these questions and more.
Sanjena Sathian is a graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, an alumna of the Clarion Writers’ Workshop and a former Paul & Daisy Soros Fellow. She's worked as a journalist in San Francisco and in Mumbai, and she has written nonfiction for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vox, Time, Food & Wine, and more. Her award-winning short fiction appears in Conjunctions, Boulevard, Joyland, Salt Hill, and The Masters Review. Booksellers named Gold Diggers an “Indie Next” pick, and Mindy Kaling's production company is adapting it for a TV series, with Sanjena co-writing the adaptation and Mindy Kaling herself set to executive produce.
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Bryan Christy's investigations as a reporter have led to police raids of ivory shops in Vatican City, the defrocking of a pedophile monsignor, the arrest and imprisonment of the “Pablo Escobar of wildlife trafficking,” and the closing of China's ivory market. What strategies did he use to track down criminals? What mistakes did he make? Why were his stories so effective at generating change? And why has he now chosen to use his journalistic crime-fighting experience as the basis for his debut novel, In the Company of Killers, a thriller about the major criminal forces connected to wildlife exploitation? Bryan discusses with Eve and Julie all this and more in this week's episode of Book Dreams.
An investigative reporter and founder of the Special Investigations Unit at National Geographic, Bryan Christy is a National Geographic Society Rolex Explorer of the Year. His criminal investigations have been the subject of two award-winning National Geographic documentaries. He has worked as a mortician's apprentice, an international trade lawyer, a CPA, and NASCAR team consultant, a whitewater kayak instructor, and a television correspondent. His novel In the Company of Killers, was one of The New York Times Book Review’s “eight thrillers to read this summer” and a Crime Reads Editor's Choice. Bryan is also the author of the acclaimed non-fiction book The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World’s Greatest Reptile Smugglers.
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What happens when a Harvard professor puts the weight of her reputation behind an alleged ancient gospel with monumental implications for the Roman Catholic Church, and the gospel turns out to be a fake? In 2012, Karen King, the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard’s Divinity School, announced the discovery of a gospel in which Jesus refers to “my wife.” Investigative reporter Ariel Sabar, author of Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man, and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, was present at the announcement and helped uncover the actuality of the gospel’s forgery.
This week on Book Dreams, Ariel talks with Eve and Julie about what it was like to be in the room, across the street from the Vatican itself, when Karen King unveiled the alleged gospel. He describes the steps taken to establish that the document was forged, and his own, successful efforts to identify the man who is almost certainly the mastermind behind the forgery. And he discusses what this saga illustrates about the nature of truth and the significance of authenticity, with a consideration of the influence of Karen King’s postmodernist thinking.
Ariel Sabar is an award-winning journalist whose work has appeared in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Smithsonian Magazine, Harper's Bazaar, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He's worked as a staff writer at the Providence Journal, The Baltimore Sun, and Christian Science Monitor. Ariel won the National Book Critics Circle Award for his first book, My Father's Paradise: A Son’s Search for His Jewish Past. Veritas, his book about Karen King and the Gospel of Jesus’s Wife, was a finalist for the Edgar Award for best true crime book of the year and for the investigative reporters and editors book award.
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In this episode of Book Dreams, Julie and Eve talk with Charles Person, the youngest and only surviving member of the original Freedom Riders. In May of 1961, thirteen men and women in Washington, D.C. boarded two public buses headed for New Orleans, to test whether states across the South were abiding by the Supreme Court’s recent decision forbidding segregation in bus depots, waiting areas, restaurants, and restrooms. Charles was only eighteen at the time. Now, six decades later, he recounts the day his fight for racial equity and justice nearly cost him and his fellow Riders their lives.
The author of the recently released Buses Are a Comin’: Memoir of a Freedom Rider, Charles tells Eve and Julie how his early experiences with systemic racism led him to become active in the civil rights movement and get on board the bus. Charles also gives vivid and vital oral testimony about the murderous attacks on the Freedom Riders by Klansmen and other white supremacists in Alabama. Those Freedom Riders included some of the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement: Congressman John Lewis, Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) Director James Farmer, CORE Field Secretary Genevieve Hughes, Reverend Benjamin Elting Cox, and writer and pacifist James Peck.
After the Freedom Ride, Charles joined the Marines and served for twenty years, including nine months in Vietnam. Today, he lives in Atlanta, where he is a sought-after public speaker.
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Vanessa Zoltan, author of the recently published Praying with Jane Eyre: Reflections on Reading as a Sacred Practice, is not your usual chaplain. She is an atheist who produces podcasts about treating Harry Potter, Twilight, and romance novels as sacred texts, and she runs pilgrimages and walking tours that explore sacred reading and writing. In this episode, Vanessa talks with Eve and Julie about what on earth (or in heaven or hell) drew her to attend Harvard Divinity School despite being a devout atheist. She explains how her spiritual education led her to find sacred engagement in her favorite secular books and how, particularly in the case of Jane Eyre, textual examination helped her navigate (but not forgive) problematic, contradictory, and racist narratives. Vanessa also shares advice for how we can read any book as a sacred text.
Perhaps best known for her podcast Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, which has more than 16 million downloads, Vanessa Zoltan also hosts the podcastsTwilight in Quarantine, which was named one of The New York Times’ “Podcasts for the Pandemic Era”; and Hot & Bothered, which explores reading and writing romance novels as a sacred practice.
Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.
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“It’s a testament to [Jo Ann] Beard, a towering talent, that she ... deliver[s] a book as forceful as it is fine, leaving us both awed and unsettled.” -- New York Times review of Festival Days
In this week’s episode, Eve and Julie talk to Jo Ann Beard about Festival Days, her extraordinary new collection of essays, some of which took decades to write. Jo Ann describes her deeply reflective, painstaking process and shares why so many of the pieces in Festival Days involve life and death moments and the kinds of reminiscences that emerge from thoughts about death. She discusses, too, her most famous essay, “The Fourth State of Matter” and wonders aloud about herself, “Why are you talking about this essay that you never talk about?” Published in The New Yorker in 1996, “The Fourth State of Matter” depicts a mass shooting at the University of Iowa lab where Jo Ann worked. “How do you take something like that, which is essentially meaningless, and infuse it with meaning?” Jo Ann asks during this Book Dreams episode. And she offers an answer to that heartbreaking question.
Jo Ann has received a Whiting Foundation Award and nonfiction fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and the New York Foundation for the Arts. She’s the author of the groundbreaking collection of autobiographical essays The Boys of My Youth and the novel In Zanesville. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Tin House, Best American Essays, and the O. Henry Prize anthologies. She teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.
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MINI EPISODE: Need help easing anxieties? Or resisting your cravings for sugar? Julie does. For this week’s episode, she sought help from neuroscientist Judson Brewer, author of Unwinding Anxiety: New Science Shows How to Break the Cycles of Worry and Fear to Heal Your Mind and The Craving Mind: From Cigarettes to Cellphones to Love--Why We Get Hooked and How We Can Break Bad Habits. The Director of Research and Innovation at Brown University’s Mindfulness Center, Dr. Brewer offers guidance for breaking bad habits--including spirals of worrying--using mindfulness and other brain-based practices. Have his strategies worked for Julie? Take a listen to her conversation with Eve and find out! This is the first in a new type of episode for Book Dreams. Periodically Eve or Julie will pick a book on a topic she needs help with, and then they’ll come together to assess whether the book actually helped. We hope you enjoy it! Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What’s it like to see stories through the eyes of a visual artist? Marla Frazee, multiple award-winning children’s book author and illustrator, shares her vision in a captivating conversation with Eve and Julie. The recipient of two Caldecott Honors and the Boston Globe Horn Book Award, Marla knew that she wanted to become an illustrator before she’d even found language. She explains why her three favorite illustrated books--The Carrot Seed, Blueberries for Sal, and Where the Wild Things Are--inspired her from the moment she first saw them as a young child, and what she’s learned from her deep study of them over the years. Marla sets out in revelatory detail, too, her process for transforming the text of a story into a fully realized, immersive world. And she shares insights about the relationships among authors, editors, and illustrators in the realm of picture book publishing. Marla Frazee’s author-illustrator credits include The Farmer and the Clown trilogy; A Couple of Boys Have the Best Week Ever; Rollercoaster; Walk On; Santa Claus: the World's Number One Toy Expert; Boot and Shoe; and The Boss Baby, which was the inspiration for the Dreamworks movie by the same name. Her illustrator credits include All the World; The Seven Silly Eaters; Stars; God Got a Dog; and the New York Times bestselling Clementine book series. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“My people are from Wisconsin. We used to be from New York. We had a little real estate problem.”--Charlie Hill, comedian and member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. In this week’s episode, Julie and Eve talk to comedian, writer, and actor Adrianne Chalepah and comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff about Native Americans and comedy. An enrolled member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma and a member of the Apache Tribe of Oklahoma, Adrianne has been a stand-up comedian for more than a decade. She’s the founder of the indigenous femme comedy troupe, Ladies of Native Comedy, and she plays the role of Shannon Diabo on Peacock’s hit show “Rutherford Falls.” Kliph was a stand-up comic for eight years. He’s the author of The Comedians: Drunks, Thieves, Scoundrels, and the History of American Comedy and, most recently, We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans & Comedy. In her conversation with Eve and Julie, Adrianne describes how before becoming a professional comedian, she was kicked out of public school for being a class clown and then sent to a U.S. government-run boarding school for Native American children. She also discusses whether the increasing success of Native American comedians like herself and others is indicative of lasting change. Kliph shares stories about Charlie Hill, the first Native American comedian to appear on network television and how he revolutionized opportunities for Native American comedians. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
The Baby-Sitters Club. You may know the books, but do you know their story? David Levithan--Editorial Director at Scholastic; Founding Editor of Scholastic’s PUSH imprint; and New York Times bestselling author of 23 books, including Boy Meets Boy, Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist (co-written with Rachel Cohn), and, most recently, The Mysterious Disappearance of Aidan S. as told to his brother--invites Eve and Julie into the Baby-Sitters clubhouse to talk about the impact and legacy of the 300-book (and counting) series. With more than 176 million copies sold, this juggernaut has inspired spinoffs, graphic novels, a movie, and two different TV series. Julie and Eve discuss David’s journey editing the series for nearly three decades--starting as a 19-year-old Scholastic intern--and what it’s taught him about writing and editing; what it was like to work with Ann M. Martin--the original author of the series--to create a literary world that multiple authors have collaborated on; and how the series has influenced a generation of writers, from Elizabeth Acevedo to Jenny Han. Eve also shares with David her personal connection to Scholastic. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
We’ll take book recommendations for $1,000, please! In a first for Book Dreams, Eve and Julie have teamed up with Brookes May--host of the podcast Books with Brookes--to play a game they’re officially calling “You Want Me to Read What?” The rules are simple: Eve, Julie, and Brookes assign each other off-the-beaten-path books and then reconvene to share their honest (and sometimes hilarious) reviews. From ‘70s time-traveling YA, to literary short stories, to a fiction debut about a cannibalistic food critic-slash-feminist, find out which books have us saying, “Deal or No Deal.” But spoiler: we’re talking books, so everyone’s a winner this episode! Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Storybound is a radio theater program designed for the podcast age. In each episode, listeners will be treated to their favorite authors and writers reading some of their most impactful stories, designed with powerful and immersive sound environments. Season 4 of Storybound features writers including Chuck Klosterman, Morgan Jerkins, Matt Haig, Nichole Perkins, Omar El Akkad, Ruth Wariner, and Tamara Winfrey-Harris. In this episode, Matt Haig reads an excerpt from the Midnight Library. Listen to Storybound on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How does an author write her extended family into a madcap romantic comedy and live to tell the tale? Jesse Q. Sutanto--author of the YA thriller The Obsession; the middle-grade fantasy novel Theo Tan and the Fox Spirit; and the debut adult novel Dial A for Aunties, which is being adapted by Netflix into a film--discusses with Eve and Julie the cultural and familial components of her work. They talk about how killing off a (fictional!) blind date gave Jesse the distance she needed to write about her family, why a feast might be forthcoming in a time of emergency, and how Jesse ensured that authenticity overrode stereotyping when she wrote about her Chinese-Indonesian-American family. Jesse, a former wedding photographer, also lifts the veil on the pervasiveness of groomzillas. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What strange and unexpected paths might one author take delving into his family's history? Menachem Kaiser--author of Plunder: A Memoir of Family Property and Nazi Treasure, a New York Times Editor’s Choice and People Magazine Best New Book of 2021--shares with Eve and Julie how his attempts to reclaim a building that had belonged to his grandfather before World War II led to unexpected discoveries. They discuss how, during his time in Poland, Menachem developed a greater awareness of the moral justifications for, and ramifications of, reparations; what it was like being embraced by Nazi treasure hunters whose ambitions resonated oddly with his own; and how the celebrated myth of his grandfather’s cousin--a Holocaust survivor whose diary of his time building underground Nazi tunnels made him a folk hero in Poland--endures while the memory of the man himself fades. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How can a thriller be more personal to an author than her own memoir? Paula McLain--New York Times and international bestselling author of The Paris Wife; the memoir Like Family: Growing Up in Other People’s Houses; and the new thriller When the Stars Go Dark--shares with Eve and Julie various ways in which her childhood of trauma and survival has influenced her writing. They discuss how Paula’s books engage with both the ordinary and extraordinary of being human; how her time spent in libraries as a child gave her one source of stability and happy endings; and why she has learned to trust the workings of her subconscious as she writes. Paula also gives advice on a question faced by every writer sharing their experience: Do I have permission to tell this story? Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How has one book that barely mentions sports reshaped the game of baseball? Joe Lemire--senior writer at SportTechie and contributor to the New York Times and MLB Network--takes Julie and Eve out to the sandlot to discuss the impact that Thinking, Fast and Slow--a book about flawed human reasoning and decision-making written by Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman--has had on our national pastime. They discuss the advantages of countering cognitive bias on and off the field; how the superstitions of baseball can coexist with a statistics-based analysis; and what happened when a biomathematician left his job at NASA to become a baseball executive and almost blew his career on the first day. Julie and Eve also learn the distinction between fruit salad and chocolate cake, cognitively speaking--and what that has to do with baseball. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In this episode of Book Dreams, our very own Julie Sternberg offers a behind-the-scenes look at her brand new middle-grade novel. Summer of Stolen Secrets is Julie’s most personal book to date, set in her hometown of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Join Eve as Julie guides her to a cemetery where coffins protrude from the earth, human bones visible through holes in their sides, in heat so thick and heavy that women drive across the street to preserve their silk blouses. Julie describes her family’s department store, the first of what became the largest family-owned department store chain in the country, where Julie spent childhood Saturdays hiding in the book department instead of working. Julie also tells the story of her formidable grandmother, Lea, who escaped to America from Germany in 1936 with three small children—but not before she made three SS officers repack her bags. As an added bonus, you’ll learn the truth about alligators: they really do prowl the streets and porches of Louisiana! Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What happens when a novelist takes on complicated and often controversial issues that consume her? And what's the payoff for the reader when she succeeds? Laurie Frankel--a New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of four novels, including the newly released One Two Three--shares with Eve and Julie some of her thoughts about the challenging and important topics that she brings to life in her books. They discuss the connection between Laurie’s third novel and a parenting experience that she described in a New York Times Modern Love essay; how Laurie sees and conveys everyday people fighting epic battles; how receiving hate mail attacking her as a mother is ironically easier than reading a bad review of one of her books; and the impact of shared trauma on a community and its citizens. Laurie also addresses J.K. Rowling’s baseless comments denigrating the transgender community. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What does your collection of toilet paper say about you? Rebecca Falkoff--author of Possessed: A Cultural History of Hoarding, assistant professor of Italian studies at NYU, and stand-up comedian--unpacks the methods and madness behind hoarding with Eve and Julie. They discuss how her family experiences inspired her academic book on hoarding; how her fear of becoming a hoarder herself complicates her writing process; how we can differentiate hoarding from collecting; and why hoarding is both a way of disavowing mortality and a mortal threat to the hoarder. Rebecca also weighs in on this hot-button question: Are billionaires and misers just economic hoarders in a capitalist society? Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
(RE-RELEASE) How do we find hope even in the most difficult of times? How do we thrive after experiencing trauma? Dr. Edith Eger--eminent psychologist, Auschwitz survivor, and author of the New York Times bestseller The Choice: Embrace the Possible and The Gift: 12 Lessons to Change Your Life--talks with Julie and Eve about how to escape the prison of victimhood, fight feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness through choice, and learn to turn hate into pity as we journey through uncertain times. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What’s it like to be a New York Times bestselling author and the editor of bestselling books by authors like Chelsea Clinton, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, and Vice President Kamala Harris? Jill Santopolo--associate publisher of Philomel Books and acclaimed author of Everything After, More Than Words, and The Light We Lost (a Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick)--shares with Eve and Julie why she only wants to edit for kids while simultaneously writing for adults, and how editing, sales, and marketing interact in the world of publishing. Eve and Julie also revisit a moment from Episode 9 of Book Dreams, “Editing Great Books for Bad Children,” which features Leonard Marcus discussing Ursula Nordstrom, an iconic editor of iconic authors. Ursula paved the way for editors like Jill. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What are the downsides to the way we tell stories? Do we need to re-imagine the craft of writing and the way it’s taught? Matthew Salesses--English professor and bestselling author of The Hundred-Year Flood and The PEN/Faulkner finalist, Disappear Doppelgänger Disappear--takes on these questions in his new national bestseller, Craft in the Real World: Rethinking Fiction Writing and Workshopping. Matthew discusses with Eve and Julie how the format of traditional writing workshops was defined by straight, white, able, cis men; how greater diversity in workshops today necessitates a more mindful and empowered approach to the teaching of writing; and how we, as readers and writers, can break free of the oppressive cycles of privileged assumptions and expectations. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
When’s the last time a book made your skin crawl? Megan Rosenbloom--a collection strategies librarian at the UCLA library, president of the Southern California Society for the History of Medicine, research team leader of The Anthropodermic Book Project, and author of Dark Archives: A Librarian's Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin--delves into the who, what, when, where, and, most importantly, why of books bound in human skin. She discusses with Eve and Julie how the desensitization and clinical distancing of doctors’ attitudes towards patients during the 19th century led to an increase in the production of books bound in human skin; how public hangings and dissections were used to dissuade people from becoming criminals; and how our understanding of societal ills like political propaganda and systemic racism can be deepened by the study of books bound in human skin. Eve and Julie also get an answer to the question, Can a whole book--ink, paper, binding--be made entirely from a human body? Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
“Trail Weight,” a new podcast from the Podglomerate network, follows host Andrew Steven on an ambitious, surprising, and transformative journey as he tries to get in shape for a month-long backpacking trip through the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Through audio diaries, recordings from the trail, and conversations with authors, experts, Olympians, and more, Andrew takes listeners through an eye-opening adventure of self-discovery. You can listen to Trail Weight on Apple podcasts or wherever you’re listening to this show. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
If we humans can't own the air or sea, why can we own land? And what happens when we do? Simon Winchester--an Officer of the Order of the British Empire and acclaimed author of the New York Times bestsellers The Professor and the Madmen, The Map That Changed the World, Krakatoa, Atlantic, and Pacific--explores with Julie and Eve how he addressed the man-made notions of land ownership and dispossession in his latest book, Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World. They discuss how the Netherlands ingeniously expanded its territory without the use of thievery, battle, or loss of life; how a single line drawn by a fountain pen brutally and senselessly cost the lives of 2 million Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs between India and Pakistan; and how, exactly, Simon managed to survive an expedition-turned-rescue-mission on an uncharted section of the East Greenland ice cap. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
When was the last time you let yourself feel the power of poetry and a poet’s voice? Here’s the perfect chance! Jasmine Mans--author of the poetry collections Chalk Outlines of Snow Angels and, most recently, Black Girl, Call Home; resident poet of the Newark Public Library; and viral sensation behind the poem Footnotes for Kanye--talks with Eve and Julie about how she discovered her own narrative through poetry. They discuss how being raised in a competitive family led Jasmine to the battlefields of slam poetry and the indelible impression made on her as a burgeoning poet by a health class substitute teacher. In a highpoint for Book Dreams, Jasmine recites and interprets one of her poems from Black Girl, Call Home. She also recommends some of her favorite poets and authors from her “rabbit hole of literary love.” Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How do you write a trailblazing woman back into history after her iconic colleagues wrote her out? Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner--founder and executive director of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation and Center for Social Justice Dialogue; a founder of one the first college-level women’s studies programs in the United States; and author of The Women’s Suffrage Movement and Sisters in Spirit--introduces Eve and Julie to Matilda Joslyn Gage, the should-be household name of the suffrage movement whom Gloria Steinem called “the woman who was ahead of the women who were ahead of their time.” Sally has dedicated her life’s work to restoring Gage to her rightful place in history. In this episode, Sally, Eve, and Julie explore how power dynamics (in politics, in social changes movements) followed a familiar playbook in the 19th century; how Indigenous women modeled an egalitarian society for 19th century feminists; why L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz was a gender-bending, revolutionary text ahead of its time, in no small part because of Matilda Gage; and how Susan B. Anthony erased Matilda Gage’s name from the pages of history. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What’s it like to delve into the origins, psyche, and after-effects of evil, and set it all on the page? Author Ashley Audrain, whose debut novel The Push became an instant New York Times bestseller, shares with Julie and Eve her thinking behind her remarkable thriller. Together, they explore whether malevolence is inherited, if a child can be truly monstrous, and what it’s like to be, simultaneously, the daughter, granddaughter, and mother of a person who may (or may not) be truly evil. Hear them challenge the tired and convenient trope of the mother-at-fault-for-the-sins-of her-child. And find out, too, why Eve once wrote a hate letter to Martin Scorsese! Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Family is forever, and so, it appears, is our fascination with reading about them. Allegra Goodman--author of The Family Markowitz, Kaaterskill Falls (National Book Award finalist), Intuition, Paradise Park, The Chalk Artist, and short stories included in The New Yorker, The O. Henry Prize Stories, and Best American Short Stories--dishes with Eve and Julie about why families remain such a compelling subject for literature. They discuss how age and experience change our perspective on family-related matters, what impact COVID-19 has had on familial relationships both nuclear and extended, and how a child’s college application process can function as a Hitchcockian bomb under the table in a story. Allegra also recommends some favorite novels about families! Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Can a compelling novel positively and radically change the way we think about living? Matt Haig--author of the bestselling memoir Reasons to Stay Alive; the novel and upcoming major motion picture A Boy Called Christmas; and, most recently, The Midnight Library, a New York Times bestseller, winner of the Good Reads Choice Award for Fiction, and a Good Morning America Book Club pick--shares his philosophy on the futility of regret with Julie and Eve. They talk about radical optimism and self-acceptance; reframing depression as an experience and not a permanent reality; and finding meaning in being thankful for everyday miracles (like puppies and Wilson Phillips songs!). Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How can books help us discover uncelebrated trailblazing women? Janice P. Nimura--author of the biography The Doctors Blackwell, for which she received a Public Scholar Award from the National Endowment for the Humanities--shares with Eve and Julie the long neglected history of Elizabeth and Emily Blackwell, who were the first and third women respectively in America to receive medical degrees. Together the Blackwell doctors opened the New York Infirmary for Indigent Women and Children, the first hospital staffed entirely by women. Janice--who also wrote Daughters of the Samurai--discusses why she was drawn to write about these sisters; what it took for them to break into the all-male, 19th century medical establishment; why there have been so few books about them despite their staggering accomplishments (hint: they weren’t adorable); and how systemic sexism has shaped perspectives on both princesses and old crones. Finally, Eve shares a dose of 19th century medical gore! Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
MINI EPISODE: After 40 episodes of book dreaming together, Eve and Julie know each other’s preferences as well as they know their own. In this one-on-one conversation, our two best book friends swap book recs. And although they’ve chosen these titles with the other in mind, we hope you’ll like them too! Join Eve and Julie as they commiserate over the pressure of being on the receiving end of a book recommendation and explore what makes a good one. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Couldn’t we all use some heartwarming tales from bookstore aisles right about now? Eve and Julie have plenty to share after speaking with VaLinda Miller--the owner of Turning Pages Bookshop, the only African-American female-owned bookstore in South Carolina and only the second African-American owned bookstore in South Carolina--and Jamie Rogers Southern--the interim executive director of Bookmarks, a nonprofit bookstore in North Carolina. They discuss the joys of running a bookstore with a best friend, moments when books change lives, and how a knitting circle and a little beer go a long way in building community. Eve and Julie also share a sneak peek at next week’s episode, which has them bursting at their bookseams. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
There’s no place like home, but does it need to have an address? Deirdre Mask--lawyer, academic, and author of The Address Book: What Street Addresses Reveal About Identity, Race, Wealth, and Power--explores with Julie and Eve how the seemingly narrow topic of street addresses underpins a powerful book that addresses (no pun intended) some of the most formative issues of our time. Deirdre discusses the benefits and detriments (yes, you heard that right) of having a street address; what Martin Luther King Jr. Streets reveal about race, community, and resources in America; what impact street addresses have had on epidemiology; and more. This is an episode for both your neighbor next door and your penpal across the globe. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How do you use historical and speculative fiction to tell the truth when America has fabricated its own fictions about its history, and particularly its ongoing racial inequities, for centuries? Bethany C. Morrow--one of USA Today’s “100 Black novelists and fiction writers you should read” and the indie bestselling author of the novels Mem, A Song Below Water, and the upcoming So Many Beginnings: A Little Women Remix--discusses with Eve and Julie the challenges that stem from blending “history” with mythology, the limitations a biased education imposes on our perspectives and imaginations, and the process of remixing a literary classic to incorporate Black characters. Bethany also recalls seeing herself reflected in fiction for the first time. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Self-help books: How helpful are they? Jolenta Greenberg and Kristen Meinzer--co-hosts of the highly acclaimed By The Book podcast and co-authors of How to Be Fine: What We Learned from Living by the Rules of 50 Self-Help Books--pull up their handcrafted (not really) armchairs to discuss with Eve and Julie the keys to picking the right self-help book, the reality of diversity (or lack thereof) within the genre, and the importance of self-awareness for both the author and the reader. They even play a round of the Glad Game, which we’re so glad you’ll get to hear! Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It takes one language to write a book; it takes many to share it with the world--so how exactly does the process of translation work? Romy Hausmann, debut German author of the thriller novel Dear Child, and Jamie Bulloch, German-to-English translator of Dear Child, discuss with Julie and Eve how the author and translator communicate (if at all) during the translation process; why conveying character voice and the natural rhythms of language are so crucial; and what it feels like when the translator becomes just as invested in a book as its author. As an added bonus, Romy chimes in with a few questions of her own for Jamie! Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How can science fiction help us radically improve the world we’re living in now? Author and activist adrienne maree brown discusses with Julie and Eve how the principles of science fiction--and particularly the work of Octavia E. Butler--can help shape movements for social change. adrienne is co-editor of the anthology Octavia’s Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements and co-host of “Octavia’s Parables,” which was recently named a Best New Podcasts of 2020 by The New York Times. She is also the author of Pleasure Activism: The Politics of Feeling Good, a New York Times bestseller; Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds; and We Will Not Cancel Us: And Other Dreams of Transformative Justice. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In our last episode of 2020, Eve and Julie reflect on some of the moments, books, guests, and friendships that have brought us (and we hope you!) joy this year. They also share a sneak peek at what’s in store for Book Dreams in 2021. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
How can we turn to fiction for a reality check? Mark Oshiro, the award-winning YA author of Anger Is a Gift--winner of the 2019 Schneider Family Book Award and finalist for a 2019 Lambda Literary Award--and the newly released Each of Us a Desert, discusses with Julie and Eve how the rapidly-growing genre of speculative fiction provides authors and readers alike the perspective and imaginative scope to help grapple with the reality of 2020 while envisioning a different future. Mark also explains what sensitivity readers do--and don’t do--and why they’re so important. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Bryan Washington, the author of Lot: Stories--one of President Obama’s Favorite Books of 2019--and Memorial--a New York Times Notable Book of 2020, a TIME Magazine Must-Read Book of 2020, Good Morning America’s November 2020 Book Club read, and nominee for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence--takes a seat at the table with Julie and Eve to discuss how the cookbooks, foreign films, and family storytellers of his youth helped form him as a writer. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In one of our most illuminating conversations to date, Eve and Julie explore ancient texts with Michelle Brown, Professor of Medieval Manuscript Studies at the School of Advanced Study of the University of London and former Curator of Illuminated Manuscripts at the British Library. They examine the illustrated margins and piquant commentary of medieval texts to understand when a porcupine is just a porcupine (and when it’s not), how many British pounds it takes to restore a woman’s virtue, and how men still banter the way they did in the 8th century. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
It’s the question that launched Book Dreams: What did Harper Lee do all day in the fifty-plus years between the publication of To Kill a Mockingbird and her death? Finally, after years of speculation, we have an answer! Casey Cep--staff writer at The New Yorker, graduate of Harvard University and the University of Oxford, and author of Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee--joins Eve and Julie to talk about Harper Lee’s surprising life in a conversation that ranges from New York’s Upper East Side to the courthouses and salt licks of Alabama. We explore her abiding need for privacy, her lifelong friendship with Truman Capote, and her half-century struggle to write the next book. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Michelle Bowdler, Executive Director of Health at Tufts University, joins Julie and Eve to discuss her recently released book, Is Rape a Crime?: A Memoir, an Investigation, and a Manifesto, which was long listed for the National Book Award. They talk about the stifling and silencing impact of sexual assault, the healing conversations that memoir can engender, and the key steps needed to increase awareness and improve treatment of sexual assault survivors, beginning with the responses of family and law enforcement. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In desperate need of a distraction from 2020, Eve and Julie turn to ROMANCE. Jane Igharo--a Nigerian-born immigrant to Canada and author of the newly released debut romance novel Ties That Tether--joins to discuss why romance readers are such avid fans, what qualities make romance novels so compulsively readable, and how to embrace the shameless delights of writing erotic scenes. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What are the books that have shaped some of the most famous authors writing today? Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager, co-authors of the newly released The Writer’s Library, share with Eve and Julie recommendations they’ve collected from writers such as Luis Alberto Urrea, Laila Lalami, Jonathan Lethem, Louise Erdrich, and Maaza Mengiste; surprising details about which famous novels consistently didn’t show up on those authors’ lists of formative books; and insights into the changing roles of books during the pandemic. Best of all, we add many, many (many!) more books to our Book Dreams reading list! Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Dr. Edith Eger--eminent psychologist, Auschwitz survivor, author of the New York Times bestseller The Choice: Embrace the Possible and the newly released The Gift: 12 Lessons to Change Your Life--talks with Julie and Eve about how to escape the prison of victimhood, fight feelings of hopelessness and powerlessness through choice, and learn to turn hate into pity as we journey through uncertain times. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
After 25 episodes together, Eve and Julie are wondering: What’s it like to collaborate on writing a book? What makes a writing team successful? And when is it better to work alone? In this week’s episode, they get a between-the-lines look at two very different writing teams--Lan Cao and Harlan Margaret Van Cao, the mother-daughter collaborators behind the collective memoir Family in Six Tones; and Mikki Daughtry and Rachael Lippincott, the #1 New York Times bestselling team behind Five Feet Apart and the newly released All This Time. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Welcome to Fandom 101. Get your wands ready! In his debut episode, Gianfranco Lentini--Book Dreams producer, news reporter for The Leaky Cauldron, LGBTQ+ journalist, and Hufflepuff--gives Eve and Julie a Potter-centric crash course on why books cast magic well beyond their bindings; who the devoted fans behind the Potter subculture are; and what impact J.K. Rowling’s transphobic beliefs have had on those who grew up looking to her for acceptance. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Since our episode on what makes a book a bestseller, Julie and Eve have been eager to determine: Can artificial intelligence help authors get to the top of the New York Times bestseller list? Marc Acito--novelist, cultural critic, playwright, Broadway librettist, film/stage director, and Eve’s high school best friend--runs his novel How I Paid for College: A Novel of Sex, Theft, Friendship, and Musical Theater through Authors A.I.’s Marlowe (aka the Bestseller-ometer) in the name of literary science. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
School is back in session, and Eve and Julie have their hands raised high for Sara Beasley, an English teacher of 34 years. They discuss why studying fiction is crucial, how teachers can make the pages Dostoevsky fly by, the unexpected secret to transforming a reluctant reader into a bookworm, the lasting impact of contemporary African writers, and upsides (they exist!) of teaching in the midst of COVID-19. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Christina Baker Kline--#1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train and the newly released The Exiles--joins Eve and Julie to discuss the research strategies, language choices, and overarching philosophies that shape the writing of historical fiction. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
What makes a book a bestseller? It’s a question that’s captivated us as readers and as writers. In this episode, Eve and Julie talk to three experts who might have cracked the code: Miranda Beverly-Whittemore, author of the New York Times bestseller Bittersweet; Dan Blank, founder of WeGrowMedia; and Matthew Jockers, co-author of The Bestseller Code and co-founder of Authors A.I. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Step aside, Reese and Oprah! Julie and Eve discuss keys to finding or creating the perfect book club. Also, Eve goes unfiltered on Dr. Suess. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
In our first follow-up episode, Julie and Eve talk about book design with Dr. Kinohi Nishikawa (@kinohin), an associate professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University and a specialist in 20th century African American literature, book history, and pop culture. They discuss how Black authors and editors have used book design to communicate with readers and exert control over their own narratives. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Move over, ice cream truck! Make way for the bookmobile. Eve and Julie get a behind-the-wheel look at the joys and perils of operating a bookmobile. They interview Hannah Spratt and Michelle Fernandez, Senior Librarians with the New York Public Library’s Bronx Bookmobile (@NYPLBookmobile), and Kevin Foster, Bookmobile Captain at Parnassus Books in Nashville (@ParnassusTruck), which is co-owned by author Ann Patchett and Karen Hayes. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Julie and Eve discuss their latest book club picks, Edwidge Danticat’s Everything Inside and Tove Jansson’s The Summer Book. Spoiler alert: We love them both and we think you will, too. Plus we have a bonus chat about a sixteenth-century exorcism compendium! Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Tricia Elam Walker--novelist, essayist, playwright, picture book author, and assistant professor of creative writing at Howard University--and KJ Dell’Antonia--novelist, essayist, nonfiction book author, cohost of the #amwriting podcast, and former editor of The New York Times’ Motherlode blog--are no strangers to writing across literary genres. In this episode, they join Eve and Julie to discuss their writing processes and how they’ve navigated the shift from writing everything from essays to novels and plays. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Julie and Eve have always dreamed of having a bookstore of their own. In this episode, they spoke with independent bookstore owners Donna Paz Kaufman of Story & Song Bookstore Bistro and Janet Webster Jones of Source Booksellers about the power of community and why books are more important now than ever. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Have you ever judged a book by its cover? Don’t feel bad; you’re supposed to. But how are design choices made, and who holds the power to make them? In Book Dream’s first double-guest episode, Eve and Julie discuss and challenge conventions of book design with Ellen Lupton, graphic designer, writer, and educator, and Reif Larsen, author of “The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet.” Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
On this special episode of Book Dreams, our very own Eve Yohalem talks us through the making of her latest book, The Truth According to Blue, now in bookstores. In the middle of a plague, no less! Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ever wondered about rare books and who collects them? Nicho Lowry, third generation bookseller and President of Swann Auction Galleries, takes us behind the glass cases and tells us stories from this unusual world. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Julie and Eve find funny books that are great anytime, but especially now. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Julie and Eve talk to children’s book expert Leonard Marcus about what it’s like to edit iconic authors. Among other questions, they ask, How do you tell E. B. White he’s got a problem with Charlotte? Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Following the release of Greta Gerwig’s 2019 film adaptation, scholar Anne Boyd Rioux joins Eve and Julie to talk about why the Little Women we grew up with is not, in fact, Alcott’s original text--and why Little Women still matters. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Eve and Julie try some of the literary medicine prescribed to them in their first bibliotherapy session. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Ella Berthoud, UK-based bibliotherapist and artist, conducts an on-air bibliotherapy session with Julie to prescribe a dose of literary medicine during these trying times. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Eve and Julie ask Jim Mustich, author of 1000 Books to Read Before You Die, how to decide what to read next. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
SPECIAL QUARANTINE EPISODE: Eve addresses a love letter to New York City, and Julie vows to stop reading creepy crime fiction (for now at least). Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
SPECIAL QUARANTINE EPISODE: Eve and Julie consider nineteenth century parenting techniques. And also beheadings. And donuts. (Not all at the same time, of course.) Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
SPECIAL QUARANTINE EPISODE: Julie trades murder mysteries and mayhem for love triangles and cannibalism, and Eve escapes to nineteenth century Colorado. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
SPECIAL QUARANTINE EPISODE: Book Dreams gets a different launch than expected. Eve and Julie practice social distancing while highlighting some of their must reads right now. Find us on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email us at contact@bookdreamspodcast.com. We encourage you to visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Book Dreams is a part of Lit Hub Radio and the Podglomerate network, a company that produces, distributes, and monetizes podcasts. For more information on how The Podglomerate treats data, please see our Privacy Policy. Since you’re listening to Book Dreams, we’d like to suggest you also try other Podglomerate shows about literature, writing, and storytelling like Storybound and The History of Literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Book Dreams is a podcast for everyone who loves books and misses English class. In each episode co-hosts Julie Sternberg and Eve Yohalem explore a book-related topic they can’t stop thinking about, everything from the genius of your favorite picture books to books bound in human skin. Julie and Eve are both award-winning authors, which allows them to come at interviews with an insider’s knowledge as well as all the wonder associated with storytelling.
Book Dreams is brought to you by The Podglomerate Network and is a member of Lit Hub Radio. New episodes run every Thursday.
Find Book Dreams on Twitter (@bookdreamspod) and Instagram (@bookdreamspodcast), or email contact@bookdreamspodcast.com.
Visit our website and sign up for our newsletter for information about our episodes, guests, and more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices