Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference

In this episode, recorded live at the 2024 conference, biographer Jonathan Eig talks about his book on Martin Luther King, Jr., the first major biography of the civil rights leader in decades. Eig resurrects King from myth and history and brings him to vivid life, with all of his emotional complexity and unwavering courage, drawing a fresh and indelible portrait of a man whom he justifiably calls one of America's founding fathers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, lucky listener, you get to hear the great Judy Blume, the author of twenty-five books for young readers and four novels for adults that all-told have sold more than 90 million copies in forty languages. Blume's cherished, ground-breaking 1970 young adult novel, Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret, has captivated and enlightened girls (and boys, and their parents) for 55 years and counting. I, for one, read it when I was 10, and it – along with about half a dozen other classic Blume titles – basically taught me everything I know, to this day, about girls and growing up. So consider me yet one more reader for whom Judy Blume was, and remains, a true literary rock star. Here she is, recorded live at the 2024 Writers Conference, in conversation with her friend JEFFREY BROWN of the PBS NewsHour. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, recorded live at the 2024 Writers Conference, I sit down with bestselling crime novelist and TV writer/producer DENNIS LEHANE for a lively, wide-ranging conversation about how he approaches writing books vs. television scripts, his advice for writing true crime stories, as well as his journey developing his two latest AppleTV limited series, Black Bird and the upcoming Firebug, both starring Taron Egerton. Lehane is that rare novelist who has found acclaim and a large audience both in fiction and on the screen. A handful of his novels have been made into excellent films – Mystic River, Gone Baby Gone, and Shutter Island, to name a few – and in recent years he has become a much in-demand television creator and showrunner, a role that first began for him two decades ago, when he joined the now-famous Season 4 writers room on David Simon's iconic show The Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We were already editing this episode when the L.A. fires broke out on January 7, 2025. In fact, our editor Dean Grinsfelder had to evacuate as the flames moved in. So did my 91-year-old dad, and so did my co-producer James Tooley's parents and brothers and their families; one of those brothers saw his house burn to the ground. All of which is to say, I guess, that podcasts, though they live in the ether, don't exist in a vacuum, and neither do we. We're all connected. And so, while those impacted by the LA fires regroup and recover, we want to share an important story – recorded live at the 2024 Conference – about another, eerily similar and catastrophic fire that was the centerpiece of journalist John Vaillant's award-winning book Fire Weather. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, recorded live at the 2024 Sun Valley Writers' Conference, novelist Kristin Hannah talks to Jenny Emery Davidson, the executive director of The Community Library in Ketchum, Idaho, about her #1 New York Times bestselling novel The Women. In The Women, Hannah (known for previous bestselling historical novels such as The Nightingale, The Great Alone, and The Four Winds) takes up the Vietnam epic and re- centers the story on the experience of the military nurses who worked under fire, on bases and in field hospitals throughout the war, but whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has all too often been forgotten. Like so many male soldiers of the time, Frankie McGrath, the novel's heroine, finds herself overwhelmed by the chaos and destruction of war, as well as the unexpected trauma of coming home to a changed and politically divided America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In a time of loneliness and isolation, social rupture and alienation, what will it take to mend our broken hearts and rebuild our society? In this episode, one of Ameriica's leading rabbis, and the author of the book The Amen Effect, Sharon Brous makes the case that it is through honoring our most basic human instinct – the yearning for real connection – that we reawaken our shared humanity and begin to heal. In a conversation with legendary bookseller Mitchell Kaplan recorded live at the 2024 Writers Conference, Brous pairs heart-driven anecdotes from her experience building and pastoring to a leading-edge faith community over the past two decades with ancient Jewish wisdom and contemporary science. Hers is a clarion call: the sense of belonging engendered by our genuine presence is not only a social and biological need, but a moral and spiritual necessity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The author of a seminal book on Putin, All The Kremlin's Men, and the founding editor-in-chief of what was Russia's most truth-telling opposition news channel TV Rain, Mikhail Zygar is a journalistic hero to many in Russia. Now living and writing in the U.S. after fleeing persecution by Putin, Zygar continues to cover the most troubling stories of his homeland with unmitigated courage and a razor-sharp intelligence. In this episode, recorded live at the 2024 conference, he sits down with The Atlantic's editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to discuss his most recent book, War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia's Invasion of Ukraine, and the state of all things Putin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, recorded live at the 2023 Sun Valley Writers' Conference, New Yorker Staff Writer Patrick Radden Keefe, who has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award to the Orwell Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award for his meticulously reported, hypnotically engaging work on the many ways people behave badly, tells a few stories and lifts the hood on what he calls his “abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In bestselling author Curtis Sittenfeld's much-loved new novel, she explores—with her typically keen observations and trademark ability to bring complex women to life on the page—the neurosis-inducing and heart-fluttering wonder of love,while slyly dissecting the social rituals of romance and gender relations in the modern age. Sittenfeld sits down with SVWC Literary Director John Burnham Schwartz—a former professor of hers at the Iowa Writers' Workshop—to discuss what makes Romantic Comedy a romantic comedy, her approach to genre and craft in previous novels such as American Wife, Rodham, and Eligible, and other stories from her literary journey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, recorded live at the 2023 conference, poet and memoirist Javier Zamora talks to legendary bookseller Mitchell Kaplan about his memoir Solito, which chronicles his experiences traveling from El Salvador to the United States, by himself, when he was 9 years old. Javier Zamora writes, and speaks, like someone who believes he can never afford to forget that journey, or the experience on the other side, in America, of growing up undocumented. You won't be able to forget, either. And that is the power of great literature. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Recorded at the closing of the 2023 Sun Valley Writers' Conference, Pulitzer Prize-winning humor writer (and one of the funniest people alive) Dave Barry talks about his latest novel Swamp Story, using it mainly as a springboard to talk about his crazy home state of Florida, and from there, about some of the problems facing our nation in general, and what he would do to fix them if by chance he ever gets the authority to do so – which, Dave says, we should all pray he never does. And finally, Dave assures us that the one promise he can make is that nobody will come away from this talk with any useful information whatsoever. Here's Dave Barry, closing the 2023 Sun Valley Writers' Conference. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Andrea Elliot sits down with another Pulitzer winner, novelist and playwright Ayad Akhtar, at the 2023 Writers' Conference to talk about Elliot's book, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City. The subject of the book is a Black girl in New York City named Dasani, whose story – told through the lens of almost a decade of Elliot's deep reporting – brings to vivid and devastating life the realities of how poverty and race and the moral failings of our institutions impact the most marginal among us.  Elliott tells us about Dasani's life and how it is both singular and emblematic, and she talks about her own passions for the deeply immersive journalism that is the hallmark of her professional life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode, author and physician Abraham Verghese – who received the 2023 Sun Valley Writers' Conference WRITER IN THE WORLD prize – brings us intimately and poetically into the heart of his remarkable, inspiring journey from his childhood in Ethiopia to his experiences as a young doctor in America during the AIDS epidemic, to his beginnings as a writer. Verghese would go on to become a professor of medicine at Stanford, as well as the author of the classic memoir My Own Country and the beloved, bestselling novels Cutting for Stone and The Covenant of Water. Here, he describes the meaning and arc of his personal journey with heartfelt tenderness and appreciation, offering new insights into his vision and practice of his joint vocations, and of the profound link between healing and storytelling. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, three of our most cogent and influential writers on global affairs and history – Anne Applebaum, Robert Kagan, and Evan Osnos – discuss the geopolitical ramifications of Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the ongoing battle between democracy and authoritarianism, Vladimir Putin's endgame, China's power plays, and the future of the Western alliance, among other urgent questions. Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, the author of such books as RED FAMINE: STALIN'S WAR ON UKRAINE; GULAG: A HISTORY; and, most recently, TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY: THE SEDUCTIVE LURE OF AUTHORITARIANSIM. Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at Brookings, a contributing columnist at the Washington Post, and the author, most recently, of THE GHOST AT THE FEAST: AMERICA AND THE COLLAPSE OF WORLD ORDER, 1900-1941. Evan Osnos is a New Yorker staff writer, and the author of WILDLAND: THE MAKING OF AMERICA'S FURY as well as the National Book Award-winning AGE OF AMBITION: CHASING FORTUNE, TRUTH AND FAITH IN THE NEW CHINA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beyond the Page host John Burnham Schwartz talks with New Yorker staff writer Tad Friend, a longtime contributor to the magazine's Letter from California and the author of two funny, poignant family memoirs, Cheerful Money and In the Early Times. In a notable testament to Friend's curiosity, range, and talent, over the years his work has been chosen for “The Best American Travel Writing,” “The Best American Sports Writing,” “The Best American Crime Reporting,” and “The Best Technology Writing” – not to mention the James Beard award for feature writing he won in 2020. In this episode, a recent piece of Friend's in the magazine about “a conservation N.G.O. that infiltrates wildlife-trafficking rings to bring them down” becomes a conversational prism for a larger discussion about the writer's methodology and philosophy of long-form journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, SVWC Literary Director John Burnham Schwartz and writer Eric Schwartzel go Hollywood. Schwartzel covers the film industry in The Wall Street Journal's Los Angeles bureau and his first book “Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy,” detailed the growing influence of China on the American entertainment industry. John and Eric discuss Hollywood's exestensial crisis, the China problem, and some important wars: culture wars, streaming wars, and Star Wars.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with editor and Canadian publishing titan Louise Dennys about her extraordinary career working side by side with writers including Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan… to name just a few. Dennys talks about how she got started, what it's like to nurture and promote some of the strongest literary voices of a generation, and the importance of freedom of expression, now more than ever. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, Anne Taylor Fleming talks with award-winning food writer Aleksandra Crapanzano about her delightful and accessible new cookbook GATEAU: The Surprising Simplicity of French Cakes. The author shares her memories of being a child in Paris and talks about her dual passions for cooking and writing.   Aleksandra Crapanzano is a James Beard-winning writer and dessert columnist for The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of The London Cookbook and Eat. Cook. LA., and her work has been widely anthologized, most notably in Best American Food Writing. She has been a frequent contributor to Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Food52, Saveur, Town & Country, Elle, The Daily Beast, Departures, Travel + Leisure, and The New York Times Magazine. She has years of experience in the film world, consults in the food space, and serves on several boards with a focus on sustainability. Aleksandra grew up in New York and Paris, received her BA from Harvard and her MFA from NYU, where she has also taught writing. She is married to the writer John Burnham Schwartz, and they live in New York with their son, Garrick, and Bouvier des Flandres, Griffin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers' Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing's brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers' Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun Valley is known for. In this episode of Beyond teh Page, John Burnham Schwartz talks with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan about her novel The Candy House—a sequel, of sorts, to 2010's A Visit From the Goon Squad—which riffs brilliantly on memory, authenticity and the allure of new technology, and about what she learned about fiction writing from her son's love of baseball statistics. Jennifer Egan is the author of six previous books of fiction: Manhattan Beach, winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Keep; the story collection Emerald City; Look at Me, a National Book Award Finalist; and The Invisible Circus. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Granta, McSweeney's, and The New York Times Magazine. Her website is JenniferEgan.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, BEN RHODES, Barack Obama's former Deputy National Security Advisor, sits down at the Sun Valley Writers' Conference with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright AYAD AKHTAR for a deeply informed conversation about the state of the world we are living in today, with the rise of authoritarian leaders and ethno-nationalism and the flood of disinformation enabling them — and what responsibility America must take for these threats to freedom across the globe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with Rebecca Donner, winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography for “All the Frequent Troubles of our Days.” The story of Donner's great-great aunt, Mildred Harnack, who as a young midwestern grad student moved to Berlin and became one of the leaders of the largest underground resistance group to Hitler in the 1930s and 40s, All the Frequent Troubles is both an intimate portrait of a courageous young woman and also the story of how a charismatic demagogue captured a country. Donner shares Mildred's story and also talks about the dogged scholarly research that helped her piece together her aunt's amazing life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When artists and athletes age, what happens to their work? Does it ripen or rot? As our bodies decay, how – and why – do we keep going? In this episode, John Burnham Schwartz sits down with the ever-original and wittily ironic GEOFF DYER to discuss the author's own encounter with late middle age against the backdrop of the last days and last works of writers, painters, footballers, musicians, and tennis stars who've mattered to him throughout his life.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, we offer something fun and different, a lively conversation between SVWC Literary Director John Burnham Schwartz and Associate Director Anne Taylor Fleming about the upcoming 2022 conference.  As the chief programmers, the longtime colleagues and friends will talk about some of the magical writers who are coming, from Evan Osnos and Heather McGhee to Ocean Vuong and Arthur Brooks, and chat about their selection process, including adding the wonderful PBS anchor Judy Woodruff to moderate some deep dives into the threats to democracy, here and around the globe.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode, John Burnham Schwartz talks with SUSAN ORLEAN, whose New Yorker articles across the last 30 years, along with books such as The Orchard Thief, The Library Book, her biography of the movie star dog Rin Tin Tin, and her latest collection of pieces, On Animals, have made her one of our most beloved and distinctive writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Is Thomas Jefferson to be deplored as a slave-owner who had a family with a young woman he owned or is he to be celebrated as one of the country's most essential and gifted founders? Or, should he be both--condemned and revered? That is the question Annette Gordon-Reed, the brilliant Harvard law professor, historian, and author of the Pulitzer prize-winning The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family, has long wrestled with. In conversation with SVWC associate director Anne Taylor Fleming, Gordon-Reed reflects on her evolving feelings about Jefferson and on the moral responsibility of the historian, and talks about her recent memoir, On Juneteenth, a stirring remembrance of growing up black in Texas. Hers is the rare wise and nuanced voice we need in today's overheated culture.    Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, John Burnham Schwartz speaks with author TOBIAS WOLFF, renowned for his classic memoirs and short stories, for an intimate, wide-ranging conversation about life, literature, craft, and the never- ending mysteries and revelations that come from spending one's time inhabiting the minds of others. Tobias Wolff was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up in Washington State. He attended Oxford University and Stanford University, where he now teaches English and creative writing. He has received the Story Prize, both the Rea Award and PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, John Burnham Schwartz speaks with Noah Feldman, Harvard Law professor and renowned Constitutional scholar, whose groundbreaking new book, The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America, takes us inside one of the more surprising realities of American History: in abolishing slavery and preserving our union, Abraham Lincoln was not adhering to the original Constitution of 1787, but rather tearing it up in order to save it through transformation. Feldman calls not only for a reassessment of Lincoln himself but also for a new look at America's founding document and its place in our law, our politics, and ourselves. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, acclaimed novelist, journalist, and Marine Corps veteran ELLIOT ACKERMAN talks to former CBS News Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief Christopher Isham about the United States military's calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan and what comes after. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers' Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing's brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers' Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun Valley is known for. In this episode of Beyond the Page, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with Patrick Radden Keefe about his new book, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with Pulitzer Prize-winning authors MARK STEVENS and ANNALYN SWAN about their landmark biography Francis Bacon: Revelations. MARK STEVENS is the former art critic of New York magazine. He has been the art critic for The New Republic and Newsweek and has also written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times. ANNALYN SWAN is the former arts editor of Newsweek and an award-winning music critic. She teaches biography at the Graduate Center of CUNY as well as at the Middlebury Bread Loaf School of English. Stevens and Swan won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for their biography, de Kooning: An American Master. They live in New York. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, human rights activist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author SAMANTHA POWER – interviewed in the lead-up to her pending US Senate confirmation vote to be President Biden’s new administrator of USAID – discusses her distinctly American journey from immigrant to war correspondent to one of America’s leading foreign policy voices. Power transports us from her childhood in Dublin to the streets of war-torn Bosnia to the White House Situation Room and the world of high-stakes diplomacy, offering a compelling and deeply honest look at navigating the halls of power while trying to put one’s ideals into practice. Along the way, she lays bare the searing battles and defining moments of her life, shows how she juggled the demands of a 24/7 national security job with raising two young children, and makes the case for how we each can advance the cause of human dignity. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, the host of American Public Media’s award-winning radio show The Splendid Table shares with us a few unforgettable food stories from his childhood, along with some of his current thoughts about the social experience of food during these pandemic times, the struggles and future of restaurants, and how certain tastes become identity markers for life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On today's episode of Beyond the Page, John Burham Schwartz speaks with David Eagleman, who not only teaches neuroscience at Stanford University, but is also CEO and co-founder of New Century, a company that develops devices for sensory substitution. Eagleman is the author most recently of Live Wired: The Inside Story of the Ever Changing Brain, as well as The Brain, The Story of You, and many other books. He's the host of the new Netflix documentary, The Creative Brain. And not only all that, but his short story collection. Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, inspired producer Brian Eno to write 12 new pieces of music, which they performed together at the Sydney Opera House. In the conversation, we explore how Eagleman is a spirited and enlightening guide to so many important biological and moral issues underpinning our lives and behaviors from QAnon and cults to the wiring of Trump's brain, to the relationship between identity, personality, biology, empathy, legal culpability and much, much more. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On Christmas morning, 2020, the writer BARRY LOPEZ died in Eugene, Oregon, surrounded by his family, after a long battle with prostate cancer. Widely honored as one of our greatest writers about the natural world – in non-fiction classics such as “Of Wolves and Men,” “Arctic Dreams,” and “Horizon” – for half a century Barry traveled the globe – High Arctic to Antarctica, Oregon to Kenya – bringing back stories etched in luminous prose that explored our profound connections to the diverse, fragile planet we inhabit.  Two weeks before his death, Barry received the first Sun Valley Writers’ Conference WRITER IN THE WORLD PRIZE, given to a writer whose work expresses that rare combination of literary talent and moral imagination, helping us to better understand the world and our place in it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with novelist and classicist MADELINE MILLER, author of THE SONG OF ACHILLES and CIRCE, about why Homer’s wisdom has never been more relevant, and why she decided to finally give a witch who changes men into pigs the starring role in her own drama. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join us for a conversation with ROGER MCNAMEE, the noted tech venture capitalist, early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook investor, who went from being a founding supporter of the world’s biggest and most profitable social media company to becoming one of its most influential critics. There is nothing the charismatic McNamee won’t discuss about Facebook's business model and practices, including his own adventures at the birth of Big Tech.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, internationally beloved author ISABEL ALLENDE, sits down virtually with her good friend, PBS/NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown, to discuss her latest novel “A LONG PETAL OF THE SEA.” Along the way, she brings us closer to the upheavals of the Spanish Civil War; Chile during Pinochet’s military dictatorship; the stories of refugees known and imagined; and, of course, the art of fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with Ayad Akhtar, the new president of PEN America and author of Homeland Elegies, about the uncanny experience of writing his latest novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with SUSAN ORLEAN, longtime New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author of The Library Book and The Orchid Thief, about libraries and memory, about the eccentric nature of curiosity, and about the journalistic surprises and personal satisfactions of finally writing her own story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his sixth novel, The Red Daughter, novelist (and regular Beyond the Page host, JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ imaginatively inhabits the life of Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926 – 2011), the only daughter of Joseph Stalin, who in his three decades as the tyrannical ruler of the Soviet Union was responsible for the deaths of far more than twenty million people. At the height of the Cold War, Svetlana became the most important Soviet citizen ever to defect to the West, arriving in New York to throngs of reporters and a nation hungry to hear her story. By her side was a young lawyer sent by the CIA to smuggle her into America. That lawyer was John Burnham Schwartz’s father. In this episode of Beyond the Page, moving between excerpts from his talk at the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference and a conversation with New Yorker Staff Writer Larissa MaFarqhuhar, Schwartz recreates for us the story of an extraordinary, troubled woman’s search for a new life and a place to belong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2002, the late civil rights champion Roger Wilkins gave one of the most memorable talks ever given at the Writers’ Conference. Roger’s great grandfather was a slave. Two generations later, Roger’s uncle, Roy Wilkins, became the legendary leader of the NAACP for over two decades. Three generations removed from the Mississippi slave fields, Roger Wilkins played pivotal roles in the civil rights advancements of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and later, as author, columnist, and professor, became a powerful voice of advocacy and hope for Black people in America. In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd and other black Americans, and in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, the words of Roger Wilkins, who died in 2017 at the age of 85, have never sounded more relevant, or vital, to the conversation about what kind of great nation America was meant to be, and must still become.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the country reeled under the weight of one shock after another—first the pandemic, then levels of mass unemployment not seen since the Great Depression, and most recently an unprecedented wave of protests against racism and police brutality—the June issue of The Atlantic magazine ran a cover story with the provocative title, “We Are Living in a Failed State.” The author was George Packer, one of the preeminent long-form journalists writing in the US today. His last three books—The Assassins Gate about the invasion of Iraq, The Unwinding about the economic and social transformation of America since the 1970s and Our Man, a biography of the larger than life American diplomat, Richard Holbrooke—each in its own unique way, tried to provide a window into the big challenges America has faced, both abroad and at home, over the last twenty-five years. In this episode, George talks with Liaquat Ahamed, a board member of the Sun Valley Writers Conference about where we are as a country, how we got here, and how a writer of non-fiction like him is able, using techniques drawn from the great novelists, “to wrap his arms around America.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What happens, what emotional threads get pulled when halfway around the globe a father gets sick from Covid? In an evocative personal essay for The New Yorker, My Father's Voice from Paris, novelist Alexander Maksik faces those questions and all the attendant thoughts and feelings provoked by them. Living in Maui with his wife, the novelist Madhuri Vijay, and his 6-month-old daughter Ela, Maksik's only contact with his father was through the phone. He listened as his father grew weaker knowing he could not go to him. It is both a story for our time and a timeless one about a son's love for a father. In this episode of Beyond the Page, Xander talks with Anne Taylor Fleming, associate director of the Sun Valley Writers' Conference, about the essay, about fatherhood and about Paris, the city both father and son know intimately.            Alexander Maksik is the author of the novels You Deserve Nothing, A Marker to Measure Drift, which was a 2013 New York Times Book Review Notable Book, and Shelter in Place. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the spring of 2016, author DANI SHAPIRO received the stunning news through a genealogy website that her father was not her biological father.  Her memoir, Inheritance, captures her urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that had been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years. It caused her to rethink everything she knew about herself, her roots, her family, the ground underneath her. In this episode of Beyond the Page, she talks with physician and author Abraham Verghese about living in a time in which science and technology are uncovering long-held secrets and about the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1996, (a 66-year-old) retired New York City public school teacher named Frank McCourt published his first book, a memoir about his brutally impoverished Irish Catholic childhood in the slums of Limerick. If ever there was a “rags-to-riches” story in publishing, Angela’s Ashes was it: The book would go on to receive the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, sell more than four million copies in hardcover alone, and become a film directed by Alan Parker. At the age of 66, Frank emerged almost overnight as one of the most celebrated authors in America. But if you knew Frank, you knew two things, at least: First, he never took anything at face value, including, and perhaps especially, his own extraordinary, late-blooming success. And second, for all the joy and gratitude he took from his unexpected good fortune, he refused to ever completely shed his (the) core of (coal-dark) anger that remained from (his childhood of poverty) growing up in terrible poverty. That he was able to so often turn that anger into unforgettable humor was just one of the many reasons why he was such a gifted writer. As he himself tells us, however, before becoming that writer, he somehow had to learn what he still needed to know. And in order to do that, he first had to become teacher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In one way or another, from the moment she left Haiti to settle in Brooklyn, New York, at age 12, Edwidge Danticat has been writing stories (prize-winning novels, memoirs, and essays) about the experience and effects of immigration. In conversation with Jeffrey Brown of the PBS NewsHour, she will talk about the ways that first seismic journey in her life has shaped all the journeys she has lived and written since. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu addressed the people of his city in May, 2017 about his decision to take down four Confederate monuments, including the statue of Robert E. Lee, he struck a nerve throughout the nation – his brave and inspirational speech has now been heard by millions.  As he described that experience in his powerful memoir In the Shadow of Statues – and as he tells it here – Mayor Landrieu’s relationship to the question of race in America is deeply personal and complicated, and begins for him with his own family’s history, and the history of the city of his birth. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing's brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun Valley is known for. Below is an edited recording of writer Alexandra Fuller at the 2012 Sun Valley Writers' Conference. Fuller, whose two best-selling, award-winning memoirs about her parents and her childhood in southern Africa, Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight and Cocktail Hour Under the Tree of Forgetfulness, indelibly evoking a landscape of love, loss, longing and reconciliation, will discuss both what she has found in the process of writing those books, and what she has lost. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

No playwright has challenged our perceptions of Muslims in America as boldly, and with such dramatic vigor, as has AYAD AKHTAR, who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Disgraced, the most produced play of the 2015-2016 season.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers' Conference. In this episode, we hear from the award-winning novelist Min Jin Lee. Speech, memory, and the power to tell one's story -- for Lee, these are not abstract, philosophical ideas. They are doorways leading her back to the process by which after great struggle she was able to find her own voice, first as a profoundly shy Korean girl growing up in America and eventually as the exceptional novelist she became. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers' Conference. In this episode, we hear from the great Israeli novelist David Grossman, widely regarded as part of the collective liberal conscience of Israel, about his masterpiece To the End of the Land.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices