GCL Book Club

In 1972, a group of young people from Clearwater, Florida, traveled to western North Carolina on their way to a Rolling Stones concert. When they were settled in their campsite for the night, the local sheriffs showed up with weapons, killing one young man and assaulting several others. Historian Timothy Silver thoroughly investigated the case and wrote a riveting book about it called Death in Briar Bottom.Buy the book!Buy the ebook!

Emma Pattee is an accomplished climate journalist who's written for The Atlantic, The New York Times, and more. Now we hear from her about her debut novel, Tilt.

In Sally Wen Mao's collection, NINETAILS, she reimagines the nine-tailed fox spirit from Asian folklore in a series of short stories interwoven with a novella.

In the literary thriller The Red Grove, a community of women live among redwoods, until a death changes everything.

In Bonnie Jo Campbell's latest novel The Waters, three generations of women—a matriarch who concocts healing potions, her daughters who scatter to various points, and her granddaughter, who's left to care for herself—live alone on an island.

The three thousand sheriffs in this country wield a tremendous amount of power, have little accountability, and are difficult to remove from office. The Highest Law in the Land explores more about this seemingly untouchable office.

The Man in the Banana Trees is a new short story collection by New Orleans writer Marguerite Sheffer. It's an original collection that melds science fiction, ghost stories, and horror with humor and realism.

On this episode of the GCL Book Club, we hear from prolific author Caroline Leavitt about her page-turner of a book, Days of Wonder, about justice, guilt, forgiveness, and reinvention.

This week on the Book Club, an international reporter takes on his most difficult story yet when he looks for his father's identity in a new memoir called A Question of Paternity.

Author Julia Phillips was nominated for a National Book Award for her very first novel, Disappearing Earth. Now Phillips has a second novel, a page-turner called Bear, in which two sisters in their twenties find themselves visited by a bear, with differing responses.

Devil is Fine is a novel in which the main character—a biracial writer—discovers that he has inherited a plantation from the white side of his family. Author John Vercher joins us to talk about it.

Carrie Sun spent several years at an extremely successful hedge fund, then wrote a memoir about it. Hear her discuss Private Equity.

Novelist Clare Beams, author of THE GARDEN, joins us. In 1948, women who have suffered multiple miscarriages gather at a private hospital to be treated by the husband-and-wife team of doctors there. Then things start to go wrong.

Kayla Min Andrews finished and published her mother's novel The Fetishist after she died.

This live edition of the Gulf Coast Life Book Club features Fort Myers writer Annabelle Tometich and her new memoir, The Mango Tree.

Kaveh Akbar is a well-known poet, publishing regularly in The New Yorker and elsewhere. Now he has written a novel, and it is excellent.

Patrick Bringley was a museum guard at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art for more than 10 years. In his beautiful memoir, he shares what he learned.

On today's episode, Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. A young woman who may be from another planet helps us see our own home more clearly.

In the novel NIGHT WHEREVER WE GO, author Tracey Rose Peyton traces the lives of six enslaved women on a small Texas farm.

Your Table is Ready is a funny and endearing memoir of high-end restaurant life in New York City.

A powerful story of a young woman overcoming huge obstacles to succeed... but maybe not in the way you might think.

We hear from Christian Kiefer, whose new novel THE HEART OF IT ALL is set in a struggling rust-belt town in Ohio.

Memoir of an army captain in Afghanistan who returns home and does the hard work to recover from PTSD.

In her new book The Migrant Chef: The Life and Times of Lalo Garcia, journalist Laura Tillman traces Lalo's journey from picking produce in the fields to becoming a beloved chef and owner of a leading Mexico City restaurant.

Amy Grace Loyd's latest novel takes place in a headache clinic in an abandoned church. It explores physical and psychic pain.

Katherine Lin's new novel is a page-turner that takes place in a luxurious hotel in the South of France.

Pulitzer Prize nominee Linda Villarosa's book UNDER THE SKIN examines why Black Americans' health outcomes are so much worse than those of white Americans.

Victor LaValle's new novel introduces us to a little-known chapter of American history: Single or widowed women who homesteaded in places like Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas.

This interview with Alka Joshi and Annette Chavez Macias was recorded live at the Southwest Florida Reading Festival in Fort Myers.

On this episode of the Gulf Coast Life Book Club, National Book Award finalist Allegra Goodman talks about her new novel, Sam.

In Dizz Tate's new novel Brutes, a group of 13-year- old Florida girls try to find one of their classmates when she goes missing.

Aubrey Gordon is a well-informed voice on anti-fat bias as well as misinformation surrounding weight loss. She talks to us about her new book You Just Need to Lose Weight and 19 Other Myths about Fat People.

On this epsiode of the GCL Book Club, we talk about Wendell Steavenson's new novel Margot, a coming-of-age story set in the 1950s and 1960s.

We hear from former This American Life producer Stephanie Foo, who talks about her compelling memoir What My Bones Know: A Memoir of Healing from Complex Trauma.

Stella Levi was 92 when she began telling her story of breing a Holocaust survivor. Michael Frank captured it in One Hundred Saturdays.

Author Maria Teresa Hart discusses her personal and cultural history of dolls that is called, simply, Doll.

Lynn Steger Strong's new novel Flight explores adult children gathering at Christmas after the death of their mother.

Author Lynne Tillman describes caring for her mother through normal pressure hydrocephalus, which causes fluid on the brain.

Joan is an ICU doctor in a busy New York City hospital. She's extremely devoted to her work and interested in little else, which causes people around her to try to steer her toward other things in life. We talk to Weike Wang about her new novel, Joan is Okay.

We hear from poet and essayist Diana Goetsch about her new memoir This Body I Wore, in which she describes coming out as a trans woman at age 50.

Writer Elizabeth Crane had a loving marriage of 15 years—or so she thought, until one day her husband said: “I'm not happy.” Her new memoir, called This Story Will Change, takes us through that time in her life.

We hear from Marcy Dermansky, author of Hurricane Girl, a fascinating, funny, horrifying, relatable and very gripping read.

Beverly Gooden's book dispels misunderstandings about intimate partner violence and is an indispensable source of education and hope on the subject.

This time on the Gulf Coast Life Book Club, we hear from Lydia Conklin, author of the short story collection Rainbow Rainbow, which Time magazine named one of the most anticipated books of the year.

Dr. Yungman Kwak is a Korean ob-gyn who immigrated to the US after the Korean War and took up his practice in the rural Minnesota town of Horse's Breath. Now, toward the end of his career, the foundation he's built is shifting. Marie Myung-Ok Lee's new novel The Evening Hero is Kwak's story.

Six Kentucky nuns set up a hospital in India in 1947. Jyoti Thottam wrote the history in Sisters of Mokama and we talk to her on GCL Book Club.

Alison Espach discusses her outstanding new coming-of-age novel Notes on Your Sudden Disappearance.

This time on the GCL Book Club, we hear from Sarah Weinman about her gripping new book Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free.

Grant Ginder's comic novel Let's Not Do That Again explores family life within a turbulent political framework.

This week, we listen back to one of our favorite GCL Book Club conversations of the year. Poet and journalist Clint Smith's How the Word is Passed, A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America, is essential reading.

Essayist Laurie Easter writes about grief and loss as well as love and redemption.