Shelf Life

In the quiet hush of winter, there's a particular inclination to fold into the pages of unexplored narratives. Since Shelf Life paused its pulse last summer, I've wandered through a constellation of worlds chosen by  a new group of celebrated bibliophiles, including the actor Dylan Baker, the finance guru Ramit Sethi,  and new voices in fiction like Ada Zhang and Ben Purkett. Stay tuned to find out what books they think you should read. 

Each year  Deep Water Literary Festival in Narrowsburg, NY, identifies a unifying theme, often a particular literary work or an author, and builds a program to engage and interrogate the ways in which the theme resonates for contemporary audiences. In 2023 the festival explored the work of British novelist and journalist George Orwell. In this conversation the award-winning novelist, Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf and A Brief History of Seven Killings, and the poet and memoirist Hafizah Augustus Geter, author of The Black Period, parse the meaning and dynamics of dystopia, both literary and real-world. At a time when our lived reality feels like it's teetering on the edge of catastrophe, how does dystopian, apocalyptic, and speculative fiction speak to the world we live in, or help us to imagine alternatives. Find more information about the festival here. For Marlon James ten favorite books, head to One Grand Books here.

The writer and biographer D.J. Taylor on the rich, complicated and too-short life of one of the 20th century's greatest writers, George Orwell. Almost 75 years after his death we discuss why the author of 1984 matters as much, if not more, than ever. Includes an excerpt of Orwell's "Some Thoughts on the Common Today," read for Shelf Life by Tilda Swinton.

Novelist Christopher Bollen has been writing twisty thrillers with emotional depth for over a decade. His latest, The Lost Americans, takes readers to Cairo for a deftly-plotted murder mystery set in the high-stakes world of arms traders and Egypt's authoritarian government. As with his writing, so with his book choices: we get intrigue and suspense in London during the Blitz, courtesy of Graham Greene's 1943 espionage thriller, The Ministry of Fear, and a criminal mastermind in Agatha Christie's The Man in the Brown Suit, an early novel that helped establish the reputation of the Queen of Crime. 

Few of us need reminding that childhood can be a difficult and challenging time; but it can also be a magical one. That duality is at the heart of The Whalebone Theater, the best-selling debut novel of Joana Quinn. Childhood is central, also, to Frances Hodgson Burnett's 1911 classic novel, The Secret Garden, in which a group of three young children discover the transformative magic of nature during the course of three seasons in a remote house in the Yorkshire moors. It is one of two books that Quinn has chosen for Shelf Life. The other is Michael Ondaatje's prize-winning novel, The English Patient, a deeply poetic story of love and betrayal, identity and class that takes place in an abandoned Italian villa in the waning days of the Second World War. 

Tender hearted children growing up in oppressive and claustrophobic societies dominate the two novels chosen by the journalist and musician, Ari Shapiro. The first is Douglas Stuart's acclaimed sophomore novel, Young Mungo; the second is Belinda Huijuan Tang's A Map for the Missing. As one of the hosts for NPR's flagship program, All Things Considered, listeners will  be familiar with Shapiro's flair for bringing a lively curiosity to the world around us, whether it be reporting from India on rising sea levels, or Afghanistan in the company of the President. But while he has met more than his fair share of world leaders, scientists, and business executives, when he wants to really understand the world, he most often turns to novels. “The conversations that help me see the world most clearly are generally not with researchers, policy makers, or so-called experts,” Shapiro writes in his new book, The Best Strangers in the World. “They aren't with the people journalists crassly call ‘newsmakers' at all. They're with artists–especially writers.” 

Sera Gamble is perhaps best known as the screenwriter and showrunner for the hit Netflix show You, based on the novels of Caroline Kepnes, in which the romantic hero is not just a pretty face; he's a serial killer as well. You is not the first book that Gamble has turned into darkly entertaining TV. She also created The Magicians for the SyFy Channel, based on the best-selling novel by Lev Grossman. And she was a showrunner on Supernatural, a haunting fantasy series which ran for 15 seasons. Gamble has said, “I'm a horror writer in my heart, in that I always like to ask myself what scares me, and what scares us universally when I'm approaching a story. To me there's just about nothing scarier than the truth that we can never really know another person.” There are scares aplenty in the books she has chosen to talk about for Shelf Life: Stephen King's classic nail-biter, Misery, and Kazuo Ishiguro's tender and haunting dystopian novel Never Let Me Go. 

For 22 years Brooke Gladstone has been demystifying the media for listeners of her indispensable public radio show, On the Media.  But her long career, which began in summer stock theater, has also included stints as editor NPR's Weekend Edition and All Things Considered, as well as a three-year posting to Moscow as a correspondent for NPR. We'll get to see just how her knowledge of Russian history and language helps her appreciate her favorite novel, the Russian classic, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov, in which the story of Jesus and Pontius Pilate is juxtaposed with a story of the Devil wreaks havoc in 1930s Moscow's. 

A bus trip to Auschwitz in the company of the writer Jerry Stahl, who in 2016 set off for Poland to confront one of the darkest chapters in human history. The resulting book, Nein Nein Nein, is fast-paced, darkly absurd, and mordantly funny without ever minimizing the horrors at its center. In that regard it has something in common with Stahl's best-selling memoir, Permanent Midnight, in which he mined both humor and pathos from his harrowing experience as a spiraling heroin addict trying to manage a high-flying script-writing career in 1980s Hollywood. That book was, was made into a 1998 movie starring Ben Stiller as Stahl, is also a brilliant satire of Hollywood, so it's not surprising that he cites Nathaniel West's classic Hollywood novel, Day of the Locust, as the book that inspired him to be a writer. 

In this special holiday episode of Shelf Life, we took time out from our regular format to see what  guests old and new read in 2022. The episode starts with Joyce Maynard, who shot to fame with her 1998 memoir At Home in the World, in which she wrote candidly about the traumatic relationship she had with the author of Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger. But Maynard has also written many novels including Labor Day and To Die For, both made into acclaimed movies, as well as (more recently), Count the Ways.   After discovering what books found their way onto Joyce's reading list in 2022 we pose the same question to Darcey Steinke, author of Suicide Blonde, Jesus Saves, and Flash Count Diary, among others, before rounding out the show with the legendary Edmund White, now 82, a pioneer in contemporary queer fiction (A Boy's Own Story, The Beautiful Room is Empty)  and still writing up a storm (a new novel is due in May 2023) and the irrepressible director, writer, and performer John Waters, a debut novelist himself in 2022 with Liarmouth: A Feel Bad Romance.

If you sometimes fret that your opportunity to make your mark on the world has passed, take a leaf from Marion Nestle's career.  At 50, she found herself divorced, out of a job, and not able to get a credit card. Despite that she persevered, going back to school, publishing her career-changing book, Food Politics,  at the age of 66. It changed her life. Now aged 86, Nestle is still very much a full-throated advocate for debunking popular food myths, and exposing the links between dietary misinformation and a rapacious food industry driven by the bottom line. In her new memoir, Slow Cooked, she recounts both her difficult upbringing as a child of a loveless marriage, and the various twists and turns that lead to her epiphany that food and nutrition was to be her subject in life. The book she has chosen to talk about in this episode  is Sidney Mintz's groundbreaking study, Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. 

In this episode, Leila Taylor, the author of Darkly, an expansive rumination on the relationship between Gothic narratives and the Black experience in America, talks haunted houses courtesy of Shirley Jackson, meditations on a cockroach in a seminal work by the Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, and being a creepy kid who loved vampires and graveyards. But although Taylor gravitated to Goth culture, she was always aware that the mask never quite fit. “Whiteness was never something I aspired to, but I considered myself a member of this tribe,” she writes in Darkly. “I'll admit, I sometimes felt a bit Blacula-ish in their presence—a Black version of a white story.”

Do good people make for good novels? In this episode, the author Lydia Millet, best known for The Children's Bible, a National Book Award Finalist, talks about her latest novel, Dinosaurs,  the story of Gil, an unambiguously good man who is determined to make the world a better place.  “I think books should have an agenda, but I don't think you should be able to deliver a one-liner about what that agenda is,” she has said. “It should be an agenda felt by the reader, sensed by the reader, but not fully known. In my work, often there's a sort of agenda of empathy.” Later in the show we'll discuss what agenda might be lurking between the lines of two of Lydia Millet's favorite books - the short, tight prose pieces in Mary Ruefle's collection, The Most of It, and in Mary Robinson's 2001 novel, Why Did I Ever. And we'll hear from Mary Ruefle herself, as she reads from one of the pieces in The Most It.

How do we synthesize a 1000-plus years of history into a 300–page book. The historian Orlando Figes, who has made the study of Russia his lifelong work, shows us how in his new book, The Story of Russia.  Coming at a moment when Russia's history is being used as a pretext for the war in Ukraine, the timing could not be more pertinent. In part two of the show, the historian shares his passion for Gustav Flaubert's great novel, Madame Bovary.  Figes has published ten books on Russian and European history, including the prizewinning study of the Russian Revolution, A People's Tragedy, and has been a historical consultant on films such as Anna Karenina, starring Keira Knightlye, and a BBC adaptation of War & Peace. Born in London in 1958, his mother was Eva Figes, a Jewish immigrant who fled Nazi Germany with her parents and would go on to become an acclaimed novelist herself, and perhaps a seminal influence on her son.

In that esteemed group of soothsayers, we might  consider adding the novelist A.M. Homes. Homes has just published her eighth novel, The Unfolding, a wild trippy ride of a novel that opens on election night, 2008 and closes two months later at the inauguration of one Barack Hussein Obama.  Homes began the novel long before the 2016 election of Donald Trump, but much of it now reads more like non-fiction, an origins story of the January 6 coup, but with a novelist's curiosity and a refreshing, caustic wit. She has said, “The oddity or the absurdity of everyday experience is part of what I'm capturing. My sense is that life itself can be so incredibly painful and disturbing that if one is to survive it, one has to find the humor in it.” There is humor, too, in Edward Albee's one act play, An American Dream, one of the two works of fiction featured in this episode. The other is Richard Yates 1975 novel, Disturbing the Peace, a gimlet-eyed examination of a man in extremis.

Jonathan Escoffery  navigates identity, belonging and the hollow promise of the American Dream in his mesmerizing debut If I Survive You, a book that has been long-listed for the National Book Award. Escoffery  has said, “I love a compelling narrative voice—a bit of personality, a bit of humor couched in some other emotion. I love a story that teaches me something.” In this episode we find out what Escoffery has learned from the hyper masculine and often violent short stories of Denis Johnson's acclaimed collection, Jesus's Son, and the vignettes in the electric coming-of-age novel, We The Animals by Justin Torres. In between, insights on living through Hurricane Andrew, sleeping in his car, and the joys of ackee.

In his new memoir All Down Darkness Wide, the award-wining poet, Sean Hewitt, describes that experience of living with the chronically depressed in prose that glints and shimmers with a poetic sensibility influenced in part by his mentor, Gerard Manley Hopkins, a 19th century poet and Jesuit priest who, like Hewitt, struggled with his sexual orientation. For Hewitt that struggle meant learning at a young age how to play act convincingly. “I realized while I was writing the memoir just how prevalent the theme of lying was in my own life,” he has said. “Whether that was lying before I came out or continuing to lie in certain ways afterwards as a way of protecting myself or to create certain fictions. Writing a memoir seemed like the perfect antidote to that because it is a truth-telling exercise.” You could say that different kinds of truth-telling are represented in Hewitt's two book choices for this show. One is Alice Oswald's book-length eco-poem, Dart, which tells the story of an English river through the conversations of people who live and work on it. The other is The Land of Spices, a deeply autobiographical novel set in an Irish convent by the writer Kate O'Brien, a book that was banned at the time of its publication in 1941.

Michael Cunningham is the author of seven novels, as well as a short story collection and several non-fiction books, including his travelogue, Land's End: A Walk in Provincetown. He had intended to become an artist, but when a girlfriend induced him to read Virginia Woolf a seed was planted that would eventually blossoming into his 1998 Pulitzer-winning novel, The Hours, in which three narratives of women's lives alternate and intersect to luminous effect. Of his own craft he has said, “in the writing of a novel one must find a balance between calculation and intuition. Too much calculation, and it's just a Swiss music box, it just doesn't feel alive; and too much intuition and it's just a mess.” Getting that percentage of calculation to intuition right are the authors of the two books that Cunningham has selected to talk about today, including George Saunder's Booker Prize winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, and Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. 

Anthony Fabian, the director of this summer's sleeper hit, Mrs Harris Goes to Paris,  is a long-time Paul Gallico fan, and for this episode of Shelf Life he has chosen the author's beloved children's book, Jennie (known as The Abandoned in the U.S.), about a boy's metamorphosis into a cat, as one of his two favorite books. The other is Dancer, the mesmerizing 2003 novel by the Irish writer Colum McCann about the life of the legendary dancer Rudolf Nureyev.  

The Scottish novelist Douglas Stuart is a master of writing about tender souls in tough spaces. He is a tender soul himself, having grown up gay in working class Glasgow with an alcoholic mother (she  died when he was 16), an experience that informs both his debut novel, Shuggie Bain, which won the Booker Prize, and his 2022 follow-up, Young Mungo. In both books, Stuart has created indelible portraits of complicated mothers and their conflicted sons trying to navigate a hostile and soul-sapping world. “I'm always writing about loneliness and belonging and love,” he has said. “That's what keeps me coming back to the page.” Loneliness and belonging and love might also be what draws Stuart to the defiant heroine of Alan Warner's 1995 novel, Morvern Callar, and the tempestuous and violent world of 17th century soldiers in Cromwell's New Model Army in Maria McCann's As Meat Loves Salt, the two books he has chosen to talk about in this episode of Shelf Life.

Norwegian pop star Sondre Lerche has been making music and releasing albums since he was a teenager, songs that ache with yearning and that are underpinned by swooning strings,  bossa nova rhythms, and jazz stylings. It was always clear that Lerche was a romantic, but a romantic with a sometimes aching, melancholy heart. If you needed evidence of that, look no further than the two books he's chosen for this episode of shelf life - Marguerite Duras's The Lover, and Geir Gulliksen's The Story of a Marriage. Though very different, both novels are interested in the power dynamics of relationships, and the alchemy of love. 

It took William Boyd three failed attempts at writing a novel before he hit gold with A Good Man in Africa, which won him both the Whitbread Book Award for a first novel and the Somerset Maugham Award. That was in 1981, and Boyd hasn't stopped to draw breath since. His 16th novel, Trio, has just been published in paperback, and another novel will be published this year. Among his other achievements is bringing James Bond back to life, in the novel Solo–in which the martini-swigging spy undertakes a mission to the fictional country of Zanzarim, then in the midst of a civil war. As it happens, a fictional country on the brink of civil war is the conceit for Scoop, Evelyn Waugh's famous comic novel of war reporters in the field, one of two books that Boyd has chosen for this episode of Shelf Life. The other is Muriel Spark's A Far Cry from Kensington, a gimlet eyed portrait of London's post-war publishing world. 

Courtney Maum, the author of three novels, including I Am Having So Much Fun Here Without You, Touch, and Costalegre,  inspired by the real life figure of Peggy Guggenheim and her daughter. Maum has also just published a memoir, The Year of the Horses, in which she writes about turning to a childhood passion for horses as a response to depression, and is the author of a best-selling guide for budding writers on navigating the travails of publishing. She has said that when she started writing her first book, in 2003, “I wasn't professional about my writing: I didn't research, I didn't outline, I didn't stress. I was very romantic and naïve about the process—I would wait until a mood hit me, and then I'd just start writing. But you can't pay your mortgage by being verbally romantic! So now, I write like a goddamn professional.” Professionalism is one hallmark of the novels that Maum has chosen to talk about today, both of which feature two of the most distinctive voices I've yet to come across. The first, published in 2020, is Hex by Rebecca Dinerstein Knight,  about an expelled biology PHD candidate, obsessed with botanical toxins; the second is Wolf in White Van, a novel by the musician John Darnielle.  

Hardboiled detective noir, and a multi-generational historical saga take center stage in the reading life of the actor Melissa Gilbert, best known for playing Laura Ingalls Wilder in the wildly successful TV series, Little House on the Prairie, which ran for nine years, and nine seasons. A quintessential bit of myth making of the America west, it gained new fans during the pandemic, thanks in part to its values of self-reliance and fortitude in the face of adversity. Gilbert recently  published a new memoir, Back to the Prairie, a funny, charming, and inspiring account of leaving behind her Hollywood life for a dilapidated cottage in the Catskills, where she and her husband, the actor Timothy Busfield, found a new community. my guest in this episode of Shelf Life. 

The legendary British playwright Sir David Hare is widely regarded as British theater's most fervent chronicler of his country's moral failings, to use the words of New York Times critic Bill Brantley. Of himself,  Hare has said, “It's usually assumed that there are two groups of people in the world, those who obey the rules and those who disobey the rules, but in fact there's a third group to which I belong: the people who don't understand the rules.” Luckily for us, that misunderstanding, or curiosity, has been channeled into 39 plays over 50 years, as well as notable adaptations of other works, including screenplays for Michael Cunningham's The Hours and Bernard Schlink's The Reader, for both of which he received Academy Award nominations. But Hare's entry into playwriting was something of a happy accident, after a theater troupe he was working with, found itself in sudden need of a play. Hare jumped in, turning around a script in four days. That work, which explored the then-nascent feminist movement, exhibited a keen interest in strong female protagonists that has marked his career ever since. It makes sense, then, that one of his book choices for Shelf Life is Mary Gabriel's Ninth Street Women about the contribution of five female artists who did anything but play by the rules, as well as Wallace Shawn's ominous short play, The Designated Mourner, dense with allusions to tyranny and complacency.

It's summer, and we're ready for a nice, shady nook,  or a perfect beach, and some great new book recommendations. Since Shelf Life went  on hiatus in February, I've been busy reading more books selected by luminaries I admire, from Pulitzer-winner, Michael Cunningham and legendary playwright David Hare to Norwegian troubadour Sondre Lerche. Stay tuned to find out what books they think you should read. 

Love takes center stage in the short stories of the celebrated Irish writer Kevin Barry, best known for his 2019 novel, Night Boat to Tangier, long listed for The Booker Prize. Barry's third collection of short stories, That Old Country Music, now out in paperback, is a masterclass in how to write about men undone or remade by love, by turns comic, troubling, and sometimes devastating. “I think every novel I've written and every story I've written is essentially about people who can't escape their own past,” he has said. “They can never get past the blood, and they can never get past their background, and they're constantly striving to break out of that shadow. Unable to escape his past is one way of describing Herzog, who elevated his creator, author Saul Bellow, into the pantheon of great American writers, and onto the bookshelves of a young Kevin Barry. The other book Barry has chosen is Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard's love song to the fecundity and cruelty and majesty of nature.

When the award-winning journalist Meredith Talusan published her memoir, Fairest, in 2020, it was widely praised for the unflinching honesty with which Talusan told a complex story of gender and identity in her own terms. It's no surprise, then, to find a similar animating spirit -- at once vulnerable and forthright -- at the heart  of the two novels Talusan has picked as favorites for Shelf Life: Jamaica Kincaid's modern classic, Lucy, published in 1990, and Susan Choi's My Education, published in 2013. In both stories the reader is presented with assertive protagonists, alive to their passions and desires, people for whom identity is sometimes messy, often urgent, and always singular.  For Talusan, who made her name as a journalist exploring transgender identity, the personal and the political are never far apart.  “So many of us have to be Swiss Army knives,” she has said. “I can't just be an author. Trans people can't just be models or actors or doctors. We also have to perform the political and emotional labor of being activists.”

We step into the world of a sinister gourmand, in John Lanchester's novel of 90s hedonism, The Debt to Pleasure, take a trip to Florida's orange groves in the genial company of John McPhee, and globe trot with our guest, the veteran BBC food journalist, Dan Saladino, author of Eating to Extinction, a timely and endlessly fascinating study of some of the world's rarest foods and why we need to save them. A recipient of a James Beard Award, Saladino has spent the last two decades tracking down Indigenous and ancient foods that are on the brink of extinction, often hanging on with the help of a few dedicated farmers. “Food shows us where real power lies,” he writes. “It can explain conflicts and wars; showcase human creativity and invention; account for the rise and fall of empires; and expose the causes and consequences of disasters. Food stories are perhaps the most important stories of all.”

In this episode of Shelf Life we are time traveling, courtesy of two 2021 National Book Award finalists: Anthony Doerr's critically acclaimed Cloud Cuckoo Land which takes readers to 15th century Constantinople, 20th century Idaho, and the year 2064; and Hanif Abdurraqib's latest book of essays, A Little Devil in America, a collection that pirouettes between decades to celebrate the history of Black performance in America. Both are  favorites of Brendan Slocumb, a classically-trained musician who has just published The Violin Conspiracy, a page-turning mystery in which a young Black musical prodigy inherits a priceless Stradivarius only to have it stolen from his hotel room on the eve of performing at the world's most prestigious music contest. Like his protagonist, Slocumb started playing violin at nine in a public schools music program, and has credited that experience for determining the shape of his life. “When my friends were out running the streets, I was in rehearsals,” he has said. “When they were breaking into houses, I was practicing Mozart or Dvořák."

Broome's memoir, Punch Me Up to the Gods, the winner of the 2021 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction, is a deeply felt account of growing up Black and gay in the 1980s. The writer, who joins Shelf Life to chat about Mary Karr's The Liar's Club and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation, is also recipient of the grand prize in Carnegie Mellon University's Martin Luther King Jr. Writing Awards, and is the K. Leroy Irvis Fellow and instructor in The Writing Program at the University of Pittsburgh.  He  has said, “For a long time, I thought stories functioned mostly as an escape from the quotidian responsibilities and minutiae of life. But I don't know that I believe stories are a way to escape anymore. I'm starting to believe that they are an essential part of life itself—a necessary element that keeps us moving forward.” 

Darcey Steinke is the author of five novels and a memoir, as well as most recently, the fragmentary investigation, Flash Count Diary: Menopause and the Vindication of Natural Life. Her work has been described as suburban Gothic and frequently borrows from her own life, drawing on her complicated relationship with her late mother, a one-time model and pageant girl, and the distant figure of her father–a Lutheran pastor. In her novel Sister Golden Hair, the narrator is a teenager whose father used to be a pastor, and whose mother was once a beauty queen. The protagonist of her novel, Jesus Saves is haunted by her mother's misery, but it was her second novel, Suicide Blonde, a candid, deeply poetic tale of sexual exploration published in 1992, that turned Steinke into a literary sensation, elevating her into the company of celebrated outlaw writers, like William Burroughs and Kathy Acker. She says, “Questions about my relationship to the universal force or God, or how we're supposed to be oriented to this life or how we're meant to live with the fragility of the human body, these questions are central to me, these are the questions that drive my work.”

Joyce Maynard has written ten novels, including To Die For and Labor Day (both turned into acclaimed movies) and, most recently, Count the Ways, an epic portrait of an American family over four decades as it navigates a devastating accident against the backdrop of historical events and shifting  social attitudes. Maynard's 2017 memoir, The Best of Us, tells the agonizing story of her second husband's battle with pancreatic cancer, but she is best known for her 1998 memoir, At Home in the World, in which she wrote about her teenage relationship with J.D. Salinger, in the process soliciting – in her words - near universal condemnation from those who felt she had sullied a great writer's reputation. In a 2018 essays for The New York Times, she wrote that the vicious reaction “did not destroy my career or my emotional well-being, but it came close.” Accused by one critic of “oversharing” she has a pithy response:  “It's shame, not exposure, that I can't endure. I've lived with so much of it. It's the things that people don't talk about that scare me.” 

Not many of us can brag they've been murdered on screen by both Sir Ben Kingsley and Bill Paxton; Becky Ann Baker can, in the respective thrillers The Confession and A Simple Plan.  “I always say we got into this business to die, because it's the most fun you can have,” she once said. Her  long list of movie, TV, and theater credits also includes iconic shows such as Freaks & Geeks and the HBO's millennial-skewering comedy, Girls, for which she was nominated for an Emmy. Although she has built a reputation as one of our most accomplished character actors in shows as varied as Big Little Lies, The Good Wife, and Blacklist, Baker began her career primarily in musicals, as a singer who could dance. It took ten years of open casting calls and auditions before she was able to sign with an agent. “I wasn't your thin little blonde,” she has said. “I was a second banana character person. I don't think anybody knew what to do with me, so it took a while.” 

The writer and essayist  John Birdsall grew up in San Francisco where he learned to cook at Green's restaurant before exiting the kitchen after 17 years to focus on food criticism and essays. He's won several James Beard awards for his writing, notably for his game-changing essay for Lucky Peach magazine, "America, your food is so gay," in which he spells out the precise ways in which a trio of gay men influenced American food culture. One of those men was James Beard, now the subject of Birdsall's is much-praised biographyThe Man Who Ate Too Much, in which he excavates hundreds of sources to create a deeply felt portrait of Beard, often dubbed the Dean of American Cookery. In this episode, Birdsall explains the ways in which Beard changed American food habits, and how his sexual identity impacted his life and career. 

In this episode,  the best-selling YA author, Nic Stone, revisits two childhood faves: Louis Sachar's classic 1998 novel, Holes, and Jeffrey Eugenides' The Virgin Suicides - two books that left their impression on her own career as the author of  young adult novels that center the stories of  Black youths so long absent in fiction. Best known for her 2017 debut, Dear Martin, the story of justice McAllister, a Black Ivy league bound teenager, trying to make sense of a world that insists on seeing him as a criminal, her books are driven by a need to tell stories about the lives of adolescents, complicated by race and sexuality in ways that reflect her own coming of age in 1990s Atlanta. It was at Spelman College, a historically Black liberal arts college for women when, Stone says, she finally found a sense of self that gave her the confidence to become a writer: "I feel that at Spelman, I got the message that I had value because I exist. If I didn't exist, there would be nothing for me to contribute to the world. But the fact that I exist means that there are things that I have to give that nobody else can give. I think that's something that everybody should internalize. "

When he's not making movies, TV shows, podcasts, or performing in cabaret, Alan Cumming also finds time to write books.  He's published a novel, a memoir, a book on photography, and several children's books based on his beloved (and dearly departed) dogs, Honey and Leon. His latest book is called Baggage, and feels a lot like having Alan Cumming as your very favorite guest at a lively dinner party. Who wouldn't want that?  For those who've been hiding under a rock, it was his mesmerizing performance as the emcee in Cabaret that shot Cumming  to fame in the United States. He's had many notable roles since, from crowd pleasers like Spy Kids, to playing resident scene stealer Eli Gold, in the long running CBS courtroom drama The Good Wife. For this episode of Shelf Life he talks about Close Up, the memoir of an out gay Scottish actor, John Fraser, and After Leaving Mr. McKenzie, the 1931 novel by Jean Rhys.

Sarah Waters racy Victorian picaresque, Tipping the Velvet, was published in 1998, and garnered huge attention and praise. It was adapted by the BBC  in 2002, a genuine television event that coincided with the publication of her third novel, Fingersmith, a heart-stopping gothic thriller — again with a lesbian couple at its center. Fingersmith was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the first of three novels to achieve the distinction, the others being The Night Watch and The Little Stranger, a spine chiller that Stephen King anointed the best book he read in 2009. She has said: It's interesting that I've become known as a feminist writer; we tend to think of feminism as being about women breaking out of old models, and finding new ways of living but I'm really much more drawn to writing about the limitations on women's lives, because I think I'm interested in the fact that most people in life do feel rather limited and there is something rather tragic about the way in which we don't really realize our great hopes and desires. That's the sort of stuff that draws me as a writer more than anything else.”

John Waters once said nothing is more impotent than an unread library. In this episode, the cult film director responsible for such enduring cult classics as Pink Flamingos, Female Trouble, Cry Baby and Hairspray talks about Serious Pleasures, Philip Hoare's extraordinary biography of Stephen Tennant, one of the so-called Bright Young Things who fascinated and scandalized 1920s Britain, alongside other headline-grabbing figures of the day such as Cecil Beaton and the Mitford sisters.  "I like to be taken into a world that's very foreign to me, and learn something," he says. "I  like somebody who's smart, and who can talk about their feelings. That's why I like biographies, just to see mistakes that people made, and what they did with success and failure." What does he love about the life of Tennant? "I love that he went to bed for 17 years because life made him too giddy." In this episode we also talk to Philip Hoare, the author of Serious Pleasures, about the challenges of writing a biography when your subject has just died.