Podcasts about los angeles times book award

Nobel Prize-winning author Abdulrazak Gurnah sits down with Adam Biles in store to discuss his new novel, Theft. Their conversation delves into the intricate interplay between personal history and the enduring legacy of colonialism, examines the complex dynamics of family and servitude, and discusses the challenge of transcending inherited narratives. Buy Theft: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/theft-2*Abdulrazak Gurnah is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021. He is the author of ten novels: Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Dottie, Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award), Admiring Silence, By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), Desertion (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize) The Last Gift, Gravel Heart, and Afterlives, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Fiction 2021 and longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. He was Professor of English at the University of Kent, and was a Man Booker Prize judge in 2016. He lives in Canterbury.Adam Biles is Literary Director at Shakespeare and Company. His latest novel, Beasts of England, a to Animal Farm, is available now. Buy a signed copy here: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/books/beasts-of-englandListen to Alex Freiman's latest EP, In The Beginning: https://open.spotify.com/album/5iZYPMCUnG7xiCtsFCBlVa?si=h5x3FK1URq6SwH9Kb_SO3wAuthor portrait Hugo Clair Torregrosa (c) Shakespeare and Company Paris Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Abdulrazak Gurnah is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021. He is the author of ten novels: Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Dottie, Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award), Admiring Silence, By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), Desertion (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize) The Last Gift, Gravel Heart, and Afterlives, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Fiction 2021 and longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. He was Professor of English at the University of Kent, and was a Man Booker Prize judge in 2016. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest novel Theft. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

One cannot turn on the news on TV or read a newspaper without hearing the words - Constitutional crisis. There's so much confusion about whether we are in a Constitutional Crisis or not, Professor Alexandra Keyssar rejoined the podcast to help us understand what a Constitutional crisis is and whether we are in one.Alexander Keyssar is the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy. An historian by training, he has specialized in the exploration of historical problems that have contemporary policy implications. His book, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (2000), was named the best book in U.S. history by both the American Historical Association and the Historical Society; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. A significantly revised and updated edition of The Right to Vote was published in 2009. His 1986 book, Out of Work: The First Century of Unemployment in Massachusetts, was awarded three scholarly prizes. Keyssar is coauthor of The Way of the Ship: America's Maritime History Reenvisioned, 1600-2000 (2008), and of Inventing America, a text integrating the history of technology and science into the mainstream of American history. In addition, he has co-edited a book series on Comparative and International Working-Class History. In 2004/5, Keyssar chaired the Social Science Research Council's National Research Commission on Voting and Elections, and he writes frequently for the popular press about American politics and history. Keyssar's latest book, entitled Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? (2020), is published by Harvard University Press.

Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, playwright, and screenwriter. She also paints watercolors and makes collages. She was born in Boston and grew up in Manchester-by-the-sea, Massachusetts, with six siblings who are all artists. Her first novel was Monkeys, published in 1986. She wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci's “Stealing Beauty” (1995.) Her novel Evening, nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award, was a worldwide bestseller and became a major motion picture in 2007. Her stories have received O. Henry Awards and have been anthologized widely, including The Best American Short Stories. Her eighth book, a collection of stories, Why I Don't Write, was published in 2020. Her daughter, Ava, was born in 2001. She teaches in the graduate writing program at Stony Brook University and privately at her kitchen table. She lives in both New York City and on North Haven, an island off the coast of Maine. Her new book is Don't Be a Stranger, and is the focus of today's show.  Susan joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to discuss naming characters, the hubbub that surrounds September to May trysts, Lolita, epigraphs, the conflict between motherhood and desire, structure, book covers, and more. For more information on Writers on Writing and extra writing perks, visit our Patreon page. For a one-time donation, visit Ko-fi. To listen to past interviews, visit our website. Support the show by buying books at our bookstore on bookshop.org. We've stocked it with titles from our guests, as well as some of our personal favorites. You support independent bookstores and our show when you purchase books through the store. And on Spotify, you'll find to an album's worth of typewriter music like what you hear on the show. Look for the artist, Just My Type. Email the show at writersonwritingpodcast@gmail.com. We love to hear from our listeners. (Recorded on November 12, 2024)  Host: Barbara DeMarco-BarrettHost: Marrie StoneMusic and sound editing: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)

Roxi Power talks with Brenda Hillman, winner this month of the Northern California Book Reviewers' Fred Cody Award  for Lifetime Achievement, about her 11th book of poetry with Wesleyan University Press, In a Few Minutes Before Later.   We discuss her new trans-genre tetralogy about time: how to find calm during the Anthropocene by being in time in multiple ways: sinking into the micro-minutes; performing micro-activism; and celebrating the microbiome. We explore her influences–from Blake to Bergson, Clare to Baudelaire, as well as the less celebrated moss, owls, and wood rats that appear frequently in her eco-poetry.  Alive with humor, witness, creative design and punctuation–what Forrest Gander calls “typographical expressionism”--Hillman's poetry teaches us how to abide in crisis from Covid to California fires, living in paradox as a way to transcend despair. Brenda Hillman shares the Fred Cody Lifetime Achievement Award with with Isabel Allende, Daniel Ellsberg, Michael Pollan, Ishmael Reed, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Alice Walker and others. Winner of the William Carlos Williams Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the International Griffin Poetry Prize (for Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire, 2013), the Northern California Book Award (for Extra Hidden Life, among the Days, 2018) and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the Academy of American Poets, Brenda Hillman was born in Tucson, Arizona and has been an active part of the Bay Area literary community since 1975.   She has edited an edition of Emily Dickinson's poems for Shambhala Press, and co-edited and co-translated several books.  She is director of the Poetry Program at the Community of Writers in Olympic Valley and is on the regular poetry staff ad Napa Valley Writers Conference. Hillman just retired from teaching in the MFA Program at St. Mary's College in Moraga, CA.  She has worked as an activist for social and environmental justice. She is a mother, grandmother, and is married to poet, Robert Hass.  Photograph by Robert Hass.

Alexander Keyssar is the Matthew W. Stirling Jr. Professor of History and Social Policy. An historian by training, he has specialized in the exploration of historical problems that have contemporary policy implications. His book, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (2000), was named the best book in U.S. history by both the American Historical Association and the Historical Society; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. A significantly revised and updated edition of The Right to Vote was published in 2009.  Prof. Keyssar chaired the Social Science Research Council's National Research Commission on Voting and Elections, and he writes frequently for the popular press about American politics and history. Keyssar's latest book, entitled Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? (2020), is published by Harvard University Press. problem for President Biden than Donald Trump,

Alice Notley has published over forty books of poetry, most recently For the Ride (Penguin Books) and Eurynome's Sandals (PURH). Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Award, the Griffin International Prize, two NEA Grants, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a lifetime achievement award. She is also a visual artist and collagist, and a book of her poem-drawings is forthcoming from Archway Editions. Since 1992, Notley has lived and worked in Paris, France.www.miafunk.com www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Alice Notley has published over forty books of poetry, most recently For the Ride (Penguin Books) and Eurynome's Sandals (PURH). Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Award, the Griffin International Prize, two NEA Grants, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a lifetime achievement award. She is also a visual artist and collagist, and a book of her poem-drawings is forthcoming from Archway Editions. Since 1992, Notley has lived and worked in Paris, France.www.miafunk.com www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Alice Notley has published over forty books of poetry, most recently For the Ride (Penguin Books) and Eurynome's Sandals (PURH). Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Award, the Griffin International Prize, two NEA Grants, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a lifetime achievement award. She is also a visual artist and collagist, and a book of her poem-drawings is forthcoming from Archway Editions. Since 1992, Notley has lived and worked in Paris, France.www.miafunk.com www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Alice Notley has published over forty books of poetry, most recently For the Ride (Penguin Books) and Eurynome's Sandals (PURH). Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Award, the Griffin International Prize, two NEA Grants, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a lifetime achievement award. She is also a visual artist and collagist, and a book of her poem-drawings is forthcoming from Archway Editions. Since 1992, Notley has lived and worked in Paris, France.www.miafunk.com www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Alice Notley has published over forty books of poetry, most recently For the Ride (Penguin Books) and Eurynome's Sandals (PURH). Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Award, the Griffin International Prize, two NEA Grants, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a lifetime achievement award. She is also a visual artist and collagist, and a book of her poem-drawings is forthcoming from Archway Editions. Since 1992, Notley has lived and worked in Paris, France.www.miafunk.com www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Alice Notley has published over forty books of poetry, most recently For the Ride (Penguin Books) and Eurynome's Sandals (PURH). Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Award, the Griffin International Prize, two NEA Grants, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a lifetime achievement award. She is also a visual artist and collagist, and a book of her poem-drawings is forthcoming from Archway Editions. Since 1992, Notley has lived and worked in Paris, France.www.miafunk.com www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

Alice Notley has published over forty books of poetry, most recently For the Ride (Penguin Books) and Eurynome's Sandals (PURH). Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Award, the Griffin International Prize, two NEA Grants, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a lifetime achievement award. She is also a visual artist and collagist, and a book of her poem-drawings is forthcoming from Archway Editions. Since 1992, Notley has lived and worked in Paris, France.www.miafunk.com www.creativeprocess.info www.oneplanetpodcast.org IG www.instagram.com/creativeprocesspodcast

As the 2022 midterm elections approach, many citizens are worried about the state of our democracy. And with good reason. Our electoral system increasingly produces leaders who do not represent the will of the majority. The national popular vote was lost, for instance, by two of the last four presidents. In the evenly divided United States Senate, the 578,000 citizens of Wyoming have as much representation as the 39 million of California. And Gerrymandering? Aided by complex computer algorithms, it's easier than ever for political parties to choose their Congressional voters—and harder for majorities to dislodge them.This month, we discuss the history and state of our democracy with Harvard Kennedy School Professor Alex Keyssar. Professor Keyssar's books include The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States, which was named the best book in U.S. history for the year 2001 by both the American Historical Association and the Historical Society and was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. In 2004 and 2005, Keyssar chaired the Social Science Research Council's National Research Commission on Voting and Elections. Keyssar's latest book, Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College? looks at that institution's persistence despite several attempts throughout history to reform it. Alex Keyssar got his PhD from GSAS in 1977.

In this episode, I'm chatting with Abdulzarak Gurnah about how his life has changed since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, 2021, his new novel, Afterlives, colonialism in Africa, and what drew him from Tanzania to the county of Kent in the UK and a life dedicated to teaching.Abdulrazak Gurnah is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021. He is the author of ten novels: Memory of Departure, Pilgrims Way, Dottie, Paradise (shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award), Admiring Silence, By the Sea (longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book Award), Desertion (shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize) The Last Gift, Gravel Heart, and Afterlives, which was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Fiction 2021 and longlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. He was Professor of English at the University of Kent, and was a Man Booker Prize judge in 2016. He lives in Canterbury.Afterlives, Abdulrazak GurnahBooks by Abdulrazak GurnahSupport the show

This podcast is a recording of the 2015 StAnza International Poetry Festival Round Table event in which SPL Programme Manager and poet Jennifer (JL) Williams was in conversation with the poet Alice Notley. It was recorded shortly before she won the 2015 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Alice Notley has published over thirty books of poetry, including (most recently) Songs and Stories of the Ghouls, Negativity's Kiss, and the chapbook Secret ID. With her sons Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, she edited both The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan and The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan. Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Award, the Griffin Prize, two NEA Grants, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. She lives and writes in Paris, France. Many thanks to StAnza International Poetry Festival and to James Iremonger for the music in this podcast. Image: Alice Notley 11.03.11 by kellywritershouse, under a Creative Commons licence

In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Anne Applebaum, David Frum, Barton Gellman, and George Packer about the ongoing threat to American democracy posed by Republican misinformation and disinformation regarding the 2020 Presidential Election and the attack on the Capitol on January 6th, 2021. Anne Applebaum is a journalist, a prize-winning historian, a staff writer for The Atlantic, and a senior fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where she co-leads a project on 21st century disinformation and co-teaches a course on democracy. Her books include Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine; Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944-1956; and Gulag: A History, which won the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for non-fiction. Her most recent book is The New York Times bestseller, Twilight of Democracy, an essay on democracy and authoritarianism. She was a Washington Post columnist for fifteen years and a member of the editorial board; she has also been the deputy editor of The Spectator and a columnist for several British newspapers. Her writing has appeared in The New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, among many other publications. Website: anneapplebaum.com Twitter: @anneapplebaum David Frum is a senior editor at The Atlantic and the author of Trumpocalypse: Restoring American Democracy, his tenth book. Frum spent most of his career in conservative media and research institutions, including the Manhattan Institute and the American Enterprise Institute. He is a past chairman of Policy Exchange, the leading center-right think tank in the United Kingdom, and a former director of the Republican Jewish Coalition. In 2001-2002, he served as a speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush. Frum holds a B.A. and M.A. in history from Yale and a law degree from Harvard. Website: davidfrum.com Twitter: @davidfrum George Packer is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes about American politics, culture, and foreign affairs. He is the author, most recently, of Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal. He is also the author of The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America (winner of the National Book Award), Our Man: Richard Holbrooke and the End of the American Century (winner of The Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Hitchens Prize), and seven other books. Barton Gellman, a critically honored author and journalist, is a staff writer at The Atlantic and senior fellow at the Century Foundation in New York. He is the author, most recently, of Dark Mirror: Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State and Angler: The Cheney Vice Presidency. His awards include The Pulitzer Prize, an Emmy for documentary filmmaking, and The Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Website: bartongellman.com Twitter: @bartongellman Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Alberto Cristoforitraduttore del romanzo "Sulla riva del mare"Abdulrazak GurnahGarzanti Editorehttps://www.garzanti.it/Premio Nobel per la letteratura 2021La vittoria va a Abdulrazak Gurnah, nato nell'isola di Zanzibar (Tanzania) nel 1948 e arrivato in Inghilterra come rifugiato alla fine degli anni '60, dove ha insegnato letteratura post-coloniale e inglese all'Università del Kent, a Canterbury.Nato a Zanzibar il 20 dicembre 1948, Abdulrazak Gurnah è uno scrittore originario della Tanzania e di espressione inglese (anche se la sua lingua madre è lo swahili). A oggi, è il quinto autore africano a vincere il Premio Nobel per la Letteratura, dopo Wole Soyinka (Nigeria, 1986), Naguib Mahfouz (Egitto, 1988), Nadine Gordimer (Sudafrica, 1991) e John Maxwell Coetzee (Sudafrica, 2003).Recatosi in Gran Bretagna per la prima volta come studente nel 1968, è stato costretto ad allontanarsi dal suo Paese a causa delle persecuzioni perpetrate ai danni dei cittadini di origine araba. Dal 1980 al 1982 Abdulrazak Gurnah ha poi insegnato alla Bayero University Kano, in Nigeria. In seguito si è trasferito all'Università del Kent, a Canterbury, dove ha conseguito il dottorato di ricerca nel 1982, e attualmente è professore e Direttore degli studi universitari presso il Dipartimento di inglese.Il suo principale interesse accademico riguarda la scrittura postcoloniale e i discorsi associati al colonialismo, in particolare concernenti l'Africa, i Caraibi e l'India. Ha curato due volumi di saggistica sulla scrittura africana e pubblicato articoli su numerosi scrittori postcoloniali contemporanei, tra cui V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie e Zoë Wicomb.Ha inoltre collaborato come redattore con la rivista Wasafiri dal 1987 e ha supervisionato progetti di ricerca sulla scrittura di autori quali gli stessi Rushdie e Naipaul, G.V. Desani, Anthony Burgess, Joseph Conrad, George Lamming e Jamaica Kincaid.Alcuni fra i più celebri di Abdulrazak Gurnah sono Paradise (1994), che è stato selezionato sia per il Booker Prize sia per il Whitbread Prize, By the Sea (2001), a sua volta selezionato per il Booker Prize e poi finalista al Los Angeles Times Book Award, e Desertion (2005). Tutti e tre sono stati pubblicati in Italia dalla casa editrice Garzanti, rispettivamente con i titoli Paradiso, Il disertore e Sulla riva del mare.Altre sue opere, pubblicate sempre in lingua inglese, sono Memory of Departure (1987), Pilgrims Way (1988), Dottie (1990), Admiring Silence (1996), The Last Gift (2011), Gravel Heart (2017) e Afterlives (2020).Paradiso (traduzione di Laura Noulian) si svolge in Kenia e si apre alla vigilia della prima guerra mondiale. Yusuf ha solo dodici anni quando suo padre lo affida allo Zio Aziz, un ricco mercante. Vicino a Mombasa, nella bottega di Aziz, il ragazzo scopre che non si tratta di suo zio, ma del suo padrone. Venduto per pagare i debiti del padre, è costretto a lavorare duramente.Poi, un giorno, Aziz decide di portarlo con sé per un lungo viaggio all'interno del continente africano. Yusuf conosce così la morte e la violenza, e impara le difficili regole di convivenza di un mondo sull'orlo del conflitto, dove musulmani, missionari cristiani e indiani coesistono in un fragile equilibrio.Al suo ritorno, Yusuf è un altro: un giovane robusto e avvenente. È ancora uno schiavo, ma a dargli la libertà del cuore c'è l'amore, quello per la giovane ancella della padrona, Amina. La ragazza però cela un terribile segreto e, mentre il colonialismo europeo stringerà le sue maglie sul continente africano, Yusuf capirà il cammino che dovrà intraprendere…Nel caso de Il disertore (traduzione di Laura Noulian), invece, il protagonista del romanzo, Hassanali, è diretto verso la moschea quando dal deserto vede emergere la sagoma di un inglese, che crolla esausto ai suoi piedi. Martin Pearce, viaggiatore, scrittore e studioso dell'Oriente, ha attraversato il deserto ed è allo stremo. Hassanali lo salva e lo porta nella casa dell'unico bianco della cittadina, un ufficiale.Quando Pearce torna a ringraziare Hassanali per averlo salvato, incontra anche sua sorella Rehana: resta immediatamente affascinato dal suo sguardo e in questa città ai margini dell'impero, affacciata sulla costa africana dell'Oceano Indiano, nasce una storia d'amore destinata a riverberarsi per tre generazioni.Infine, Sulla riva del mare (traduzione di Alberto Cristofori), finora l'ultimo dei romanzi di Abdulrazak Gurnah portato in Italia, si apre il pomeriggio del 23 novembre. All'aeroporto di Gatwick atterra Saleh Omar; con sé porta solo una borsa, dentro la quale c'è una scatola con dell'incenso e poco altro. Aveva un negozio, una casa, una moglie, una figlia, mentre ora è solo un profugo in cerca d'asilo, e la sua unica difesa è il silenzio.Lo stesso giorno Latif Mahmud, poeta e docente universitario che ha scelto l'esilio, medita nel suo appartamento londinese sulla sua famiglia e sul paese, che non rivede da tempo. Per i due uomini il paradiso che hanno dovuto abbandonare è lo stesso: Zanzibar, l'isola dell'Oceano Indiano spezzata da venti che portano con sé gli aromi di mille spezie, ma anche uno straordinario intreccio di culture e di storie.IL POSTO DELLE PAROLEascoltare fa pensarehttps://ilpostodelleparole.it/

In SA Cosby's latest novel, RAZORBLADE Tears, has the feel of a buddy cop movie in the vain of Lethal WElcome, but in this case the main characters are two reformed criminals in their 50s, African American Ike Randolph and self-proclaimed redneck Buddy Lee.  They team up to track down the double murder of their sons who were married to each other.  The novel examines the homophobia that kept both fathers from attending their sons' wedding, and the tumultuous relationship they had with them.  RAZORBLADE Tears also explores, as Cosby explained in the interview, race, sex, and class, the Holy Trinity of Southern fiction. SA Cosby is an award winning author of fantasy, horror and crime fiction including the novel  BLACKTOP WASTELAND which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

In S. A. Cosby's latest novel, RAZORBLADE Tears, has the feel of a buddy cop movie in the vain of Lethal WElcome, but in this case the main characters are two reformed criminals in their 50s, African American Ike Randolph and self-proclaimed redneck Buddy Lee.  They team up to track down the double murder of their sons who were married to each other.  The novel examines the homophobia that kept both fathers from attending their sons' wedding, and the tumultuous relationship they had with them.  RAZORBLADE Tears also explores, as Cosby explained in the interview, race, sex, and class, the Holy Trinity of Southern fiction. SA Cosby is an award winning author of fantasy, horror and crime fiction including the novel  BLACKTOP WASTELAND which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

Alice Notley has published over forty books of poetry, most recently For the Ride (Penguin Books) and Eurynome's Sandals (PURH). Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Award, the Griffin International Prize, two NEA Grants, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a lifetime achievement award. She is also a visual artist and collagist, and a book of her poem-drawings is forthcoming from Archway Editions. Since 1992, Notley has lived and worked in Paris, France.

In this episode, Will and Josh have a conversation with author and historian Rick Perlstein. Perlstein has garnered recognition for four-part chronicles of the history of modern American Conservatism, a project 20 years in the making. Our conversation spans from Barry Goldwater to Mitt Romney to Charismatic Pentecostals. You won't want to miss this enlightening conversation! Buy the book: https://www.rickperlstein.net/book/reaganland/Guest Bio:Rick Perlstein is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan; Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by over a dozen publications; and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, which won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history and appeared on the best books of the year lists of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. His essays and book reviews have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times,The Washington Post, The Nation, The Village Voice, and Slate, among others. A contributing editor and board member of In These Times magazine, he lives in Chicago.Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/faithpolitics)

Join Heather Ann Thompson, Flint Taylor and Darrell Cannon as they discuss 1969 murders of Black Panther Party chairman Fred Hampton and Panther Mark Clark—and the historic, thirteen-years of litigation that followed—through the dogged pursuit of commander Jon Burge, the leader of a torture ring within the CPD that used barbaric methods, including electric shock, to elicit false confessions from suspects. The three panelists will further delve into the events leading up to and the legacy surrounding the 1971 Attica prison uprising when 1,300 prisoners took over the facility. These event will be framed in the context of the paperback release of Taylor's book Torture Machine: Racism and Police Violence in Chicago and Thompson's Pulitzer-prize winning book Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy. ---------------------------------------------------- Speakers: Heather Ann Thompson is a Collegiate Professor of History in the departments of Afro- American and African Studies, History, and in the Residential College at the University of Michigan. She is the Pulitzer Prize and Bancroft Prize winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971. Blood in the Water won five other major book prizes and was also a finalist for the National Book Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Silver Gavel Award, and the Cundill Prize in History. The book has also been optioned by Sony Pictures and Thompson is also the lead advisor on Stanley Nelson's forthcoming Showtime documentary on Attica. Thompson is also a public intellectual who writes extensively on the history of protests, policing, prisons, and the current criminal justice system more broadly. On the policy front, Thompson served on the historic National Academy of Sciences blue-ribbon panel that studied the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the U.S. She currently serves on the standing Committee on Law and Justice of the National Academies. She is currently writing her next book on the MOVE Bombing of 1985. @hthompsn Flint Taylor is a founding partner of the People's Law Office in Chicago. He is one of the lawyers for the families of slain Black Panther leaders Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, has represented many survivors of Chicago police torture over the past 30 years and is counsel in several illegal search and wrongful death cases brought against the Milwaukee Police Department. Darrell Cannon is a Chicago police torture survivor who was subjected to electric shock and a mock execution at a remote torture site on the far southeast side of Chicago by two of notorious Chicago police commanderJon Burge's main henchmen. As a result he gave a false confession, was wrongfully convicted, and spent 24 years in prison, 9 in a supermax prison, before he was exonerated in 2007. After his release, he became a powerful leader in the successful movement to obtain reparations for 60 Chicago police torture survivors. ---------------------------------------------------- Order a copy of Flint Taylor's book , The Torture Machine: https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1642-the-torture-machine Order a copy of Heather Ann Thompson's book, Blood In The Water: https://bookshop.org/a/1039/9781400078240 Watch the live event recording: https://youtu.be/neXDQiYTpns Buy books from Haymarket: www.haymarketbooks.org Follow us on Soundcloud: soundcloud.com/haymarketbooks

Tobias Wolff grew up in Washington State. He taught English and creative writing at Stanford. He has received the Story Prize, both the Rea Award and PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story, Los Angeles Times Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Medal of the Arts from President Obama in 2015. He is the author of the memoir This Boy's Life. His novels and short story collections include Old School, The Barracks Thief, In Pharaoh's Army, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, and The Night in Question.
· www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/33605/tobias-wolff
· www.creativeprocess.info

Tobias Wolff grew up in Washington State. He taught English and creative writing at Stanford. He has received the Story Prize, both the Rea Award and PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story, Los Angeles Times Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Medal of the Arts from President Obama in 2015. He is the author of the memoir This Boy's Life. His novels and short story collections include Old School, The Barracks Thief, In Pharaoh's Army, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, and The Night in Question.
· www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/33605/tobias-wolff
· www.creativeprocess.info

Eric Foner, the 2020 Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards winner for Lifetime Achievement, joins The Asterisk* to discuss the Jan. 6, 2021 storming of the U.S. Capitol, his marriage to a fellow historian and his place among the most influential American historians of the last half-century. With more than two dozen books to his credit, AWBA jury chair Henry Louis Gates Jr. says Foner “is the dean of Reconstruction historians, and is one of the most generous, and genuinely passionate, professors of his generation.” In arguably his most influential book, “Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution,” Foner tracked the warp and weave in the struggle for freedom and equality long after the Confederacy expired. It won the Bancroft Prize, the Francis Parkman Prize, a Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Avery O. Craven Prize and the Lionel Trilling Award. The book is still considered the premier synthesis of the years 1863-1877.

Alice Notley has published over forty books of poetry, most recently For the Ride (Penguin Books) and Eurynome's Sandals (PURH). Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Award, the Griffin International Prize, two NEA Grants, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a lifetime achievement award. She is also a visual artist and collagist, and a book of her poem-drawings is forthcoming from Archway Editions. Since 1992, Notley has lived and worked in Paris, France.

Alice Notley has published over forty books of poetry, most recently For the Ride (Penguin Books) and Eurynome's Sandals (PURH). Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Award, the Griffin International Prize, two NEA Grants, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a lifetime achievement award. She is also a visual artist and collagist, and a book of her poem-drawings is forthcoming from Archway Editions. Since 1992, Notley has lived and worked in Paris, France.

Alice Notley has published over forty books of poetry, most recently For the Ride (Penguin Books) and Eurynome's Sandals (PURH). Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Award, the Griffin International Prize, two NEA Grants, the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry, and the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, a lifetime achievement award. She is also a visual artist and collagist, and a book of her poem-drawings is forthcoming from Archway Editions. Since 1992, Notley has lived and worked in Paris, France.

With REAGANLAND: America’s Right Turn 1976-1980 , historian Rick Perlstein concludes his sweeping four-volume account of the rise of modern American conservatism. Over two decades (and more than three thousand pages), Perlstein has published three definitive works about the emerging dominance of conservatism in American politics: Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of American Consensus (2002); Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008); and The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan (2014). With the saga’s final installment, REAGANLAND—covering the years from Jimmy Carter’s election to his defeat at the hands of Ronald Reagan—he has delivered his most stunning literary and historical achievement yet. Perlstein shows how much the nation changed over those years—and just as importantly, how those changes produced the world we live in now. About the author Rick Perlstein is the author of the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan; Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America, a New York Timesbestseller picked as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by over a dozen publications; and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, which won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history and appeared on the best books of the year lists of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. His essays and book reviews have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Village Voice, and Slate, among others. A contributing editor and board member of In These Times magazine, he lives in Chicago. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/steve-richards/support

Carolyn Forché was born in Detroit, Michigan. She studied at Michigan State University and earned an MFA from Bowling Green State University.She is a poet, memoirist, translator, and editor, Forché's books of poetry include: In the Lateness of the World, The Angel of History, which received the Los Angeles Times Book Award; The Country Between Us, which received the Poetry Society of America's Alice Fay di Castagnola Award and was the Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; and Gathering the Tribes, which was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets by Stanley Kunitz. Her memoir What You Have Heard is True: A Memoir of Witness and Resistancewas a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award in Nonfiction. In this episode we discuss In the Lateness of the World. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Tobias Wolff grew up in Washington State. He taught English and creative writing at Stanford. He has received the Story Prize, both the Rea Award and PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story, Los Angeles Times Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Medal of the Arts from President Obama in 2015. He is the author of the memoir This Boy's Life. His novels and short story collections include Old School, The Barracks Thief, In Pharaoh's Army, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, and The Night in Question.
· www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/33605/tobias-wolff
· www.creativeprocess.info

Tobias Wolff grew up in Washington State. He taught English and creative writing at Stanford. He has received the Story Prize, both the Rea Award and PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story, Los Angeles Times Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Medal of the Arts from President Obama in 2015. He is the author of the memoir This Boy's Life. His novels and short story collections include Old School, The Barracks Thief, In Pharaoh's Army, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, and The Night in Question.
· www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/33605/tobias-wolff
· www.creativeprocess.info

Tobias Wolff grew up in Washington State. He taught English and creative writing at Stanford. He has received the Story Prize, both the Rea Award and PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story, Los Angeles Times Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Medal of the Arts from President Obama in 2015. He is the author of the memoir This Boy's Life. His novels and short story collections include Old School, The Barracks Thief, In Pharaoh's Army, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, and The Night in Question.
· www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/33605/tobias-wolff
· www.creativeprocess.info

Tobias Wolff grew up in Washington State. He taught English and creative writing at Stanford. He has received the Story Prize, both the Rea Award and PEN/Malamud Award for excellence in the short story, Los Angeles Times Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the National Medal of the Arts from President Obama in 2015. He is the author of the memoir This Boy's Life. His novels and short story collections include Old School, The Barracks Thief, In Pharaoh's Army, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs, Back in the World, and The Night in Question.
· www.penguinrandomhouse.com/authors/33605/tobias-wolff
· www.creativeprocess.info

In conversation with Beth Kephart, the award-winning author of twenty-four books, including Going Over, Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir, and Flow: The Life and Times of Philadelphia's Schuylkill River. ''An unflinching witness and eloquent mourner'' (The New Yorker), Carolyn Forché is the author of the poetry collections Blue Hour, The Angel of History, The Country Between Us, and Gathering the Tribes. For this body of work she has amassed an impressive list of honors, including fellowships from the Academy of American Poets and the National Endowment for the Arts, the Windham-Campbell Prize, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award. The Lannan Chair in Poetry at Georgetown University, Forché is also a respected translator, editor, and activist. What You Have Heard Is True tells the story of her journey with an enigmatic man into the chaos and horror of the Salvadoran Civil War. (recorded 3/19/2019)

Former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky joined poet Monica Youn to share recent work and exchange ideas, along with moderator Elizabeth Bradfield, local poet and naturalist on June 9, 2018 in the Hawthorne Barn. Robert Pinsky‘s recent book is At the Foundling Hospital, nominated for the Nation Book Critics Award in poetry. As Poet Laureate of the United States (1997-2000), he founded the Favorite Poem Project, featuring the videos at www.favoritepoem.org. His best-selling translation The Inferno of Dante received the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the Harold Morton Landon translation prize. His other awards include the Lenore Marshall Prize, the Korean Manhae Prize, the Italian Premio Capri and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Pen American Center. He performs with pianist Laurence Hobgood on CDs PoemJazz and House Hour, from Circumstantial Productions. Monica Youn is the author of Blackacre (Graywolf Press 2016), which was shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Kingsley Tufts Award, longlisted for the National Book Award, and named one of the best poetry books of 2016 by the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, the Paris Review, and BuzzFeed. Her previous book Ignatz(Four Way Books 2010) was a finalist for the National Book Award. A former lawyer, she currently teaches at Princeton University and in the Sarah Lawrence and Columbia University MFA programs. Elizabeth Bradfield is the author of the poetry collections Once Removed, Approaching Ice, Interpretive Work and the forthcoming Toward Antarctica. Her poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, West Branch, Orion and her awards include a Stegner Fellowship and the Audre Lorde Prize. Founder and editor-in-chief of Broadsided Press, she lives on Cape Cod, works as a naturalist locally as well as on ships around the globe, and teaches creative writing at Brandeis University.

The Democratic Party's retreat from its New Deal and Great Society identity as a party eager to use the federal treasury to spend in the public interest to create a broadly shared prosperity is usually associated with the Clinton administration in the 1990s. It actually dates to the Carter administration. This talk will narrate this shift, and explained two political consequences that flowed from it: its failure to placate the Democratic Party's critics on the right, who consistently refused to recognize the shift, even as it attenuated the trust that had formerly reposed in the party among its traditional white working class constituencies. RICK PERLSTEIN is the author of The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan [https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Bridge-Fall-Nixon-Reagan/dp/1491534737]. Before that, he published Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (2008)[https://www.amazon.com/Nixonland-Rise-President-Fracturing-America/dp/074324303X], a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best nonfiction books of the year by over a dozen publications, and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus [https://www.amazon.com/Before-Storm-Goldwater-Unmaking-Consensus/dp/1568584121], winner of the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history. A contributing writer at The Nation, former chief national correspondent for the Village Voice, and a former online columnist for the New Republic and Rolling Stone, his journalism and essays have appeared in Newsweek, The New York Times, and many other publications. Politico called him the “chronicler extraordinaire of American conservatism,” who “offers a hint of how interesting the political and intellectual dialogue might be if he could attract some mimics.” The Nation called him the “hyper caffeinated Herodotus of the American century.” Watch Rick's accompanying talk at The Watson Institute: [https://youtu.be/Wb4ku4wN0Cw] You can read a transcript of this episode here: [https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WDO8AnK7ktoJ0HCX_frO_1lLWT4KKP0b/view?usp=sharing]

Claudia Rankine is the author of five collections of poetry including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely; two plays including Provenance of Beauty: A South Bronx Travelogue; numerous video collaborations, and is the editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. For Citizen, Rankine won the Forward Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry (Citizen was also nominated in the criticism category, making it the first book in the award’s history to be a double nominee), the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the PEN Open Book Award, and the NAACP Image Award. A finalist for the National Book Award, Citizen also holds the distinction of being the only poetry book to be a New York Times bestseller in the nonfiction category. Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize and fellowships from the Lannan Foundation and the National Endowment of the Arts. She lives in New York City and teaches at Yale University as the Frederick Iseman Professor of Poetry.

Join Dr. Carlos as he discusses Dr. Kandel's book "Age of Insight".Eric R. Kandel is University Professor and Kavli Professor at Columbia University and a Senior Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Kandel is founding director of the Center for Neurobiology and Behavior at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, and recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on memory storage in the brain. He is the author of In Search of Memory, a memoir that won a Los Angeles Times Book Award, and co-author of Principles of Neural Science, the standard textbook in the field. He is also Co-Director of the Zuckerman Mind, brain, behavior institute at Colombia University

Amy Louise Wood visits The Context of White Supremacy. An associate professor of history at Illinois State University, Wood is a U.S. cultural historian of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. We'll review her 2009 publication, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940. This book was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award in History. Wood investigates how Whites bearing witness to the mutilation of black bodies helped solidify the White race and legitimized, sanctified the barbarism White Supremacy required. She details the significance of the 1915 masterpiece, Birth Of A Nation, lynching postcards and photographs, and the ritual scavenging of body parts by Racist spectators. We'll compare this barbaric practice to the 21st century montage of footage of enforcement officers brutalizing and slaughtering black citizens. The racial theater has extended to the presidential election, as black attendees have been harassed and assaulted continually. #AnswersForMiriamCarey INVEST in The COWS - http://paypal.me/GusTRenegade CALL IN NUMBER: 641.715.3640 CODE 564943# The C.O.W.S. archives: http://tiny.cc/76f6p

For thousands of years, humans have experienced cycles of empire building and retreat, from the neolithic settlers of Levant and the Indus Valley to the ancient Cahokia and Maya civilizations. What can new discoveries teach us about how to plan our next thousand years as a global civilization? Authors Charles C. Mann and Annalee Newitz talk about how ancient civilizations shed light on current problems with urbanization, food security, and environmental change. Charles C. Mann is the author, most recently, of 1493, a New York Times best-seller, and 1491, winner of the National Academies of Science’s Keck award for best book of the year. His next project, The Wizard and the Prophet, is a book about the future that makes no predictions. An early version of the introductory chapter was a finalist for a National Magazine Award. Annalee Newitz writes science nonfiction and science fiction. She’s editor-in-chief of Gizmodo.com and founding editor of io9.com. She’s the author of Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will Survive a Mass Extinction, which was a finalist for a Los Angeles Times Book Award. Her work has appeared in publications from The New Yorker and Technology Review to 2600 and Lightspeed Magazine. Her next book is a novel about robots, pirates, and the future of property laws.

Wednesday Reading Series Alice Notley has published over thirty books of poetry, including (most recently) Songs and Stories of the Ghouls, Negativity's Kiss, and the chapbook Secret I D. With her sons Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, she edited both The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan and The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan. Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets' Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America's Shelley Award, the Griffin Prize, two NEA Grants, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. She lives and writes in Paris, France.

This podcast is a recording of the 2015 StAnza International Poetry Festival Round Table event in which SPL Programme Manager and poet Jennifer (JL) Williams was in conversation with the poet Alice Notley. Alice Notley has published over thirty books of poetry, including (most recently) Songs and Stories of the Ghouls, Negativity’s Kiss, and the chapbookSecret I D. With her sons Anselm and Edmund Berrigan, she edited both The Collected Poems of Ted Berrigan and The Selected Poems of Ted Berrigan. Notley has received many awards including the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Award, the Griffin Prize, two NEA Grants, and the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Poetry. She lives and writes in Paris, France. Many thanks to StAnza International Poetry Festival and to James Iremonger for the music in this podcast. (https://jamesiremonger.wordpress.com/tabla/)

This month, our Book Talk panel turns its attention to the latest book by fantastic Scottish author, Andrew O'Hagan. The Illuminations tells two stories; the first of Anne Quirk, a once-great photographer trying to reconnect with her past, and the second, of her grandson Luke, serving in the British Army in Afghanistan. Andrew O'Hagan has been twice nominated for the Man Booker Prize as has won the Los Angeles Times Book Award and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & LettersJoining Sasha de Buyl are Kaite Welsh (@kaitewelsh), journalist and chair of the Green Carnation Literary Prize, and Yasmin Sulaiman (@yasmin_sul), Books Editor at The List.The panel discusses the novel's dual perspectives, the way the book explores the inner workings of a mind in the grip of dementia and the frustrations of the voiceless.Through the podcast, they explore the two main characters and how they interact, the comparison between the beauty of art and the atrocities of war and the gentle lyricism of O'Hagan's style.If you're reading, or have read, the book, what did you think? How do you think it compares to O'Hagan's previous work? We'd love to know what you thought - you can join the discussion in the comments below, or on Twitter @scottishbktrust.Book Talk is also available on Soundcloud. BookTalk is produced by Colin Fraser of Culture Laser Productions.

Get a progressive politics primer on this week’s episode of Arts & Seizures as Mike Edison is joined by Rick Perlstein, the author of the New York Times bestseller The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan; Nixonland: The Rise of a President and The Fracturing of America, a New York Times bestseller picked as one of the best nonfiction books of 2007 by over a dozen publications; and Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus, which won the 2001 Los Angeles Times Book Award for history and appeared on the best books of the year lists of The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. His essays and book reviews have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, The Village Voice, and Slate, among others. He has received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant for independent scholars. This program was brought to you by Roberta’s. “History is full of ironies.” [07:00] –Rick Perlstein on Arts & Seizures

Chance (Scribner) When Kem Nunn's debut novel Tapping the Source was published, the Los Angeles Times Book Review wrote: "Kem Nunn is the bright son of a very good family. His 'parents' include Hammett, Chandler, Raoul Whitfield, Paul Cain, James M. Cain, Horace McCoy, and yes, Ross MacDonald. What Kem Nunn has done is what every good parent yearns for and is afraid of: he has surpassed them all." Now, with Chance, Nunn surpasses even himself. Half Coen Brothers, half Dashiell Hammett, Kem Nunn has written a gritty, twisted psychological thriller centered on a lonely, brilliant, forensic neuropsychologist in San Francisco. Dr. Eldon Chance has a track record of becoming involved with the wrong women. As he enters a mid-life crisis brought on by the failure of his marriage, a series of bad decisions lead him into a relationship with Jaclyn Blackstone, a patient suffering an apparent dissociative identy disorder. And unfortunately her abusive husband, an Oakland homicide detective, is the jealous type. At the same time, Chance meets a young man named “D,” a self-styled Samurai who Chance thinks is a war veteran, but is really more of a deranged loner. As Chance finds his life twisting more and more uncomfortably into Jaclyn Blackstone's world, D acts as Chance's guide to the underbelly of San Francisco and his coach for the looming show-down with Jaclyn's psychotic husband. In his own cool, gray City of Love, amid its fluid, ever-changing beauty and shifting fogs, Dr. Chance will be forced to live up to his name. By turns horrific and darkly comic, suspenseful and thought provoking, Chance is a head trip through the fun house from “one of the most interesting writers working the coast” (San Diego Union Tribune) and confirms Kem Nunn'sreputation as a master of suspense and a novelist of the first rank.  Kem Nunn is a third-generation Californian and the author of six novels, including the National Book Award NomineeTapping the Source, Tijuana Straits, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award for Best Mystery/Thriller, The Dogs of Winter, Pomona Queen, and Unassigned Territory. In addition to writing novels, he writes screenplays for television and film, most notably John from Cincinnati which he co-created with David Milch, Deadwood, and currently, Sons of Anarchy. He lives in Southern California.

Distinguished Writers Series: Nikky Finney and Tom Sleigh Tuesday, April 10, 2012, 4:30PM Newhouse Center for the Humanities, Wellesley College Nikky Finney was born in South Carolina, within listening distance of the sea. A child of activists, she came of age during the civil rights and Black Arts Movements. At Talladega College, nurtured by Hale Woodruff's Amistad murals, Finney began to understand the powerful synergy between art and history. Finney has authored four books of poetry: Head Off & Split (2011); The World Is Round (2003); Rice (1995); and On Wings Made of Gauze (1985). Professor of English and creative writing at the University of Kentucky, Finney also authored Heartwood (1997) edited The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South (2007), and co-founded the Affrilachian Poets. Finney's fourth book of poetry, Head Off & Split was awarded the 2011 National Book Award for poetry. Tom Sleigh's books include After One, winner of the Houghton Mifflin New Poetry Prize; Waking, a finalist for the Lamont Poetry Prize and the William Carlos Williams Award; The Chain, finalist for Lenore Marshall Prize; The Dreamhouse, finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award; Far Side of the Earth, an Honor Book Award from the Massachusetts Society for the Book; Bula Matari/Smasher of Rocks; a translation of Euripides' Herakles; a book of essays, Interview With a Ghost; and Space Walk, winner of the $100,000 2008 Kingsley Tufts Award. He has also received the Shelley Prize from the Poetry Society of America, the John Updike Award and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an Individual Writer's Award from the Lila Wallace Fund, and grants from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He publishes in the New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Atlantic Monthly, Poetry, and elsewhere, as well as The Best American Poetry and The Best American Travel Writing anthologies His new book, Army Cats, was published this spring from Graywolf Press. This fall he was the Anna Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin. He teaches in the MFA Program at Hunter College and lives in Brooklyn.

C. K. Williams was the eleventh poet in the Raymond Danowski Poetry Library Reading Series and read in 2009. C.K. Williams is known for his daring formal style, which combines everyday observations with long, Whitmanesque lines. He has authored ten books of poetry, including Collected Poems (2006); The Singing (2003), winner of the National Book Award; Repair (2003), winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award; and Flesh and Blood (1987), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. Williams has also published translations of Sophocles, Euripides, and poems of Francis Ponge, among others. His honors include awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Twentieth Annual Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, an honor given to an American poet in recognition of extraordinary accomplishment.