WYPL Book Talk

Russ Kick - The Graphic Canon Volume 1

Stephen Usery interviews editor Russ Kick about his new project The Graphic Canon Volume One: From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Shakespeare to Dangerous Liaisons. It's the first of three volumes to published this year which feature graphic novel interpretations of the world's great works of literature.

Joseph Kanon - Istanbul Passage

Stephen Usery interviews Joseph Kanon about his latest Cold War thriller Istanbul Passage. Set in Turkey a couple of months after the end of World War II, businessman Leon Bauer is asked to help smuggle a defector from eastern Europe, and Bauer has to examine his morals in light of atrocities and dubious politics in this new uncertain world.

Daniel Friedman - Don't Ever Get Old

 

 Stephen Usery interviews Memphis native Daniel Friedman about his debut mystery novel, Don't Ever Get Old. It stars the 87 year-old retired police detective Baruch "Buck" Schatz, who along with his grandson, tries to hunt down the Nazi prison camp officer who tortured him during World War II.

Wiley Cash - A Land More Kind than Home

photo by Kevin Millard Stephen Usery interviews Wiley Cash about his debut novel A Land More Kind than Home. Compared to the works of Tom Franklin and John Hart, A Land More Kind Than Home is set in the hills of western North Carolina in the mid-1980s, where a small snake-handling church and the secrets it holds threaten the Hall family, as well as others in the community.

Sophie Littlefield - A Bad Day for Mercy

Stephen Usery welcomes Sophie Littlefield back to the program to talk about her upcoming mystery, A Bad Day for Mercy. It's the fourth installment of her Stella Hardesty series, where a 50 year-old sewing machine shop owner from Missouri, who normally takes justice into her own hands with abusive spouses, now finds herself in Wisconsin helping her step-nephew who has a corpse on his kitchen table when she arrives.

Kristen Iversen - Full Body Burden

Stephen Usery interviews Kristen Iversen about her new book "Full Body Burden: Growing up in the Nuclear Shadow of Rocky Flats." Rocky Flats was the factory in suburban Denver, Colorado which made 70,000 plutonium triggers for America's nuclear weapons from the 1950s until 1990. The federal government and its private contractors tried to minimize public concern about radioactive pollution downwind from the plant, including in the suburb where Kristen Iversen grew up.

Thomas McNamee - The Man Who Changed How We Eat

Stephen Usery interviews Thomas McNamee about his new book, THE MAN WHO CHANGED THE WAY WE EAT: CRAIG CLAIBORNE AND THE AMERICAN FOOD RENAISSANCE. Starting with Claiborne's upbringing in the Mississippi Delta and through his war-time naval service, this book looks at Claiborne's reign as the food editor of the New York Times and his creation of modern food writing.

Geraldine Brooks - Caleb's Crossing

Stephen Usery interviews Pulitzer Prize-winner Geraldine Brooks about her novel Caleb's Crossing which is now available in paperback. Drawing inspiration from the life of the first Native American graduate of Harvard, Caleb's Crossing tells the tale of young Bethia Mayfield, daughter of a Calvinist minister trying to bring Christianity to the Wampanoag people on Martha's Vineyard in the mid-17th century.

Charlaine Harris - Deadlocked

Stephen Usery interviews Charlaine Harris about the latest installment to her Sookie Stackhouse series, Deadlocked. The series, which is the inspiration for the television program True Blood, is ramping up for a conclusion next year, as human, vampire, shapeshifter and fairy worlds vie for the services of Sookie, whose psychic abilities are belied by her small-town waitress exterior.

David Rees - How to Sharpen Pencils

Stephen Usery interviews former cartoonist David Rees about his new book, How To Sharpen Pencils: A PRACTICAL AND THEORETICAL TREATISE ON THE ARTISANAL CRAFT OF PENCIL SHARPENING, FOR WRITERS, ARTISTS, CONTRACTORS, FLANGE TURNERS, ANGLESMITHS, AND CIVIL SERVANTS, WITH ILLUSTRATIONS SHOWING CURRENT PRACTICE. Fraught with tension and discord, this episode Book Talk should have played on AM radio!

 

Heidi Julavits - The Vanishers

 

Stephen Usery interviews Heidi Julavits, an editor of The Believer Magazine. She has recently published her fourth novel, The Vanishers, which is the story of a young woman who attempts to develop her psychic abilities and is sucked into a web of deceit and confusion where an academic is searching for a believed-to-be-dead filmmaker and there is no such things as coincidence.

Ron rash - The Cove

Lauren Groff - Arcadia

Noah Hawley - The Good Father

Amy Franklin-Willis - The Lost Saints of Tennessee

Alex George - A Good American

Eugenia Bone - Mycophilia

Taylor M. Polites - The Rebel Wife

Patrick Dewitt - The Sisters Brothers

L.A. Weatherly - Angel Fire