WYPL Book Talk

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.

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!

 

 

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.

Stephen Usery interviews Gin Phillips, acclaimed author of The Well and the Mine. Her new novel, Come in and Cover Me, is the story of archaeologist whose study of early Southwest cultures is complicated by her own past.

 

 

Stephen Usery interviews Kim Edwards (The Memory Keeper's Daughter) about her latest novel, The Lake of Dreams, which is now available in paperback. Lucy Jarrett returns home to upstate New York after working in Asia for almost a decade. Family secrets new and old surface as Lucy is pulled at by loves old and new.

 

Stephen Usery interviews Joshilyn Jackson about her fifth novel, A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty. It's an funny yet tense story of three generation of Slocumb women, eldest Ginny, Liza, and youngest Mosey, who have to deal with secrets coming to light after Liza has a stroke and a mysterious silver box is found in their backyard, exposing many lies in the process.

Stephen Usery interviews Adam Johnson about his critically-acclaimed second novel, The Orphan Master's Son. It's the story of Pak Jun Do, a young man thought to be an orphan, and the incredible path his life takes inside the repressive and mysterious political system of North Korea. It's a harrowing tale that also allows room for love and humanity to bloom in the cracks of this totalitarian regime.

Stephen Usery interviews John M. Barry, the New York Times best-selling author of Rising Tide and The Great Influenza. Barry's new book is Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul: Church, State, and the Birth of Liberty, which traces America's approach to freedom of religion back to Williams's reaction to supression of Puritans by the English crown and his banishment by early Massachusetts colonists.

Stephen Usery interviews Rick Gavin about Ranchero, the first book in his hilarious crime fiction series about Mississippi Delta repo man Nick Reid.

 

Stephen Usery interviews Stuart Dill about his debut thriller, Murder on Music Row. Drawing on over two decades of artist management, Dill has created a tense, behind-the-scenes look at the country music industry as someone is trying to kill the biggest star in Nashville, Ripley Graham. 23-year-old intern Judd Nix has gotten in over his head and is as concerned about his own survival as solving the mystery.