WYPL Book Talk

Stephen Usery interviews award-winning poet Sandra Beasley about her memoir, Don't Kill the Birthday Girl. Beasley has suffered from multiple extreme food allergies all of her life, and she looks back at the effect it has had on her and her family, as well as investigating the science behind food allergies and their treatment.

Stephen Usery interviews Pulitzer Prize winner Oscar Hijuelos about his new memoir, Thoughts Without Cigarettes. It follows his parents' leaving Cuba and moving to New York, his fight with kidney disease and a long hospital stay as a child that alienated him from his mother tongue Spanish, and up until he won the Pulitzer in 1990 for his novel, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love. 

Stephen Usery interviews Bill Loehfelm about his third crime novel, The Devil She Knows. Maureen Coughlin is tough Staten Island waitress coming up on 30 who wants to get her life on track, but when she sees something that she shouldn't have, surviving the next few days means much more than choosing a new career path.

Stephen Usery interviews National Book Award Finalist Jim Shepard about his newest collection of short stories, You Think That's Bad. Not one to limit himself historically or geographically, Shepard's stories range from Joan of Arc's compatriot Gilles de Rais, to the man responsible for the first Godzilla suit, and black ops scientists who work at Area 51.

Stephen Usery interviews Karen White about her latest best-selling novel, The Beach Trees, where a woman in New York becomes guardian of her recently-deceased friend's son and goes to New Orleans and the Mississippi coast in order to untie her friend's secrets.

Stephen Usery interviews Rita Mae Brown about her newest Mrs. Murphy mystery, Hiss of Death. Strange things are afoot at the new medical center in Crozet, Virginia and our feline detective Mrs. Murphy, corgi Tucker, and the somewhat rotund cat Pewter, all try to help their human Harry track down who is behind a string of suspicious deaths.

 

Stephen Usery interviews David Schmahmann about his two recent novels, The Double Life of Alfred Buber and Ivory From Paradise.

Stephen Usery welcomes back Alabama native and current Mississipian Ace Atkins to discuss his new series about Army Ranger Quinn Colson. The Ranger is the first book, and in it, Sergeant Colson comes back to Jericho in Northern Mississippi for his uncle's funeral, and it seems there are more than a few questions lingering about this county sheriff's death.

Stephen Usery interviews Vanderbilt Law School professor Daniel J. Sharfstein about his book The Invisible Line: Three American Families and The Secret Journey From Black to White. It's a fascinating look at the evolution of America's legal views of people who have both Caucasian and sub-Saharan African ancestors and the implications it had on them when dealing with slavery, reconstruction and Jim Crow.

Stephen Usery interviews Kyran Pittman about her memoir Planting Dandelions: Field Notes from a Semi-Domesticated Life. It's the story of a young woman from the Canadian Province of Newfoundland whose marriage blows apart as she runs off with a man from Arkansas and finds herself soon raising a family of three boys in Little Rock as she begins her writing career.

 
Stephen Usery interviews novelist and playwright River Jordan about her memoir, Praying for Strangers. It's a look at the year when Jordan undertook a New Year's resolution to pray for a different stranger each and every day and the impact that it it made on her normally introverted tendencies.

 

 

Stephen Usery interviews Mark Childress about his new novel Georgia Bottoms. Georgia Bottoms is a special woman who provides a special service to the important men of Six Points, Alabama, all while trying to maintain her family's stately home with her mother's slide in to dementia, complicated by old-school racism, and her brother's small-time criminal inclinations making things more and more difficult.

Stephen welcomes Keith Thomson back to the program to talk about his new comedic international thriller Twice a Spy. Picking right up after Once a Spy, Charlie Clark and his former-spy and Alzheimer-patient father Drummond are searching for a nuclear weapon to save both one life in particular and many others in general.

 

Stephen Usery interviews Les Standiford and Joe Matthews about their book Bringing Adam Home: The Abduction that Changed America. It's the story of the kidnapping and murder of six year-old Adam Walsh in Hollywood, Florida in 1981, the bungled investigation and the movement to bring the plight of missing children to national attention.

Stephen Usery interviews New York Times Atlanta bureau chief, Kim Severson. Her memoir Spoon Fed:How Eight Cooks Saved My Life is new in paperback, and it looks back at her career as a food and dining writer in Alaska, San Francisco, and New York, as well as her family's food traditions rooted in her mother's Italian heritage.

 

Stephen Usery interviews Andre Dubus III, author of The House of Sand and Fog. They discuss Dubus's new NY Times best-selling memoir, Townie, about growing up in the rough, crumbling mill towns of northern Massachusetts and how he embraced violence to give him a sense of control in his adolescence, but at a major cost to his spiritual well-being.

 

 

Stephen Usery interviews Canadian author Yann Martel about his allegorical novel, Beatrice and Virgil, which is now available in paperback. They'll also talk about the themes that pervade his fiction, including the international best-seller and Man Booker Prize-winning novel Life of Pi.

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Stephen Usery interviews Sophie Littlefield about the first book in her dystopia trilogy. In the novel Aftertime, Cassandra Dollar must navigate northern California after bio-terrorism has decimated the ecology and turned most humans into ravenous, zomblie-like predators called "beaters." She's searching for her young daughter and must also deal with the threat humans continue to be to themselves.

Stephen Usery interviews PEN/Hemingway winner Mark Richard about his new memoir House of Prayer No. 2: A Writer's Journey Home. It's an unusual book, in that it's told in the second person, so Stephen asked that Mark answer his questions in the second person, too.

Stephen Usery interviews professional football player and Memphis native Michael Oher about his memoir, I Beat the Odds: From Homelessness to the Blindside and Beyond.