Shelf Life

Send us Fan Mail 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 no...

Send us Fan Mail 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 kno...

Send us Fan Mail 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 Midn...

Send us Fan Mail 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 wr...

Send us Fan Mail 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 sti...

Send us Fan Mail 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 gravit...

Send us Fan Mail 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-li...

Send us Fan Mail 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 s...

Send us Fan Mail 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 rea...

Send us Fan Mail 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 episo...

Send us Fan Mail 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 literary hero, Gerard Manley Hopkins, a 19th century poet and Jesuit priest who, like Hewitt, struggled with his sexual orientation. For Hewitt that st...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 crea...

Send us Fan Mail 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...

Send us Fan Mail 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 hi...

Send us Fan Mail 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-s...

Send us Fan Mail 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 pandem...

Send us Fan Mail 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 t...

Send us Fan Mail 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 w...

Send us Fan Mail 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 devas...

Send us Fan Mail 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 favorit...

Send us Fan Mail 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 w...

Send us Fan Mail 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 celeb...

Send us Fan Mail 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...