Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference

In this episode of Beyond the Page, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with editor and Canadian publishing titan Louise Dennys about her extraordinary career working side by side with writers including Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan… to name just a few. Dennys talks about how she got started, what it’s like to nurture and promote some of the strongest l...

In this episode of Beyond the Page, Anne Taylor Fleming talks with award-winning food writer Aleksandra Crapanzano about her delightful and accessible new cookbook GATEAU: The Surprising Simplicity of French Cakes. The author shares her memories of being a child in Paris and talks about her dual passions for cooking and writing.   Aleksandra Crapanzano is a James Beard-winning writer and dessert c...

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing’s brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, g...

In this episode of Beyond the Page, BEN RHODES, Barack Obama’s former Deputy National Security Advisor, sits down at the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright AYAD AKHTAR for a deeply informed conversation about the state of the world we are living in today, with the rise of authoritarian leaders and ethno-nationalism and the flood of disinformation ena...

In this episode of Beyond the Page, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with Rebecca Donner, winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography for “All the Frequent Troubles of our Days.” The story of Donner's great-great aunt, Mildred Harnack, who as a young midwestern grad student moved to Berlin and became one of the leaders of the largest underground resistance group to Hitler i...

When artists and athletes age, what happens to their work? Does it ripen or rot? As our bodies decay, how – and why – do we keep going? In this episode, John Burnham Schwartz sits down with the ever-original and wittily ironic GEOFF DYER to discuss the author's own encounter with late middle age against the backdrop of the last days and last works of writers, painters, footballers, musicians, and...

In this episode of Beyond the Page, we offer something fun and different, a lively conversation between SVWC Literary Director John Burnham Schwartz and Associate Director Anne Taylor Fleming about the upcoming 2022 conference.  As the chief programmers, the longtime colleagues and friends will talk about some of the magical writers who are coming, from Evan Osnos and Heather McGhee to Ocean Vuong...

On this episode, John Burnham Schwartz talks with SUSAN ORLEAN, whose New Yorker articles across the last 30 years, along with books such as The Orchard Thief, The Library Book, her biography of the movie star dog Rin Tin Tin, and her latest collection of pieces, On Animals, have made her one of our most beloved and distinctive writers. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoice...

Is Thomas Jefferson to be deplored as a slave-owner who had a family with a young woman he owned or is he to be celebrated as one of the country's most essential and gifted founders? Or, should he be both--condemned and revered? That is the question Annette Gordon-Reed, the brilliant Harvard law professor, historian, and author of the Pulitzer prize-winning The Hemingses of Monticello: An American...

In this episode of Beyond the Page, John Burnham Schwartz speaks with author TOBIAS WOLFF, renowned for his classic memoirs and short stories, for an intimate, wide-ranging conversation about life, literature, craft, and the never- ending mysteries and revelations that come from spending one’s time inhabiting the minds of others. Tobias Wolff was born in Birmingham, Alabama, and grew up in Washing...

In this episode, John Burnham Schwartz speaks with Noah Feldman, Harvard Law professor and renowned Constitutional scholar, whose groundbreaking new book, The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America, takes us inside one of the more surprising realities of American History: in abolishing slavery and preserving our union, Abraham Lincoln was not adhering to the original...

In this episode of Beyond the Page, acclaimed novelist, journalist, and Marine Corps veteran ELLIOT ACKERMAN talks to former CBS News Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief Christopher Isham about the United States military’s calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan and what comes after. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing's brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, g...

In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with Pulitzer Prize-winning authors MARK STEVENS and ANNALYN SWAN about their landmark biography Francis Bacon: Revelations. MARK STEVENS is the former art critic of New York magazine. He has been the art critic for The New Republic and Newsweek and has also written for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and The New York Times. ANNALYN...

In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, human rights activist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author SAMANTHA POWER – interviewed in the lead-up to her pending US Senate confirmation vote to be President Biden’s new administrator of USAID – discusses her distinctly American journey from immigrant to war correspondent to one of America’s leading foreig...

In this episode, the host of American Public Media’s award-winning radio show The Splendid Table shares with us a few unforgettable food stories from his childhood, along with some of his current thoughts about the social experience of food during these pandemic times, the struggles and future of restaurants, and how certain tastes become identity markers for life. Learn more about your ad choices...

On today's episode of Beyond the Page, John Burnham Schwartz speaks with David Eagleman, who not only teaches neuroscience at Stanford University, but is also CEO and co-founder of New Century, a company that develops devices for sensory substitution. Eagleman is the author most recently of Live Wired: The Inside Story of the Ever Changing Brain, as well as The Brain, The Story of You, and many ot...

On Christmas morning, 2020, the writer BARRY LOPEZ died in Eugene, Oregon, surrounded by his family, after a long battle with prostate cancer. Widely honored as one of our greatest writers about the natural world – in non-fiction classics such as “Of Wolves and Men,” “Arctic Dreams,” and “Horizon” – for half a century Barry traveled the globe – High Arctic to Antarctica, Oregon to Kenya – bringing...

In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with novelist and classicist MADELINE MILLER, author of THE SONG OF ACHILLES and CIRCE, about why Homer’s wisdom has never been more relevant, and why she decided to finally give a witch who changes men into pigs the starring role in her own drama. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Join us for a conversation with ROGER MCNAMEE, the noted tech venture capitalist, early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook investor, who went from being a founding supporter of the world’s biggest and most profitable social media company to becoming one of its most influential critics. There is nothing the charismatic McNamee won’t discuss about Facebook's business model and practices, includ...

In this episode, internationally beloved author ISABEL ALLENDE, sits down virtually with her good friend, PBS/NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown, to discuss her latest novel “A LONG PETAL OF THE SEA.” Along the way, she brings us closer to the upheavals of the Spanish Civil War; Chile during Pinochet’s military dictatorship; the stories of refugees known and imagined; and, of course, the art of fiction. Lea...

In this episode of Beyond the Page, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with Ayad Akhtar, the new president of PEN America and author of Homeland Elegies, about the uncanny experience of writing his latest novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with SUSAN ORLEAN, longtime New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author of The Library Book and The Orchid Thief, about libraries and memory, about the eccentric nature of curiosity, and about the journalistic surprises and personal satisfactions of finally writing her own story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megapho...

In his sixth novel, The Red Daughter, novelist (and regular Beyond the Page host, JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ imaginatively inhabits the life of Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926 – 2011), the only daughter of Joseph Stalin, who in his three decades as the tyrannical ruler of the Soviet Union was responsible for the deaths of far more than twenty million people. At the height of the Cold War, Svetlana became the...

In 2002, the late civil rights champion Roger Wilkins gave one of the most memorable talks ever given at the Writers’ Conference. Roger’s great grandfather was a slave. Two generations later, Roger’s uncle, Roy Wilkins, became the legendary leader of the NAACP for over two decades. Three generations removed from the Mississippi slave fields, Roger Wilkins played pivotal roles in the civil rights a...