Book Dreams

“I get so upset during conversations about politics with certain family members, I feel like my body’s on the verge of explosion, with body parts flying off and blood splattering all over walls.” Do you ever feel like Julie does when you’re trying to have a meaningful discussion with someone with whom you vehemently disagree? Then you’re going to love this episode with journalist Mónica Guzmán, au...

We Own This City–written by Pulitzer Prize-nominated journalist Justin Fenton and the basis for David Simon’s HBO miniseries–tells the shocking, true story of a massive police corruption scandal. Baltimore had been struggling with high rates of violent crime for decades when, in 2007, the police department established the Gun Trace Task Force, a unit of plain-clothed police officers whose mandate...

“It’s a testament to [Jo Ann] Beard, a towering talent, that she ... deliver[s] a book as forceful as it is fine, leaving us both awed and unsettled.” -- New York Times review of Festival Days (RE-RELEASE) In this week’s episode, Eve and Julie talk to Jo Ann Beard about Festival Days, her extraordinary new collection of essays, some of which took decades to write. Jo Ann describes her deeply refle...

Today, we’d like to introduce you to the new podcast from The Podglomerate, Missing Pages. Missing Pages is an all-new investigative podcast hosted by world-renowned literary critic and publishing insider Bethanne Patrick. In its first season, Missing Pages uncovers the power struggles, mistaken identities, and unfathomably bad behavior within the secretive world of book publishing. Learn about th...

Welcome back to another installment of our favorite bibliophilic game, You Want Me to Read WHAT? The rules are simple: Julie, Eve, and a guest assign each other off-the-beaten path books and then gather to talk about them! This time around, Julie picked the Japanese thriller Seventeen by author Hideo Yokoyama for guest Marc Acito; Marc picked Colette’s feminist novella Gigi (which Alan Jay Lerner...

Constance Baker Motley was a groundbreaking civil rights lawyer and the first Black woman to become a federal judge. Her “world-changing accomplishments, which made her a ‘queen’ in her time, should place her in the pantheon of great American leaders,” alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and Thurgood Marshall. And yet,“far too few Americans today know Motley’s name and deeds. Students do not routine...

One pivotal afternoon, Erika Krouse met an attorney in a bookstore when they both reached for the same Paul Auster novel. Much to his surprise, he soon found himself confiding in her. She told him not to worry–strangers divulged secrets to her all the time–whereupon he offered her a job as a private investigator. And so, with no prior experience, Erika wound up investigating sexual assaults by mem...

Tensions are running high at Book Dreams! Why? The fantasy novels of author Susanna Clarke, that's why. After Julie--and multiple Book Dreams guests--strongly recommended Clarke's novel Piranesi, Eve gave it a try, only to quickly toss it on her DNR pile. Outraged, Julie insisted that Eve not only finish Piranesi, but also dig into Clarke's 800-page doorstopper Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. Can...

Fiction can invite the reader into unknown worlds and perspectives, or it can hold up a mirror so that we can see the familiar more clearly. In this episode of Book Dreams, Eve and Julie talk to first-time novelist Vauhini Vara about her new book, The Immortal King Rao. Together they explore how fiction helps us understand the path we’re on now, whether we can or should transcend global capitalism...

What makes us human? It’s a question we keep coming back to, in part because it's got no definitive answer. In this week’s episode we explore the ultimate existential query by looking at two of our most recent human ancestors–Homo floresiensis and Neanderthals–with two experts, anthropologist Gregory Forth and archeologist Rebecca Wragg Sykes. Discovered by archeologists in 2003 on the Indonesian...

(RE-RELEASE) How do you write a trailblazing woman back into history after her iconic colleagues wrote her out? Dr. Sally Roesch Wagner--founder and executive director of the Matilda Joslyn Gage Foundation and Center for Social Justice Dialogue; a founder of one the first college-level women’s studies programs in the United States; and author of The Women’s Suffrage Movement and Sisters in Spirit-...

Sometimes finding hope requires shifting our gaze from humanity. In this episode of Book Dreams, we take an up-close and uplifting look at the four-eyed spook fish, the great gray owl, the star-nosed mole, and even the bloodthirsty vampire bat. Our guest, Jackie Higgins–author of Sentient: How Animals Illuminate the Wonder of Our Human Senses–shares riveting details about the sensory capabilities...

Fairy tales. Why have they survived a thousand years of re-telling? How do they adapt to reflect changing times, places, and storytellers? And what is it about them that captivates us from early childhood and continues to intrigue us throughout our lives? In this episode of Book Dreams, Eve and Julie explore the magic of these familiar stories with scholar, author, and teacher Jack Zipes, one of t...

"I always think of that moment in North by Northwest, the Hitchcock movie, when someone is falling off one of the mountains in Mount Rushmore, and he grabs someone's hand, and then he loses their hand, and then he grabs their jacket. And then the jacket starts to rip." In this week's episode of Book Dreams, beloved mystery writer Sara Gran talks about how suspense writers create that "compelling u...

The best cookbooks are so much more than collections of recipes. They’re windows into a life or a place or a time or a way of thinking. The very best cookbooks are all of these things at once. Black Food: Stories, Art, and Recipes from Across the African Diaspora is one of these rare books. Edited by author-activist Bryant Terry, and published by his new imprint 4 Color Books, Black Food is the wo...

How should we, as a country, execute our military power, and what role should we, as citizens, play in military policy? In what ways does our current engagement in modern warfare, as it has evolved during the war on terror, fall short of the ideal, and what’s the impact of that shortfall? What’s the connection between our deep polarization at home and the endless, invisible conflicts we’re mired i...

What makes us human? In this episode, Eve and Julie explore one of our favorite questions with James Suzman, PhD, in a wide-ranging conversation about his book Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots. They talk about which aspects of work are specific to our species and how so much of what we believe to be intrinsic to work is actually just a product of our culture. James als...

Ellen McGarrahan was a young reporter at the Miami Herald when she volunteered to witness the execution of Jesse Tafero, who’d been convicted of killing two police officers. That execution went horrifically awry, and watching it changed the course of Ellen’s life. She left journalism, became a private investigator, and reinvestigated the murders attributed to Jesse Tafero, in an effort to determin...

What do wild bears and libertarians have in common? Turns out, more than you might think. In 2004 a group of libertarians founded the Free Town Project, a movement to take over a town and turn it into a libertarian utopia. After some research, the Free Towners decided that Grafton, New Hampshire, a town with a history of resistance to taxation that goes back to the American Revolution, seemed like...

This week we’re running an episode from the fabulous podcast, History of Literature, about one of our favorite authors, Jane Austen. Each week on his podcast, literature enthusiast–and dear friend of Book Dreams–Jacke Wilson journeys through the history of literature, from ancient epics to contemporary classics. Recent episodes include conversations about Kafka; about the wonderful world of myster...

“My people are from Wisconsin. We used to be from New York. We had a little real estate problem.” -Charlie Hill, comedian and member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. (RE-RELEASE) In this week’s episode, Julie and Eve talk to comedian, writer, and actor Adrianne Chalepah and comedy historian Kliph Nesteroff about Native Americans and comedy. In her conversation with Eve and Julie, Adrianne descri...

In 2011, a 27-year-old Austin Kleon gave a talk to college students outlining a simple list: 10 things he wished someone had told him about being creative when he was their age. Austin posted the advice to his blog after the talk, and the list went viral. A year later, his New York Times bestselling book Steal Like an Artist was born. Now, in 2022, Austin joins returning guest host (and Book Dream...

“When Dostoyevsky was 28, he was arrested in the pre-dawn hours by the Czar's political police. ... [Nine months later] the men were brought out into a square in the middle of St. Petersburg in December. Three men were tied to stakes; there were hoods pulled over their heads. A firing squad came out to aim their rifles. Dostoyevsky was next in line to be executed.” Thus begins our Book Dreams inte...

We did it! We reached our 100th episode of Book Dreams! In celebration, we went back to our guests and asked them this question: What's one book you love and why do you love it? And so now, have we got book recommendations for you! Twenty-eight beloved books from twenty-four of our beloved guests. From old favorites to new discoveries, from short stories to epic doorstoppers, we’ve got your readin...

It was a story that captured the attention of the public and art critics worldwide: A treasure trove of exceptional photographs was discovered after a storage locker auction in 2007. The then unknown photographer? Vivian Maier, a woman who worked her whole life as a nanny. Even after two documentaries were made about Vivian–one of which, “Finding Vivian Maier,” was nominated for an Oscar–many ques...