Shelf Life

Send us Fan Mail Francis Spufford’s new novel, Nonesuch , drops us into Blitz London—blackouts, random acts of violence, food rationing—and then, almost imperceptibly, the world acquires another layer. In this episode, Spufford, the author of Golden Hill and Light Perpetual , among others, talks about the “daft mixture of wartime finance, early TV, archangels, Renaissance magic, and falling bombs,...

Send us Fan Mail Madeleine Dunnigan’s fierce, unnerving coming-of-age novel, Jean, is set in the final weeks at Compton Manor, an all-boys school that sells itself as enlightened where desire moves like weather, and cruelty is a kind of social sport. In this episode Dunnigan explains why the boarding-school setting is such a useful framing device; what drew her to the late 1970s punk-era—close eno...

Send us Fan Mail Few cities lend themselves to myth quite like New York, a city that reinvents itself so often that each generation claims its own version. In this episode, we speak with journalist Jonathan Mahler about The Gods of New York , his sweeping portrait of the 1980s city of ambition and excess, when figures like Ed Koch, Donald Trump, and Al Sharpton weren’t just characters in the story...

Send us Fan Mail Before you can shape a story, you have to pay attention to the world as it really is—even when it’s messy, even when it stings. That lesson from Louise Fitzhugh’s classic Harriet the Spy has guided the career of reporter and biographer Laurie Gwen Shapiro. Her new book, The Aviator and the Showman , is the first major biography of Amelia Earhart in two decades, praised by The Wash...

Send us Fan Mail “Anything Ada Calhoun wants to write is well worth reading,” declared Kirkus in its review of her new novel, Crush , a sharp and seductive exploration of midlife desire and the unruly force of infatuation. Calhoun is the author of the acclaimed history St. Marks Is Dead ; the memoir Also a Poet , which chronicles her attempt to finish an abandoned biography of Frank O’Hara begun b...

Send us Fan Mail Few writers dance across genres with as much wit, irreverence, and intellectual curiosity as Geoff Dyer. From Out of Sheer Rage , about his struggles to write a book on DH Lawrence, to the award-winning jazz meditations of But Beautiful, he's made a career of bending forms to his will. In Homework , his first memoir, Dyer turns that restless mind to his own post-war English c...

Send us Fan Mail What can we learn from Weimar Germany and its rapid unraveling in the 1930s? Lately that question has gained more urgency as the US turns away from the trans-Atlantic alliance that has underpinned European security for the past 80 years. For Katherine Bucknell, no writer was better placed than Christopher Isherwood for understanding the speed with which a country can slide into au...

Send us Fan Mail Nobel Laureate Rudyard Kipling is among the most derided of 20th century novelists, but in this episode of Shelf Life, the publishing legend Edwin Frank urges us to take a second look. As it happens, taking a second look was the impetus behind Frank's trailblazing publishing imprint, New York Review Books, built on the principle that too many great books had fallen out of pri...

Send us Fan Mail It's been 40 years since Jeanette Winterson's debut novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit , launched a confident and daring new voice in English fiction, one that wasn’t afraid to take risks in the service of craft. Many books have followed,  including The Passion , Sexing the Cherry , Written on the Body , and more recently Frankissstein: A Love Story. “I am an ambitiou...

Send us Fan Mail Memoir meets history meets politics in Jennifer Kabat’s book, The Eighth Moo n, a fascinating account of moving to the Catskills in 2005, and stumbling on a history of America’s forgotten populist uprising, the Anti-Rent War, that culminated in 1845 with the murder of a police officer, Osman Steele. Drawing on archives, conversations, and her many hikes through the countryside, Ka...

Send us Fan Mail A teenage prodigy who worshiped Joni Mitchell, Ricky Ian Gordon has made a career turning novels and poems into operas and song. “I was that kid who was invited to the party because I could play anything, no matter how hard, and incite everyone into singing all night,” he writes in his  memoir, Seeing Through: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs and Opera . But that exuberant talent has an...

Send us Fan Mail Rex Ogle’s series of YA memoirs, beginning with Free Lunch, about life as a poor kid in a wealthy school district, and culminating this year in Road Home, which chronicles his experience as a homeless teen have won acclaim for their frank ability to illuminate the shame and isolation that comes with poverty. In the words of Ogle’s mother, "being poor in America is like starin...

Send us Fan Mail Is there a more primal terror than a mother’s fear of losing a child. Helen Phillips, one of our greatest speculative writers, explored that terrain in her acclaimed 2020 novel, The Need , in which a mother fears her children are being abducted by her own doppelganger. She returns to that theme ih Hum, a novel set in a near-future when artificial intelligence and surveillance pose...

Send us Fan Mail The musician Orenda Fink, best known for her early 2000s band, Azure Ray, purveyors of a dreamy, confessional pop, has now penned a frank, unsparing memoir, The Witch's Daughter, in which she grapples with her complicated family story in which her mother's profound emotional needs operated as a kind of centrifugal force.  “Life with my mother was like being in a trap,” s...

Send us Fan Mail What does Charles Portis’s 1968 novel, True Grit , twice made into a Hollywood western,  have in common with Kay Thompson’s whimsical children's book, Eloise? Here to tell us is Jennifer Belle, the author of five novels, including most recently, Swanna in Love, an indelible, and often very funny portrait of a 14-year-old girl trapped in an artist’s commune in Vermont with her...

Send us Fan Mail The author of seven novels and one collection of stories, Curtis Sittenfeld specializes in sharp-witted female protagonists in stories that reflect a Jane Austen-like cunning in using comedy as a vehicle for social observation.  For those who are familiar with her work, it may come as little surprise that Austen’s Pride & Prejudice is among her favorite books.  We also get an...

Send us Fan Mail Loss, longing and melancholy dominate the strange and sometimes mordantly funny short stories of Eudora Welty, the writer whose debut 1941 collection, A Curtain of Green is among two books that Ada Zhang has chosen for Shelf Life. The other is William Maxwell's short, taut So Long, See You Tomorrow . Zhang's debut story collection, The Sorrows of Others is a tapestry of...

Send us Fan Mail When did you first encounter Dylan Baker? Perhaps it was as the brazen wife killer Colin Sweeney in the long-running CBS show, The Good Wife . Or maybe it was the FBI bully-in-chief, J. Edgar Hoover in Ava DuVernay’s civil rights-era movie, Selma . Or was it much longer ago as the monster with the human face, Bill Maplewood in Todd Solendz’s 1998 movie Happiness.  He says, “I went...

Send us Fan Mail The bestselling  finance guru-turned-TV star, Ramit Sethi is on a mission to help all of us live what he calls our rich lives, but he's not just another finance bro. The son of Indian immigrants who were too poor to afford restaurants or overseas vacations, he has developed an extraordinary skill in helping people figure out how to spend money on the things that make our live...

Send us Fan Mail In the quiet hush of winter, there's a particular inclination to fold into the pages of unexplored narratives. Since Shelf Life paused its pulse last summer, I've wandered through a constellation of worlds chosen by  a new group of celebrated bibliophiles, including the actor Dylan Baker, the finance guru Ramit Sethi,  and new voices in fiction like Ada Zhang and Ben Pur...

Send us Fan Mail Each year  Deep Water Literary Festival in Narrowsburg, NY, identifies a unifying theme, often a particular literary work or an author, and builds a program to engage and interrogate the ways in which the theme resonates for contemporary audiences. In 2023 the festival explored the work of British novelist and journalist George Orwell. In this conversation the award-winning noveli...

Send us Fan Mail The writer and biographer D.J. Taylor on the rich, complicated and too-short life of one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, George Orwell. Almost 75 years after his death we discuss why the author of 1984 matters as much, if not more, than ever. Includes an excerpt of Orwell's "Some Thoughts on the Common Today," read for Shelf Life by Tilda Swinton.

Send us Fan Mail Novelist Christopher Bollen has been writing twisty thrillers with emotional depth for over a decade. His latest, The Lost Americans , takes readers to Cairo for a deftly-plotted murder mystery set in the high-stakes world of arms traders and Egypt's authoritarian government. As with his writing, so with his book choices: we get intrigue and suspense in London during the Blit...

Send us Fan Mail Few of us need reminding that childhood can be a difficult and challenging time; but it can also be a magical one. That duality is at the heart of The Whalebone Theater , the best-selling debut novel of Joana Quinn. Childhood is central, also, to Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 classic novel, The Secret Garden , in which a group of three young children discover the transformative m...

Send us Fan Mail Tender hearted children growing up in oppressive and claustrophobic societies dominate the two novels chosen by the journalist and musician, Ari Shapiro. The first is Douglas Stuart’s acclaimed sophomore novel, Young Mungo ; the second is Belinda Huijuan Tang’s A Map for the Missing . As one of the hosts for NPR’s flagship program, All Things Considered , listeners will  be famili...