The Avid Reader Show

About Stanley Warren.. My first area of creative expression has been poetry. I have written some 1500 poems, of which several dozen have been published here and there, but many more recited at readings. In my late twenties I became the lyricist for a progressive electronic combo called Silver Apples, writing the words to seven of the nine songs on their first album, music that is played and listen...

Hailed as “The Great Israeli Novel” (Time Out Tel Aviv) and winner of the prestigious Bernstein Prize, The Hilltop is a monumental and daring work about life in a West Bank settlement from one of Israel’s most acclaimed young novelists. The Avid Reader Show airs each Monday at 4PM EST on WCHE AM 1520. Please visit our website at www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com

Fiction. "Who is Nell Zink? She claims to be an expatriate living in northeast Germany. Maybe she is; maybe she isn't. I don't know. I do know that this first novel arrives with a voice that is fully formed: mature, hilarious, terrifyingly intelligent, and wicked. The novel is about a bird-loving American couple that moves to Europe and becomes, basically, eco-terrorists. This is strange, and inte...

Inspired by and structured around the chamber piece of the same title by the French composer Olivier Messiaen, Quartet for the End of Time is a mesmerizing story of four lives irrevocably linked in a single act of betrayal. The novel takes us on an unforgettable journey beginning during the 1930s Bonus Army riots, when World War I veteran Arthur Sinclair is falsely accused of conspiracy and then d...

In his highly anticipated sequel to The Elements, Theodore Gray demonstrates how the elements of the periodic table combine to form the molecules that make up our world. The Avid Reader show airs Mondays at 5PM EST on WCHE AM 1520. The show is sponsored by Wellington Square Bookshop in Chester County, PA. Please visit our website at www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com

Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified readers with her million-copy bestseller, Reading Lolita in Tehran, which told the story of how, against the backdrop of morality squads and executions, she taught The Great Gatsby and other classics to her eager students in Iran. In this exhilarating followup, Nafisi has written the book her fans have been waiting for: an impassioned, beguiling, and utterly...

Mandy Aftel is widely acclaimed as a trailblazer in natural perfumery. Over two decades of sourcing the finest aromatic ingredients from all over the world and creating artisanal fragrances, she has been an evangelist for the transformative power of scent. In Fragrant, through five major players in the epic of aroma, she explores the profound connection between our sense of smell and the appetites...

Digital information is a powerful tool that spreads unbelievably rapidly, infects all corners of society, and is all but impossible to control—even when that information is actually a lie. In Virtual Unreality, Charles Seife uses the skepticism, wit, and sharp facility for analysis that captivated readers in Proofiness and Zero to take us deep into the Internet information jungle and cut a path th...

“ Haunting and riveting ... In several moving passages, Mandel's characters look back with similar longing toward the receding pre-plague world, remembering all the things they'd once taken for granted — from the Internet to eating an orange ... It's not just the residents of Mandel's post-collapse world who need to forge stronger connections and live for more than mere survival. So do we all. " -...

“Maria Venegas is a transfixing writer. Her voice is tough, vulnerable, humorous, insightful and always rousingly alive. American readers have rarely encountered a depiction of Mexican lives so true, unsentimental, and moving as in this emotionally complex story of an Americanized young woman and her outlaw father who lives by the hard violent codes of Mexico profundo.” —Francisco Goldman, author...

“Is there such a thing as a Rescue Book? Well, there is now. This is a miracle of a book. It’s even a spiritual handbook. And it is for readers young and old and all of the in-between. Cooney is such a wise genius of a writer, and her sentences keep surprising you, but are never the point in themselves. I read with a kind of mental breathlessness. If Cooney needs someone to convince her to write a...

The New York Times bestseller by the author of Cloud Atlas | Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize “With The Bone Clocks, [David] Mitchell rises to meet and match the legacy of Cloud Atlas.”—Los Angeles Times Following a terrible fight with her mother over her boyfriend, fifteen-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her family and her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: A sensitive c...

Arturo and Alma Rivera have lived their whole lives in Mexico. One day, their beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter, Maribel, sustains a terrible injury, one that casts doubt on whether she’ll ever be the same. And so, leaving all they have behind, the Riveras come to America with a single dream: that in this country of great opportunity and resources, Maribel can get better. The Avid Reader Show ai...

From the National Book Foundation.. James McBride’s novel takes a pivotal, troubled sequence in American history—John Brown’s abolitionist campaign—and retells it in a voice as comic and original as any we have heard since Mark Twain. The narrator is one Henry Shackleford, aka Onion, an escaped teenaged slave who accompanies Brown while disguised as a girl. Fondly portraying Brown as a well-meanin...

KIRKUS REVIEW On a journey from Ohio to Hollywood to Long Island to London in the 1940s, a couple of plucky half sisters continually reinvent themselves with the help of an unconventional assortment of friends and relatives. The Avid Reader Show airs Mondays at 5PM EST on WCHE 1520AM. The Show is sponsored by Wellington Square Bookshop in Chester County, PA. Please visit our website at www.welling...

Physicist Dave Goldberg speeds across space, time and everything in between showing that our elegant universe—from the Higgs boson to antimatter to the most massive group of galaxies—is shaped by hidden symmetries that have driven all our recent discoveries about the universe and all the ones to come. The Avid Reader Show airs every Monday at 5PM EST on WCHE AM 1520. The show is sponsored by Welli...

Me Before You Louisa Clark is an ordinary girl living an exceedingly ordinary life—steady boyfriend, close family—who has barely been farther afield than their tiny village. She takes a badly needed job working for ex–Master of the Universe Will Traynor, who is wheelchair bound after an accident. Will has always lived a huge life—big deals, extreme sports, worldwide travel—and now he’s pretty sure...

Streetlamps, neon signs – an ever-present glow that has changed the natural world and adversely affected our health; Paul Bogard illuminates the problems caused by a lack of darkness. We live awash in artificial light. But night’s natural darkness has always been invaluable for our spiritual health and the health of the natural world, and every living creature suffers from its loss. Paul Bogard in...

"A great story--how modernism brought down the regime of censorship--told as a great story. Kevin Birmingham's imaginative scholarship brings Joyce and his world to life. There is a fresh detail on nearly every page."--Louis Menand, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Metaphysical Club The Avid Reader is sponsored by Wellington Square Bookshop in Chester County, PA. The show airs at 5PM EST on WC...

Dysfunctional government: It’s become a cliché, and most of us are resigned to the fact that nothing is ever going to change. As John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge show us, that is a seriously limited view of things. In fact, there have been three great revolutions in government in the history of the modern world. The West has led these revolutions, but now we are in the midst of a fourth rev...

Not since Donna Tartt’s The Secret History has a novel this intoxicating captured the headiness and dark temptations of university life. The old Etruscan city of Grifonia swarms with year-abroad students—thousands of them from all over. Ostensibly, they’ve come to study. But really they are here to reinvent themselves, to shuck their identities and buck constraints far from the watchful eyes of pa...

Laline Paull’s ambitious and bold first novel, “The Bees,” follows Flora 717, a sanitation worker doomed by her birth to the lowest caste of her community. She is large and ugly and — oh, yes — a bee. What could feel gimmicky or cute never does; Flora 717 is a brave and spirited soul, and it is a pleasure to follow her through the hive and the air. The brief prologue and epilogue are the only sect...

In The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons, Sam Kean travels through time with stories of neurological curiosities: phantom limbs, Siamese twin brains, viruses that eat patients' memories, blind people who see through their tongues. He weaves these narratives together with prose that makes the pages fly by, to create a story of discovery that reaches back to the 1500s and the high-profile jousting a...

One of the most anticipated debut novels of 2014, Cutting Teeth takes place one late-summer weekend as a group of thirty-something couples gather at a shabby beach house on Long Island, their young children in tow.

In this richly detailed novel about the quest for an unknown father, Julia Glass brings new characters together with familiar figures from her first two novels, immersing readers in a panorama that stretches from suburban New Jersey to rural Vermont and ultimately to the tip of Cape Cod.