The Avid Reader Show

From Insomniac City author Bill Hayes, "who can tackle just about any subject in book form, and make you glad he did" (SF Chronicle)—a cultural, scientific, literary, and personal history of exercise. Exercise is our modern obsession, and we have the fancy workout gear and fads from HIIT to spin classes to hot yoga to prove it. Exercise—a form of physical activity distinct from sports, play, or at...

A poet’s audio obsession, from collecting his earliest vinyl to his quest for the ideal vacuum tubes. A captivating book that “ingeniously mixes personal memoir with cultural history and offers us an indispensable guide for the search of acoustic truth” (Yunte Huang, author of Charlie Chan). Garrett Hongo’s passion for audio dates back to the Empire 398 turntable his father paired with a Dynakit t...

What really happened in Area 51? Adam Pagnucco is just trying to help out a stranger who's down and out. He has no idea that man is Winston Koop, his exceptionally talented, ex-best friend. Koop and Nuke had been inseparable in college, but then life happened. Nuke finally quit drinking, and Koop--Koop was at the center of a massive conspiracy that the government faked UFOs just to cover it up. Ev...

A leading philosopher takes a mind-bending journey through virtual worlds, illuminating the nature of reality and our place within it. Virtual reality is genuine reality; that’s the central thesis of Reality+ . In a highly original work of “technophilosophy,” David J. Chalmers gives a compelling analysis of our technological future. He argues that virtual worlds are not second-class worlds, and th...

The New York Times bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran returns with a guide to the power of literature in turbulent times, arming readers with a resistance reading list, ranging from James Baldwin to Zora Neale Hurston to Margaret Atwood. What is the role of literature in an era when one political party wages continual war on writers and the press? What is the connection between politic...

In 2030, a grieving archeologist arrives in the Arctic Circle to continue the work of his recently deceased daughter at the Batagaika Crater, where researchers are studying long-buried secrets now revealed in melting permafrost, including the perfectly preserved remains of a girl who appears to have died of an ancient virus. Once unleashed, the Arctic plague will reshape life on Earth for generati...

Reflections from a life lived in medicine. Pediatrician Mark Vonnegut has spent forty years treating children for coughs, fevers, ear infections, and sometimes more serious complaints. In that time he has seen the American medical system change in ways he couldn't have imagined as a medical student--some of them good, others not so good. But what hasn't changed is his commitment to his young patie...

The dramatic story of how a humble bookseller fought against incredible odds to bring one of the most important books of the 20th century to the world in this new novel from the author of The Girl in White Gloves.   When bookish young American Sylvia Beach opens Shakespeare and Company on a quiet street in Paris in 1919, she has no idea that she and her new bookstore will change the course of lite...

A truly original book in every sense of the word, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows poetically defines emotions that we all feel but don’t have the words to express, until now—from the creator of the popular online project of the same name. Have you ever wondered about the lives of each person you pass on the street, realizing that everyone is the main character in their own story, each living a l...

Bestselling biographer Laurence Leamer delves into the years following the acclaimed publication of Breakfast at Tiffany’s in 1958 and In Cold Blood in 1966, when Capote struggled with a crippling case of writer’s block. While en­joying all the fruits of his success, he was struck with an idea for what he was sure would be his most celebrated novel…one based on the re­markable, racy lives of his v...

As a child, Jerad Alexander lay in bed listening to the fighter jets take off outside his window and was desperate to be airborne. As a teenager at an American base in Japan, he immersed himself in war games, war movies, and pulpy novels about Vietnam. Obsessed with all things military, he grew up playing with guns, joined the Civil Air Patrol for the uniform, and reveled in the closed and safe li...

Lily King, one of the most "brilliant" ( New York Times Book Review ), "wildly talented" ( Chicago Tribune ), and treasured authors of contemporary fiction, returns after her recent bestselling novels with Five Tuesdays in Winter, her first book of short fiction.  Told in the intimate voices of complex, endearing characters, Five Tuesdays in Winter intriguingly subverts expectations as it explores...

n this lively, unexpected look at the hearts of animals—from fish to bats to humans—American Museum of Natural History zoologist Bill Schutt tells an incredible story of evolution and scientific progress. We join Schutt on a tour from the origins of circulation, still evident in microorganisms today, to the tiny hardworking pumps of worms, to the golf-cart-size hearts of blue whales. We visit beac...

A revelatory new portrait of the courageous woman who saved Dostoyevsky’s life—and became a pioneer in Russian literary history In the fall of 1866, a twenty-year-old stenographer named Anna Snitkina applied for a position with a writer she idolized: Fyodor Dostoyevsky. A self-described “emancipated girl of the sixties,” Snitkina had come of age during Russia’s first feminist movement, and Dostoye...

The highly anticipated biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art. With a wealth of never-before-accessed materials--including unpublished letters and manuscripts; court, police, and psychiatric records; and new interviews--Heather Clark brings to life the brilliant dau...

A darkly funny, soul-rending novel of love in an epoch of collapse—one woman’s furious revisiting of family, marriage, work, sex, and motherhood. Since my baby was born, I have been able to laugh and see the funny side of things. a) As much as I ever did. b) Not quite as much now. c) Not so much now. d) Not at all. Leaving behind her husband and their baby daughter, a writer gets on a flight for a...

A searing and brave memoir that offers a new understanding of suicide as a distinct mental illness. As the sun lowered in the sky one Friday afternoon in April 2006, acclaimed author Donald Antrim found himself on the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building, afraid for his life. In this moving memoir, Antrim vividly recounts what led him to the roof and what happened after he came back down: two h...

Six weeks after Kimberly and her husband announced their divorce, she began work on a book that she thought would only be about divorce — heavy on the dark humor with a light coating of anger and annoyance. After all, on the heels of planning to dissolve a twenty-year marriage they had chosen to still live together in the same house with their kids. Throw in a global pandemic and her idea of what...

Frank Exit is dead—or is he? While eavesdropping on two women discussing a dog-sitting gig over lunch, a bereft friend comes to a shocking realization: Frank has been reincarnated as a dog! This epiphany launches a series of adventures—interlaced with digressions about AI-generated fiction, virtual reality, Asian American identity in the arts, and lost parents—as an unlikely cast of accomplices an...

Shizuka Satomi made a deal with the devil: to escape damnation, she must entice seven other violin prodigies to trade their souls for success. She has already delivered six.  When Katrina Nguyen, a young transgender runaway, catches Shizuka's ear with her wild talent, Shizuka can almost feel the curse lifting. She's found her final candidate.  But in a donut shop off a bustling highway in the San...

What if we responded to death... by throwing a party? By the time Erica Buist's father-in-law Chris was discovered, upstairs in his bed, his book resting on his chest, he had been dead for over a week. She searched for answers (the artery-clogging cheeses in his fridge?) and tried to reason with herself (does daughter-in-law even feature in the grief hierarchy?) and eventually landed on an inevita...

What’s to be done about a jaywalking moose? A bear caught breaking and entering? A murderous tree? Three hundred years ago, animals that broke the law would be assigned legal representation and put on trial. These days, as New York Times best-selling author Mary Roach discovers, the answers are best found not in jurisprudence but in science: the curious science of human-wildlife conflict, a discip...

From national bestselling author Nick McDonell, The Council of Animals is a captivating fable for humans of all ages—dreamers and cynics alike—who believe (if nothing else) in the power of timeless storytelling. “‘Now,’ continued the cat, ‘there is nothing more difficult than changing an animal’s mind. But I will say, in case I can change yours: humans are more useful to us outside our bellies tha...

The Top 10 Sunday Times Bestseller. For history nerds and food lovers, the curious and the hungry, an entertaining journey stretching across the British Isles. Packed with the story of British cheese from an expert storyteller and master cheesemonger. Ned Palmer runs the Cheese Tasting Company, whose unique events pair cheese with wines, beers, whiskies and history. After studying philosophy, thea...

Flash Forward: An Illustrated Guide to Possible (And Not So Possible) Tomorrows takes readers on a journey from speculative fiction to speculative “fact.” Producer and host of the podcast Flash Forward , Rose Eveleth poses provocative questions about our future, which are brought to life by 12 of the most imaginative comics and graphic artists at work, including Matt Lubchanksy, Sophie Goldstein,...