Author

The Routines Of Creative Geniuses

Virginia Prescott — Thu, 16 May 2013 15:12:14 +0000

Hemingway, Darwin, Joyce, Tesla and Picasso were all remarkably different in their temperament and creative output, but they had one thing in common: a successful routine. From Franklin’s solitary nude reading hour to Picasso’s silent lunch gatherings, the outstanding rituals and habits that created genius are as fascinating as they are unexpected. Combing through over 160 accounts of creative minds, Mason Currey’s new book “Daily Rituals: How Artists Work” uncovers the daily almanac of history’s most eccentric, troubled and genius figures. Mason’s writing has appeared in Slate, Print, and Metropolis, where he was an editor for six years.

Augusten Burroughs

Virginia Prescott — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:10:57 +0000

It's been ten years since Augusten Burroughs' memoir Dry was published. In that decade, the author of Running With Scissors has gotten married, stayed sober, and written a self-help book, This is How: Surviving What You Think You Can't, now out in paperback.

Pulitzer Prize Winning Poet, Sharon Olds

Virginia Prescott — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 18:15:22 +0000

Throughout her career the poet Sharon Olds has been asked if her poems were true or autobiographical. There are poems about mothering and domesticity and eroticism filled with personal details and described with remarkable directness and insight. Sharon Olds has rejected the auto-biographical characterization and resisted talking about her life while her children were young, and her parents were alive. She even kept the disillusion of her 32 year marriage from the public; waiting more than a decade to publish Stag's Leap, a collection of poems that is being praised as the best book of her career, and earlier this month won the Pullitzer Prize for poetry.

Game Theory According To Jane Austen

Virginia Prescott — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 13:53:12 +0000

This year marks the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s most celebrated novel, in which Ms. Bennet discovers her true love in a man she first sees as an adversary. Pride and Prejudice has spurred countless adaptations, films, and even a zombie parody…but now Austen is getting new attention not for her romantic prose, but for her strategic thinking. Joining us is Jennifer Schuessler with the New York Times, who recently covered the publication of the book, Jane Austen, Game Theorist, written by UCLA political scientist Michael Chwe.

Dusting Off The Classics: Why You Should Revisit Your High School Reading List

Virginia Prescott — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 13:45:07 +0000

Kevin Smokler is setting out to resurrect America’s long-ago encounters. Works such as The Great Gatsby, Fahrenheit 451 and Bartleby: The Scrivener, skimmed and discarded by 15 year-old high school hands in days of yore, are being taken off the shelf, dusted off, and re-explored by the same pair of older, more experienced eyes. By compiling a list of fifty high school “classics”, Kevin spent ten months re-reading the stories that have become distant, unquestionable deities in the eyes of many middle-aged Americans. What he found was profound; and in some ways, unexpected. Kevin, now 39, amassed his thoughts and findings in his new book Practical Classics: Fifty Reasons to Reread Fifty Books You Haven’t Touched Since High School.

Zero-Waste Home

Virginia Prescott — Thu, 11 Apr 2013 15:38:17 +0000

Many of us have good intentions when it comes to reducing household waste – but too often those canvas totes get left in the closet, food scraps avoid the compost pile, and product packaging fills the trash-bag. One head of household has found the motivation and creativity needed to take home-waste reduction to a whole other level. Bea Johnson is the blogger behind Zero-Waste Home, and now author of a book by the same name. She and her family produce only one quart of garbage per year.

The Burgess Boys

Virginia Prescott — Mon, 08 Apr 2013 15:07:41 +0000

Shirley Falls, Maine is one of those New England towns with a strong memory of the way things used to be…before the mills closed, before the mall went up across the river…before so many residents moved away. It’s the fictional town left behind by a pair of brothers in The Burgess Boys, a new novel by Elizabeth Strout, who won the Pulitzer prize for fiction for Olive Kitteridge. The story centers on Jim and Bob Burgess, brothers whose lives are imprinted by a childhood tragedy in very different ways. Both pull up their stakes and secret miseries and move to New York City….and both are pulled back to their hometown by another family crisis. Elizabeth talks to Virginia about the book and it's connection to Maine.

Fight For Your Long Day

Rebecca Lavoie — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:21:01 +0000

Alex Kudera published Fight for Your Long Day, in 2010, but it’s still gaining traction because of its unflinching look at the swelling academic underclass that is adjunct faculty, recently getting notice from the chronicle of higher education. We spoke with him about the book and the perception of adjuncts in higher education today.

The Bloggess Pretends This Never Happened

Virginia Prescott — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 14:16:55 +0000

Last year we spoke to Jenny Lawson about her memoir Let’s Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir. Since then the book has enjoyed time on the NY Times best seller list and even garnered the number one spot in the first week it was out. Now that it’s out in paperback --once again on the NY Times best seller list, in the number 7 slot--and Jenny is touring the country to promote it, we thought it would be a great time to revisit Virginia’s conversation with her from April of 2012.

Word Of Mouth 03.23.2013

Rebecca Lavoie — Fri, 22 Mar 2013 18:41:18 +0000

All of the pleasure, none of the guilt. Our Saturday show gets you caught up, in a convenient snack pack size. This week….A video game attempts to replicate the experience of autism; spying in space with the help of spectroscopy; a look back to when Peyton Place was in its heyday, almost 60 years ago; the delicious and sweet tradition of capturing maple syrup; making music by “playing” a tower; and a musician gives a private concert in Studio D, then talks about teenage inspiration and her love of pie.

Lake People

Virginia Prescott — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 13:21:15 +0000

An unnamed lake in Kettleborough, New Hampshire has an almost mythological pull on the characters in a new novel by Abi Maxwell. Bodies disappear into the ice, the shamed and broken hearted sometimes float…sometimes are swallowed in its depths. A young woman named Alice, abandoned as an infant, is found floating in a tethered canoe. Its mysteries are deep and startling, the inventions of a first-time novelist who is also the assistant librarian at the Gilford public library. Abi will read from her new book, Lake People tomorrow night at Gibson’s Books in Concord.

The Lawyer Bubble

Virginia Prescott — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 13:14:23 +0000

Since 2004, the number of law-school applications has dropped from almost 100,000 to 54,000, and the Law School Admission Council recently reported that applications were heading toward a 30 year low. Steven J. Harper submits that these declining numbers haven’t emerged from uncontrollable market forces, but are rather a result of human greed and grandiosity that went unchecked for decades. Steven is an adjunct professor at Northwestern University and author of the forthcoming book The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis.

Dave Barry

Virginia Prescott — Thu, 21 Feb 2013 19:21:32 +0000

The Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist joins us with his first solo adult novel in over a decade – the darkly comic Insane City. The book is a riotous tale of a destination wedding gone awry with Russian gangsters, angry strippers, a pimp as big as the Death Star, a very desperate Haitian refugee on the run with her two children from some very bad men, and an eleven-foot Burmese albino python named Blossom.

John Irving

Virginia Prescott — Thu, 07 Feb 2013 14:38:51 +0000

From the youth spent at Philips Exeter Academy that pervades his body of work, through his studies with Kurt Vonnegut at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop – known for producing authors the like of Pulitzer winners John Cheever and Philip Roth - John Winslow Irving has emerged as a true literary heavyweight, distinctly American of voice, and one of the most influential cultural exports to come out of New Hampshire.

Jared Diamond

Virginia Prescott — Wed, 09 Jan 2013 15:38:02 +0000

Jared Diamond, Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling author of Collapse and Guns, Germs, and Steel, takes the stage to discuss his latest foray into a field he has made his own -- a biological analysis of human history.