Shows
Tell Me What You’re ReadingEp. # 54: Susan Brown: The Secrets of the Great Writers/ Hit Lit/ UlyssesSusan Brown is a professional editor, writing coach, and book doctor. She’s had forty years of teaching college creative writing and book editing, and has guided dozens of books into print as an editor, and as a writing coach.My friend Jeff Moran in Woodstock had previously mentioned Susan to me, and so I was intrigued when I heard that Susan was going to run a five week online writing workshop called “The Secrets of the Great Writers”.Jeff had told me that Susan was a James Joyce scholar. That was a little...
2025-09-2651 min
Tell Me What You’re ReadingNo. 55: The Merry Wives of WindsorI had a delightful discussion with Hank Neimark, one of the Directors and Eric Hefler, who plays Falstaff, in The Bird-On-A-Ciff’s Woodstock Shakespeare Festival production of “The Merry Wives of Windsor”, Shakespeare’s light heartened, and raucous, comedy, truly a farce, which focuses on middle class domestic issues and the agency of its female characters. The Merry Wives of Windsor is Shakespeare’s only contemporaneous play, and features two very clever and able women who turn the tables on the bumptious, raucous, drunken rogue and scoundrel, womanizing, egotistical, deceitful, epicure and glutton, the fragile and fearful, morbidly obese an...
2025-09-2523 min
Tell Me What You’re ReadingTell Me What You're Reading #53: Jenni Knight discusses Autoportrait by Edouard LeveJenni Knight, an artist in residence at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony (Bard MFA grad with a background in sculpture, drawing, painting and working with New York City experimental culture institutions, and currently writing about bodily integrity), discusses Autoportrait by Édouard Levé, 112 pages of mostly unconnected sentences, profound and mundane, serious and lighthearted, many irreverent, several entries referring to suicide, all in just one paragraph; a stream of consciousness exercise perhaps. Comic, unsettling, tragic.
2024-11-1859 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #52 Jeffrey Gurock - Marty Glickman -The Life of an American Sports LegendJeffrey Gurock is the author of a great new comprehensive biography of the premier voice of New York sports from the 1940s through the 1990s. The book is Marty Glickman, The Life of an American Jewish Sports Legend. I loved the book and our podcast discussion.
It's a sweet, sweet, bittersweet biography.
Romania, the Bronx and Brooklyn, the example set by Hank Greenberg and by Sandy Koufax, track and football in high school and college, quotas limiting the number of Jews in certain colleges, the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, the Jews who were precipitously excluded from the competition, A...
2024-01-0741 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #51 Elizabeth Lesser: Broken Open/ Marrow/ Our Town / Tom Lake/ Omega InstituteElizabeth Lesser discussed on my Podcast the founding of Omega Institute - internationally recognized for its wellness, spirituality, creativity, and social change workshops and conferences - as well her beautiful and inspiring books about finding protection and blessings in the broken moments of our lives; enjoying the passage of time; realizing what we have in life; appreciating every moment we are alive - Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow - and about being present to each moment; being who you are, answering the call of your soul, authenticity; unconditional love; learning to avoid straining against pain; being...
2023-12-0140 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #50 Amy Shearn and Hannah Oberman-Breindel - To the LighthouseI enjoyed talking with Amy Shearn and Hannah Oberman-Breindel this summer when they were in the Artist-in-Residence writing program at Woodstock’s Byrdcliffe Arts Colony, and even more so on our recent podcast discussion of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, which is considered to be one of the great literary masterpieces of the twentieth century.
I had not previously read any Virginia Woolf and I had not studied literary modernism. Despite being uninitiated, I was struck by the way Woolf captured the human condition and, in a realistic way, the unstructured non-linear thought processes of her characters.
Written in 1927, the n...
2023-11-0750 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. # 49 Carol Graham: Passion! In Park Slope, a “cozy” murder mysteryOur Woodstock friend Carol Graham recently told me that her new book was just about to be published. She said something like, “Howard, this is not like one of the big, great fiction books you read, this is a ‘cozy’“. I had no idea at the time what a “cozy” was. but I do now.
British crime novelist and detective fiction writer, P. D. James has been credited with saying that “All fiction is largely autobiographical”
Carol is a Texan but has lived in Brooklyn and Woodstock for the last 21 years, and is now a real estate agent in both areas. Carol is...
2023-10-2621 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #48 David Gordon commemorates Cormac McCarthy and The RoadOn an Upper Byrdcliffe Road walk in Woodstock this past summer, I noted to my friends, Perry Beekman and David Gordon, the recent death of Robert Gottlieb, the most acclaimed book editor of the last 50+ years. I’ve previously mentioned on the podcast, Gottlieb’s really great memoir, Avid Reader.
David noted that writer Cormac McCarthy had also then recently died. David expressed enthusiasm for McCarthy’s great works over the years. I had read McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece, The Road, many years prior and I still get a chill in my bones when I think about it.
I asked...
2023-10-0730 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #47 An Ecotopia Conversation with Artist Kelly M O’BrienCarol and I walked up the road in early September to visit the Open Studios of the Artists-in-Residence Program at Woodstock’s Byrdcliffe Arts Colony. The Byrdcliffe Arts Colony was founded in 1903 by Ralph Whitehead, the son of a wealthy mill owner from Yorkshire, England. Whitehead was influenced by utopian ideas when he studied at Oxford, and he developed an enduring vision to found his own “brotherhood of artists” community. The Artists-in-Residence program is one of the many Byrdcliffe programs today that carry on Whitehead’s legacy.
Carol and I saw some really interesting works at the Open Studios and were rea...
2023-09-2642 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #46 Steph Kent: Hamnet - A Novel of the Plague + The Call Me Ishmael ProjectSteph Kent, co-founder, with her husband Logan Smalley, of the Call Me Ishmael project joined me to discuss Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell, the book I have recommended more than any other over the last few years.
Hamnet is a work of fiction, but it’s based in part on certain core facts on which O’Farrell builds this beautiful, devastatingly sad story, albeit with a sweet ending, of the impact of Hamnet’s death on his family, and its relationship to the writing of Hamlet.
The book is a master class in the use of detail...
2023-08-1331 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #45 Tony Wolf: “Tales From The Wolf”My friend Tony Wolf and I discussed “Tales From The Wolf”, Tony’s memoir about his years living in Greenpoint, and including a compilation of his New York Times “food cartoon” features, his superhero stories, a moving 9/11 tribute, and Trump era political cartoons. “Tales From The Wolf” can be purchased here. Tony is a cartoonist, an actor (including on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), a singer, film director, and illustrator. He’s essentially a storyteller, a journalist at heart. Tony’s website.
We discussed Tony’s cartooning journey from the time he was a young child, his cartoonist role models, and how he “unwittingly c...
2023-06-171h 11Tell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #44: Erica Obey - The Brooklyn North MurderOur discussion about Erica Obey’s mystery novel, the Brooklyn North Murder, turned into a discussion of The Typology of Detective Fiction, by Bulgarian-French historian, philosopher, and literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov, a discussion about AI bots, their invasion into the publishing industry, plagiarism charges, and what it means for a book to be ghost written. We discussed Mountweazels, the dark web, The Chronicles of Narnia, early 19th century English aristocrat, publisher and linguist, Lady Charlotte Guest, locked-room murder mysteries, plotters and pantsers, and Erica’s “chaotic” writing style. We also conducted a ChatGPT experiment. Rabbit holes abound.
Erica is a gradua...
2023-04-0232 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #43: Tom Vartanian: The Unhackable Internet: How Rebuilding Cyberspace Can Build Real Security and Prevent Financial CollapseTom pulls no punches in his new book as he vividly and colorfully, and also convincingly, describes our cyber security vulnerabilities. As he explains, we are living on the razor’s edge between prosperity and devastation; the possibility of a digital Pearl Harbor, of a geopolitical D-day, of a technological and geopolitical tsunami, and of systemic vulnerabilities, including to our entire financial system, with the risk of a financial meltdown and economic annihilation, and also, among other things, vulnerability to the world’s food supply.
He refers to unprecedented threats and describes the cyber security risk as one huge virtual impr...
2023-03-1649 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #42: Katharine L. McKenna - The Paleontologist's DaughterCarol and I recently attended a lovely dinner party hosted by Abigail Sturges and other supporters of the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild. On its website, the Guild describes itself as “a vibrant center for arts and crafts in the beautiful and unique rural community of Woodstock, New York, while preserving the historic and natural environment of one of the earliest utopian arts colonies in America.” Carol and I live in the Woodstock Byrdcliffe community and the beauty abounds whichever way you turn.
I had the good fortune of being seated next to Katherine McKenna at Abigail's dinner party. Katherine is on the B...
2023-02-0942 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #41: Alison Gaylin/ Wendy Corsi Staub - domestic psychological thrillers, etc.My podcast guests are Alison Gaylin , a bestselling mystery writer who has been nominated for the Edgar Award four times, and has won the award in the category of Best Paperback Original for If I Die Tonight, and New York Times bestseller, and Wendy Corsi Staub, the award-winning author of more than ninety novels, best known for her psychological suspense novels. We discussed The Collective – No Killer Goes Unpunished (by Alison) and The Other Family (by Wendy), both compelling, chilling page turners. We also discussed psychological suspense thrillers generally in which the perpetrator is coming from inside the house, or...
2022-10-2619 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #40: Todd Spire of Esopus CreelTodd Spire is a licensed fly fishing guide and instructor, and is the owner of Esopus Creel, a company devoted to fly fishing in the Catskill Mountains, where he’s lived since 2008. Todd’s on the board of the local Trout Unlimited chapter, which helps to protect the Esopus Creek, which feeds into the Ashokan reservoir, which provides New York City with about 40% of its drinking water. Todd is a scholar of our local river, the Esopus Creek. Todd discusses Neversink - One Angler's Intense Exploration of a Trout River, by Leonard M. Wright, Jr., and also the beauty and...
2022-09-3045 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #39: Jen Maxfield - More After the Break: A Reporter Returns to Ten Unforgettable News StoriesJen Maxfield is an Emmy® Award winning correspondent for NBC 4 New York. She covers breaking news and general assignment stories in New Jersey, and is a fill-in anchor on all of NBC 4 New York’s newscasts.
Jen has covered many of the Tri-State area’s most memorable and powerful stories throughout her long career. More After the Break describes her initial reporting and follow up many years later for the 2003 Staten Island ferry crash, Katrina and Sandy in 2005 and 2012, a 2011 horrendous hit and run casualty, and several other accidents, tragedies and moving stories. The stories themselves are compelling, but mostly I lov...
2022-08-0730 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #38: A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Discussion with the Woodstock Shakespeare Festival directorsOur friend Maxine Davidowitz recently introduced me to Hank Neimark, telling me that Hank was getting ready to work on the Summer 2022 Woodstock Shakespeare Festival production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. After talking with Hank for just a short time, I asked if he would like to talk about the play on the podcast, and he agreed.
At Hank’s suggestion, we were joined on the podcast by David Aston Reese, the Producing Artistic Director of the Bird-On-A-Cliff Theatre Company in Woodstock. David has acted, directed and produced works for Bird-On-A-Cliff Theatre Company's Woodstock Shakespeare Festival and The Woodstock Playh...
2022-07-2153 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #37: L. Mark Weeks - Bottled Lightning; Moby Dick; the writing process; etc.My guest for this episode is Mark Weeks, a friend and former colleague at Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe. Mark has practiced law at Orrick in New York and Tokyo for more than 30 years and after many years as a Partner and head of Orrick’s Tokyo office, Mark is now a Senior Counsel at the firm. Mark is also a world class, award winning, international saltwater fly fisherman.
It is said that first novels are at least partly autobiographical, and much of Mark’s debut novel, Bottled Lightning, neatly overlaps with his life and career: a top global technology lawyer and avid...
2022-05-2245 min
Tell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #36: Trinh Q. Truong - The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh NguyenMy guest for this episode is Trinh Q. Truong. Trinh came to the U.S. from Vietnam with her mother about 20 years ago. During what we in the U.S. refer to as the Vietnam War, Trinh’s grandfather worked for the governments of the Republic of Vietnam and the United States doing intelligence work, mainly mapping the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Most of the rest of her family was engaged during the war years in democratic activism in the country. After Saigon fell in 1975, Trinh’s grandparents and eight of their children—with the exception of Trinh’s mother, who was o...
2022-01-2037 min
Tell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #35: Tom Vartanian - 200 Years of American Financial Panics - Crashes, Recessions, Depressions, and the Technology That Will Change It All.Tom Vartanian discusses his recent book, 200 Years of American Financial Panics - Crashes, Recessions, Depressions, and the Technology That Will Change It All. Tom is the former head of the financial institutions practice at two major law firms; the former General Counsel of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board and at the Federal Savings and Loan Insurance Corporation; and the former executive director and professor of law at George Mason University's Scalia Law School Program on Financial Regulation & Technology.
2021-11-1332 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp . #16 Kate McGloughlin - Requiem for Ashokan - The Story Told in LandscapeKate McGloughlin is a painter and printmaker (and storyteller), and during her long career, she has exhibited in notable galleries and museums around the world. Kate is president emeritus of the Board of Directors of the Woodstock School of Art, where she teaches printmaking and landscape painting, including to Carol, and where she directs the Printmaking Studio. Through her paintings, poetry and prose, Kate’s book, Requiem for Ashokan, The Story Told in Landscape, is her outlet to tell a personal story with universal themes of tragedy, loss, grief, confusion and rage, as well as of migration, shared resources, competition fo...
2021-08-1924 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #34: Brian E. Denton - War and Peace (Tolstoy)My guest for this episode is Brian E. Denton. Brian has been reading Tolstoy’s great novel War and Peace every year for the last ten years, one chapter a day, which results in a year long read of the 361 chapters. Brian has also produced an e-book titled “War and Peace and A Year of War and Peace”, which includes the full text of the novel as well as Brian’s reflective essays, his insightful commentary on each chapter. War and Peace was brought to my attention at the beginning of the pandemic when I learned of Princeton Professor Yiyun Li...
2021-08-0727 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. # 33: Jim Finnegan (Again): Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart; etc.My friend Jim Finnegan (who was my guest on episode #3 of our podcast) discusses Shuggie Bain, by Douglas Stuart; a tough book but a great read. An unfortunate tale of growing up gay in working class poor Glascow with an alcoholic mother; anger, sadness, lack of hope, despair and dependence. Jim and I also discuss Milkman, Ironweed, The Vanishing Half, The Shadow King, Deacon King Kong, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Interior Chinatown, Lolita, Caro’s LBJ biographies, The Power Broker, Motherless Brooklyn (film), Angela’s Ashes, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777, Ten Less...
2021-04-1737 min
Tell Me What You’re ReadingEvelyn Lerman - A Tribute. Discussing “A Dressmaker's Threads: The Life and The Legacy of My Russian Immigrant Mother"; and discussing the life and legacy of Evelyn as wellSpecial Edition (March 31, 2021) Our friend Evelyn Lerman wrote a loving biography titled “A Dressmaker's Threads: The Life and The Legacy of My Russian Immigrant Mother", which was published in 2013. In July 2018, I sat down with Evelyn in her cabin in Winslow Maine to discuss the biography she wrote about her mother. As you will hear, I use the excuse of talking to Evelyn about her book to talk with Evelyn about her own life as well. Evelyn describes her mother - Celia Gorfinkel - as a remarkable woman, who in 1920, with a sick husband and an infant, escaped from the Cza...
2021-04-0151 minTell Me What You’re ReadingNo. 31: Charlotte Cross - Reading to write, and novels about "marginalized characters" (The Brides of Dracula, etc.)Charlotte Cross of Oxford, England is working on a tale of the “Brides of Dracula”, following in the footsteps of other novels that have given voice to “marginalized characters”, characters (usually women) who haven't been given the chance to speak in the originals. These others include The Silence of the Girls, by Pat Barker and Wide Sargasso Sea, by Jean Rhys. Charlotte discusses those books, and others, as well as her writing process. Charlotte also discusses the books she has recently read: The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, by Anne Bronte, Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.
2021-02-2122 min
Tell Me What You’re ReadingEp. 30 Michael Koryta - The Chill, a horror/suspense/disaster/ supernatural novel written under the pen name, Scott CarsonRecorded March 2020 .... Michael Koryta, a New York Times-bestselling author of 14 novels, a novella, and multiple short stories discusses his latest novel, The Chill, written under the pen name Scott Carson. The Chill is a story of the fictional town of Galesburg in the Catskill mountains in upstate New York, and about its residents who many years before, generations before, were displaced by the government when the properties where their homes were located were taken to create a reservoir, the Chillewaukee, to meet the water needs of New York City. Their town, Galesburg, was devastated and the residents at the...
2020-11-2200 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #29: Andrew Wilcox - Richard Ravitz and Paul Volcker memoirs, Lewis’ The Fifth Risk, JFK, Nixon, and Lepore’s masterpiece, These Truths, A History of the United StatesAndrew Wilcox discusses So Much to Do: A Full Life of Business, Politics, and Confronting Fiscal Crises, a memoir by Richard Ravitz, former head of the New York State Urban Development Corporation and of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority; Keeping At It, by former Federal Reserve Board Chairman Paul Volcker; The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis; JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917‒1956, by Fredrik Logevall; Being Nixon: A Man Divided, by Evan Thomas; and These Truths, A History of the United States, by Jill Lepore
2020-11-1427 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp #28: Andrew Rice - Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a CityAndrew Rice discusses Jonathan Mahler's book, Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning 1977, Baseball, Politics, and the Battle for the Soul of a City, which includes stories of New York City in 1977, the mayoralty race, Cuomo, Koch (Bess Meyerson), Bella, Giuliani, Bloomberg, LaGuardia, The Daily News, The New York Post, New York Magazine, Murdoch (Succession), Breslin, Hamill, Steinbrenner, Reggie, Billy Martin, Thurman, Cosell, Son of Sam, Bed Stuy, Bushwick, South Bronx, Reverend Jesse Jackson, Saturday Night Live, Rolling Stone, Studio 54, Tavern on the Green, Windows on the World, Elaine’s, Maxwell’s Plum (Warner LeRoy), Jim MacMullen’s, etc.
Andrew also di...
2020-10-0344 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp #27: Rob Chesnut - Intentional Integrity - How Smart Companies Can Lead an Ethical Revolution— and Why That’s Good for All of UsRob Chesnut discusses his new book Intentional Integrity - How Smart Companies Can Lead an Ethical Revolution— and Why That’s Good for All of Us, and explains how intentional integrity and intentional inclusion make companies more attractive to employees and to customers, and make such companies out-performers as well.
Rob began his journey in the U.S. Justice Department, including as a federal prosecutor, and then he joined eBay as an early employee and ultimately had responsibility for overseeing all site rules and policies for the eBay global community of over 150 million users. Rob later was General Counsel of Live...
2020-07-2725 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #26 Allen Guy Wilcox – A Gentleman in MoscowAllen Guy Wilcox, founding Artistic Director of The Theater at Woodshill, a not for profit summer Shakespeare festival in central New York, discusses "A Gentleman in Moscow” by Amor Towles, an elegant, historical novel in post revolutionary Moscow, expounding on the literature, poetry and classical music of the time, and on the timelessness of friendship, children, parenting, food and wine, and on the pace of life itself. Grand entertainment, and more, surrounding the life of Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov. "He was wise enough to know that life does not proceed by leaps and bounds. It unfolds. At any given moment, it...
2020-03-0324 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #25: Camilla Calhoun - The White MothCamilla Calhoun discusses The White Moth, a beautifully told, moving and lovely memoir, both historical and very personal. Much of the story takes place on a 15th century farm villa in Tuscany during very challenging times in Italy, from the 1930s to the 1970s: wars, political upheaval, deprivation, fascism, occupation and change. The book is very much a tribute to Camilla’s rock of a mother-in-law, Alda Innocenti Rafanelli. The tribute is offered in the form of Camilla’s memoir of what was intended to be a sojourn in Italy to pursue her passion for writing, her romance with and marr...
2020-02-2227 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. # 24: 2020 Book Club - Kendra Dodson Breitsprecher, owner/editor of Dayton Leader newspaper in Iowa, discusses bios written by Dem Pres. caucus candidates.When Andrea Phillips, who was then Vice Chair of the Iowa Democratic Party, started a book club to encourage her fellow Iowans to read the books written by the 2020 Democratic party Presidential candidates, my wife Carol and I heard Andrea interviewed on MSNBC. Andrea said that Iowa Democrats take their role in vetting the presidential candidates seriously, and that she hoped the book club would help voters know the candidates better so that people can make a good decision on caucus night, which is on February 3.
Andrea decided to launch the 2020 Book Club and to put up a 2020 Book Club...
2020-01-2437 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #23 Uli Beutter Cohen: Mona Eltahawy, Alexander Chee, Ocean Vuong, Erin Williams, Lauren DucaAfter discussing the Subway Book Review project in our Episode 22, Uli Beutter Cohen and I discussed five books that Uli has recently read and recommends: How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee, an essay collection by a Korean American artist and activist; The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls by Mona Eltahawy, which has been referred to as a striking anti-patriarchal manifesto written by an Egyptian American activist, “with enough rage to fuel a rocket”; On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong Ocean is a young Vietnamese-American writer — born in Saigon, he was raised in Hartford...
2020-01-1522 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #22 Subway Book Review: Uli Beutter CohenFor the last five years, Uli Beutter Cohen has been talking with people on New York City subways about the books she sees them reading on the subway. Uli refers to her Subway Book Review as a social media project. The project now also has contributors in Washington D.C., London, Berlin, Milan, Barcelona, Mexico City, Sydney, and Santiago. Discussions with subway readers, pictures of the readers and their books are posted on Instagram @subwaybookreview.
2019-12-2620 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #21 Tracy Sidesinger - What My Mother and I Dont Talk AboutTracy Sidesinger, a clinical psychologist and psychoanalytic psychotherapist in New York City, discusses “What My Mother and I Don't Talk About: Fifteen Writers Break the Silence”, edited by Michele Filgate. (“Some of these essays are harrowing, some heartwarming, some — like a lot of mother-child relationships — a mix of both. All of them suggest, though, that if you can talk to your mother, you should.” Tampa Bay Times)
Tracy also refers to Mothers: An Essay on Love and Cruelty by Jacqueline Rose, and also Feminine Law: Freud, Free Speech, and the Voice of Desire by Jill Gentile with Michael Macrone. Tracy has said tha...
2019-11-3028 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. # 20 The Call Me Ishmael Project; Steph Kent and Logan SmalleyCall Me Ishmael is a New York City-based project that invites readers to call and leave a voicemail message about their favorite book. Thousands of readers have already called and over a million readers have listened to this library of stories. Steph Kent and Logan Smalley are the founders of the Call Me Ishmael project and they are privy to the reading interests of the thousands of people who have called in. To call Ishmael, call Ishmael’s number: 774.325.0503. It goes straight to voicemail. Listen to Ishmael’s short answering machine message and leave a voicemail about a book you love...
2019-11-1024 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #19 Visiting Days, by Gretchen PrimackWhile visiting the Golden Notebook bookstore in Woodstock last summer, my daughter Melanie and I met and struck up a conversation with bookseller, author and poet, Gretchen Primack. It turns out that Gretchen is also an educator in a more formal sense. Gretchen has taught and/or administrated with prison education programs (mostly college) in maximum security prisons since 2006.
Gretchen recently released a new book of poems called ”Visiting Days”, which is inspired and informed by her years of first hand experience teaching and administrating in maximum security prisons.
Visiting Days has been described as a collection of short, keen dram...
2019-07-2631 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #18 Pride Month/ Stonewall 50: The Great Believers by Rebecca MakkaiIn connection with the celebration by my law firm, @Orrick, of Pride Month and the commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots, I discussed with Alvin Lee and Amy Pasacreta of Orrick The Great Believers, by Rebecca Makkai, which is a very moving, beautiful and at the same time devastating, award winning novel about the AIDs epidemic in Chicago in the 1980s, its impact on young gay men and on the survivors as well.
I’m very proud to say that Orrick has a long standing commitment to inclusiveness that enables the LGBTQ lawyers and staff of the fi...
2019-06-2432 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #17 Josh Raff discusses four sets of "paired" books, and more.A discussion by a serious and thoughtful,reader of four sets of "paired" books - Song of a Captive Bird + The Age of Light/ Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom + East West Street: On the Origins of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide/ Chefs, Drugs and Rock & Roll + Fasting and Feasting/ Golden Hill + His Bloody Project - and also Solitary; The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues, a History of Greenwich Village; Ninth Street Women: Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler: Five Painters and the Movement That Changed Modern Art; and The...
2019-06-2039 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #15 Sophie McManus: The Art of Time in FictionSophie McManus (master's degree in fiction writing/ teaching writing at Sarah Lawrence College; author of critically acclaimed novel, The Unfortunates) discusses The Art of Time in Fiction by Joan Silber, and a variety of books written in Classic Time, Long Time, Slowed Time, Switchback Time and Fabulous Time.
2019-05-3037 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #14 Nick Lyons: Fly fishing and other lit.; flys, tiers; joy, intensity and solitude of fishing.Nick Lyons is a lifelong fisherman and has also written 20 highly regarded books about his passion for the outdoors and fly fishing, has edited and published many more, and Nick also for 25 years wrote the Seasonable Angler column for “Fly Fisherman” magazine.
Nick’s memoir, Spring Creek, is a love letter to a creek in Montana. In it, Nick writes that he aims for his writing “to be rich enough to catch some of the stillness, complexity, joy, fierce intensity, frustration, practicality, hilarity, fascination, [and] satisfaction” that he finds in fly fishing. If you read anything that Nick has written, you will en...
2019-05-0934 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #13 Keith Grossman: Bad Blood, American Kingpin and Red Notice - “You Can’t Make This Stuff Up!”Keith discusses three astounding and true tales, as well as internet privacy and manners, and audio books + Springsteen
2019-04-1733 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #12 Alexis Coe on history, research and writing and the tale of Alice + Freda ForeverAlexis Coe discusses Alice + Freda Forever, the book, podcast and movie; also the research and writing process + her forthcoming bio of George Washington.
2019-04-0544 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #11 Dylan Marron: Educated, by Tara Westover + Dylan’s “softness as strength”, etc.Dylan Marron discusses “Educated”, the momentous memoir by Tara Westover + wielding softness as strength, empathy on the internet, online and offline personalities and reading audibly.
2019-03-2937 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #10 Joe Polizzotto - Strout, Barry, etc.Joe Polizzotto discusses the works of Elizabeth Strout, Sebastian Barry and other great novelist.
2018-12-2325 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #9: Children’s Books . . . Follow-up to Youngna Park discussionParents of young children tell me what they are reading and, no surprise, it’s books they read to and with their children.
2018-11-3038 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #8: Youngna Park on children’s booksConversation with Youngna Park, Executive Director of Parenting at The New York Times - Children’s Books; what to read to your kids!
2018-10-3037 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #7: Payton Turner - Women’s anger and, sometimes, ragePayton discusses The Blazing World and Now My Heart is Full, and also her own experiences as an art student, and the meaningfully ways she has responded to anger and rage.
2018-10-2226 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #6: Catskills Potpourri - Marty’s MercantileConversations at Marty’s Mercantile in West Shokan - our geological beginnings, Of Mice and Men and Moby Dick, dystopian tales and sobering memories of war.
2018-10-1423 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #5: Maya Prohovnik - Stephen King!, Detectives & Sci-fiMaya Prohovnik - a Stephen King “Superfan”! + Detective tales and Maya’s “favorite book of all time”, Adrian Tchaikovsky’s sci-fi adventure tale, Children of Time.
2018-10-0422 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #4: Reading for the words, with Emma HollandEmma Holland discusses what she is reading as well as how she reads, highlights and rereads, her love for words, and also her favorite book in the last decade, Too Much and Not the Mood by Durga Chew-Bose.
2018-09-2727 minTell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #3: An impressive tour of 30 + books in about 35 minutesTell Me What You’re Reading #3: Jim Finnegan on a literary tour de force, from Haruki Murakami to Joe Ide, Jennifer Egan, Stephen King and many others
2018-09-201h 13Tell Me What You’re ReadingEp.#2: Understanding the Nation & Finding Common Ground with Dr. Hardin ColemanDr. Hardin Coleman discusses the 11 distinct regions of the country and their particular political, social and emotional traits, President Grant’s pardon of the Confederate generals after the Civil War in order to preserve national unity and the need to find the right balance between acting locally and globally in order to have an impact on the issues we face in the nation today.
2018-09-1341 min
Tell Me What You’re ReadingEp. #1: History of Comic Books with Dr. Frank BurbrinkIn the inaugural episode of Tell Me What You’re Reading, Dr. Frank Burbrink discusses the history of comic books, which were, for many of us, the very first books we read.
2018-09-0615 min