Originally Aired September 2004; Ferit Orhan Pamuk, or just Orhan Pamuk, won the Nobel prize for literature in 2006. He was born and still lives in Istanbul, though he has visited the U.S. and has taught at Columbia University. He is Turkey’s best-selling writer and the recipient of numerous prizes. Among his important works are My Name is Red; The Black Book; Snow; The White Castle; and Colors. He is a Muslim, though more in a cultural sense, and as a human rights activist has been outspoken about the Armenian genocide and also about Turkey’s treatment of the Kurds. Besides his huge writing talent and heart, Pamuk, at least in my opinion, is very funny.

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Elizabeth Kostova made history with the publication of The Historian, her novel about Vlad the Impaler on whom the original Dracula was modeled, which was translated into 44 languages. The book sold some 4 million copies and a film is in the works. Now after 5 years Elizabeth has written a novel called The Swan Thieves, about Robert Oliver, a gifted artist who attacks a painting in The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Why does he do it? Who is Leda? Join me and meet Elizabeth Kostova who knows the answers to these and any other questions you may have about Robert, or Vlad, or Swans, or love. She is a professor of literature at the University of Michigan as well as a talented writer. . . and very charming. Just cover your neck at night.

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Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a philosopher, novelist, MacArthur Fellow who writes about subjects that fascinate her. Usually brilliant people like herself. In 36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD, her entertaining new novel, Rebecca introduces Cass Seltzer, a kind and gentle best-selling atheist who is drawn into a constellation of eccentric and interesting intellectuals from Harvard who both fuss over him and mesmerize him.  They are assorted poets, mystics, and geniuses including one six-year-old mathematical prodigy who is the son of a Hasidic Rebbe. Suffice that Goldstein’s novel is great fun as is Rebecca herself who in real life is as interesting as any of her characters and plays house with the redoubtable Steven Pinker. She knows whereof she speaks.

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Jasper Fforde is a British novelist unlike any you have ever read. He is a literary experimentalist of the first order who has carved out a special niche for himself within the literary world. His first novel The Eyre Affair was published in 2001 and followed by a series called Thursday Next about a literary detective of that name. He is unfailingly inventive, and clever, and fun to interview. But then what would you expect from a young man who owns and flies his own DH 82 Tiger Moth airplane. On the Frumkes Show Jasper discusses his life and the publication of his latest book Shades of Gray.

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Gail Godwin is a lovely lady and an elegant writer. She was raised in Asheville North Carolina and many of her books are set in the South. She was three times nominated for the National Book Award, and has received a Guggenheim Fellowship and grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition to writing she is an artist, and a librettist. Five of her novels have been on the New York Times Best-Seller List and her current novel Unfinished Desires is recommended by the NY Times Book Review. She serves with me on the Editorial Board of The Writer Magazine and is a charmer. Join Gail and me for a nice discussion.

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Murray Gell-Mann is the Robert Andrews Millikan Professor of Theoretical Physics Emeritus at Caltech and widely regarded as one of the smartest men on the planet. Suffice that he speaks 15 languages, graduated from Yale University at the age of 18 and in 1969 won the Nobel Prize in physics for his work on elementary particles. Essentially he formulated the quark model of hadronic resonances, and identified the SU(3) flavor symmetry of the light quarks, extending isospin to include strangeness, which he also discovered. He also collaborated with Richard Feynman to discover the V-A theory of chiral neutrinos. Join us as we discuss basic concepts of cosmology, GUT theory, and Murray’s book “The Jaguar and The Quark.”

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Freeman Dyson who has long been a legend at The Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton is a theoretical physicist and mathematician of the first order, a futurist, and a nuclear engineer. British by birth, Dyson studied with Hans Bethe at Cornell before moving to the Institute for Advanced Study.  He is probably best known for demonstrating in 1949 the equivalence of the formulations of quantum electrodynamics that existed at the time— Feynman’s diagrammatic path integral formulation and the operator method developed by Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga for which Schwinger, Feynman, and Tomonaga shared the Nobel Prize. Dyson also did seminal work in topology, analysis, number theory, random matrices and other abstruse topics in mathematics.  On first meeting him Dyson can seem a tad eccentric, subversive, perfectionistic and cantankerous. . . but ultimately with his impish little smile he comes across as quite charming. When I asked him of all the scientists with whom he worked whom he thought possessed true genius, he unhesitatingly answered. . . Richard Feynman.

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I visited Margaret Geller in 1989 at the Harvard Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge Mass where she took me on a trip with a Cray Super-Computer out to the Great Wall At The End of Space and back again. At the time she was working with Alan Guth at MIT and also enlisting graduate students to map the visible and invisible distribution of dark matter in the universe, the halo of our own galaxy, the Milky Way, and to understand the link between the history of our galaxy and the history of the universe. In 1989 with John Huchra  she discovered the Great Wall at the visible limits of the universe based on redshift survey data from the CFA Redshift Survey. She even showed me a configuration of stars at the Great Wall that resembled a cross but cautioned me not to make too much out of it. In 2008 Geller was awarded the Magellanic Premium by the American Philosophical Society for her research into the groupings of galaxies.

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“I’m 39 years old, and I grew up in Evanston, Illinois, which is the first suburb north of Chicago. I’m a spinster (albeit a spinster with a permanent boyfriend) and I live in a white stucco bungalow with my cats, Muybridge and Claudine. I’ve been writing since I was a tiny child, and I always made pictures to go with the words.” How could you not love a writer who describes herself thusly. She did write The Time Traveler’s Wife, and the recent Her Fearful Symmetry, and is an accomplished and talented artist. . . but that is all you need to know. Want to know more? Listen to our interview.

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Verbivore, logophile, word wizard, lexicraftologist, all of these apply to Richard Lederer who may just be our reigning expert and purveyor of recreational wordplay. He has written over thirty books on language with titles such as ANGUISHED ENGLISH, THE MIRACLE OF LANGUAGE, GET THEE TO A PUNNERY, THE CUNNING LINGUIST, CRAZY ENGLISH, MORE ANGUISHED ENGLISH and dozens of others. To his language books Richard has recently added two best-selling treasuries, A TREASURY FOR DOG LOVERS, and A TREASURY FOR CAT LOVERS. A recipient of many awards (One year Richard was elected International Punster of the Year by the International Pun Foundation, and the next he was given the Golden Gavel Award by Toastmasters International), he is a supreme entertainer. . . .and if you love words or are an aficionado of the English language you will adore Richard Lederer.

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