Radio Show
It may sound strange, but Richard Peck reminds me somehow of a James Ellroy for youngsters. This Newberry-Award-winner, and National Book-Award-finalist, with sixty or seventy books to his credit, mines the fields of horror, caper, mystery, the occult, and history for his legions of young-adult fans. He enthralls them and […]
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Jason Starr is a big talent coasting along just under the radar and worth discovering. If you’ve read his first book “Cold Caller,” and freaked out, or his most recent “Panic Attack,” you’ll know what I mean. Jason and I discuss how he got into writing. . . writing thrillers, […]
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Mariam Said joins me on the Frumkes Show to discuss her mother Wadad Makdisi Cortas’s fascinating memoir entitled “A World I Love,” and also a book by her late Husband Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim entitled “Parallels and Paradoxes.” The former is the story of her mother’s pioneering attempts to […]
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Jonathan Lethem tells me he thinks Chronic City is his best and most complete work. This evaluation becomes interesting in light of the fact that we have a clash of critics in the Times. Michiko Kakutani in the daily New York Times reviewed the novel unkindly while Gregory Cowles on […]
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Caryn James in The New York Times Book Review said of Lorrie “She may be the most acute and lasting writer of her generation,” and personally I don’t doubt it. One has only to read some of Lorrie’s short stories in “Birds of America,” “Like Life,” or “Self-Help,” or her […]
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As J.M Coetzee says, “It is an extraordinarily brave act for a writer to undertake to inhabit, fully and sympathetically, the life her mother lived. And yet that is exactly what Hanan Al-Shaykh does in “The Locust and the Bird,” her novel based on her mother’s story. We enter 1930’s […]
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This time Nick Sparks visits me to talk about his new book “The Last Song,” that he wrote for Miley Cyrus about a young girl’s first encounter with heart-break and . . . love. It will soon be released as a film by Disney. Two of his other books will […]
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Nicholson Baker is one of our most intelligent writers. Years ago, I reviewed Nicholson’s unusual self-meditation about his obsession with John Updike, “U and I” in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, and then watched as he produced one extraordinary book after the other. “The Mezzanine,” “Vox,” “The Fermata,” […]
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Writer/neurologist Dr. Oliver Sacks is best known for his collections of case histories offbeat neurological studies which he has published under the engaging titles The Man Who Mistook his Wife For a Hat; and An Anthropologist on Mars in which he describes patients struggling to live with conditions ranging from […]
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Originally Aired in 2004; One of the most remarkable writers to come along in recent years Alexander McCall Smith is widely erudite and has written more than 60 books including his wildly popular No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series. His books range from the academic to children’s books. . . […]
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