Show Notes
Send us Fan Mail In this special holiday episode of Shelf Life, we took time out from our regular format to see what guests old and new read in 2022. The episode starts with Joyce Maynard, who shot to fame with her 1998 memoir At Home in the World, in which she wrote candidly about the traumatic relationship she had with the author of Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger. But Maynard has also written many novels including Labor Day and To Die For, both made into acclaimed movies, as well a...
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Send us Fan Mail Francis Spufford’s new novel, Nonesuch, drops us into Blitz London—blackouts, random acts of violence, food rationing—and then, almost imperceptibly, the world acquires another layer. In this episode, Spufford, the author of Golden Hill and Light Perpetual, among others, talks about the “daft mixture of wartime finance, early TV, archangels, Renaissance magic, and falling bombs," that makes Nonesuch such an epic and invigorating read. We talk about the Blitz as a kind of perm...
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Send us Fan Mail “Anything Ada Calhoun wants to write is well worth reading,” declared Kirkus in its review of her new novel, Crush, a sharp and seductive exploration of midlife desire and the unruly force of infatuation. Calhoun is the author of the acclaimed history St. Marks Is Dead; the memoir Also a Poet, which chronicles her attempt to finish an abandoned biography of Frank O’Hara begun by her father, the critic Peter Schjeldahl; the essay collection Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give; and ...