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Shelf Life
Grand Journal
55 episodes
1 month ago
Send us a text Before you can shape a story, you have to pay attention to the world as it really is—even when it’s messy, even when it stings. That lesson from Louise Fitzhugh’s classic Harriet the Spy has guided the career of reporter and biographer Laurie Gwen Shapiro. Her new book, The Aviator and the Showman, is the first major biography of Amelia Earhart in two decades, praised by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times for peeling back the myths around “Lady Lindy” to reveal the w...
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All content for Shelf Life is the property of Grand Journal and is served directly from their servers with no modification, redirects, or rehosting. The podcast is not affiliated with or endorsed by Podjoint in any way.
Send us a text Before you can shape a story, you have to pay attention to the world as it really is—even when it’s messy, even when it stings. That lesson from Louise Fitzhugh’s classic Harriet the Spy has guided the career of reporter and biographer Laurie Gwen Shapiro. Her new book, The Aviator and the Showman, is the first major biography of Amelia Earhart in two decades, praised by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times for peeling back the myths around “Lady Lindy” to reveal the w...
Show more...
Books
Arts,
Society & Culture,
Philosophy,
Fiction
Episodes (20/55)
Shelf Life
Laurie Gwen Shapiro on Amelia Earhart, Harriet the Spy, and the art of rewriting legend
Send us a text Before you can shape a story, you have to pay attention to the world as it really is—even when it’s messy, even when it stings. That lesson from Louise Fitzhugh’s classic Harriet the Spy has guided the career of reporter and biographer Laurie Gwen Shapiro. Her new book, The Aviator and the Showman, is the first major biography of Amelia Earhart in two decades, praised by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times for peeling back the myths around “Lady Lindy” to reveal the w...
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1 month ago
54 minutes

Shelf Life
Ada Calhoun on Ghostwriting, Thornton Wilder, and the audacity of desire
Send us a text “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 th...
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2 months ago
51 minutes

Shelf Life
Geoff Dyer on Bad Food, Jazz Renegades, and the "Soviet Resignation" of Post-War Britain
Send us a text Few writers dance across genres with as much wit, irreverence, and intellectual curiosity as Geoff Dyer. From Out of Sheer Rage, about his struggles to write a book on DH Lawrence, to the award-winning jazz meditations of But Beautiful, he's made a career of bending forms to his will. In Homework, his first memoir, Dyer turns that restless mind to his own post-war English childhood and proves that even the most straightforward narrative can't escape his signature style. Homewor...
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3 months ago
52 minutes

Shelf Life
Biographer Katherine Bucknell on Christopher Isherwood's Odyssey from Weimar Berlin to California
Send us a text What can we learn from Weimar Germany and its rapid unraveling in the 1930s? Lately that question has gained more urgency as the US turns away from the trans-Atlantic alliance that has underpinned European security for the past 80 years. For Katherine Bucknell, no writer was better placed than Christopher Isherwood for understanding the speed with which a country can slide into autocracy. It was his book Goodbye to Berlin that became the basis for the musical, Cabaret. Without ...
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8 months ago
52 minutes

Shelf Life
Legendary Publisher Edwin Frank in Praise of Rudyard Kipling — and Why the 20th Century Novel Matters
Send us a textNobel Laureate Rudyard Kipling is among the most derided of 20th century novelists, but in this episode of Shelf Life, the publishing legend Edwin Frank urges us to take a second look. As it happens, taking a second look was the impetus behind Frank's trailblazing publishing imprint, New York Review Books, built on the principle that too many great books had fallen out of print and deserved a second life. At my bookstore, One Grand Books, where titles are selected by celebrated ...
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9 months ago
50 minutes

Shelf Life
Jeanette Winterson on ghosts, tech bros, and what her success taught her about class in Britain
Send us a textIt's been 40 years since Jeanette Winterson's debut novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, launched a confident and daring new voice in English fiction, one that wasn’t afraid to take risks in the service of craft. Many books have followed, including The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body, and more recently Frankissstein: A Love Story. “I am an ambitious writer,” she has written. “I don’t see the point of being anything; no, not anything at all, if you don’t ...
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10 months ago
51 minutes

Shelf Life
Jennifer Kabat on America's forgotten populist uprising and the politics of place
Send us a textMemoir meets history meets politics in Jennifer Kabat’s book, The Eighth Moon, a fascinating account of moving to the Catskills in 2005, and stumbling on a history of America’s forgotten populist uprising, the Anti-Rent War, that culminated in 1845 with the murder of a police officer, Osman Steele. Drawing on archives, conversations, and her many hikes through the countryside, Kabat favors a writing style that feels akin to an overflowing mind, moving back and forth between eras...
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12 months ago
51 minutes

Shelf Life
Ricky Ian Gordon's Odyssey of Sex, Drugs and Opera
Send us a textA teenage prodigy who worshiped Joni Mitchell, Ricky Ian Gordon has made a career turning novels and poems into operas and song. “I was that kid who was invited to the party because I could play anything, no matter how hard, and incite everyone into singing all night,” he writes in his memoir, Seeing Through: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs and Opera. But that exuberant talent has an undercurrent of pain and sadness that has shaped and colored his life and career. It’s there in ...
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1 year ago
52 minutes

Shelf Life
YA author Rex Ogle on Life as a Poor Kid in a Land of Plenty
Send us a textRex Ogle’s series of YA memoirs, beginning with Free Lunch, about life as a poor kid in a wealthy school district, and culminating this year in Road Home, which chronicles his experience as a homeless teen have won acclaim for their frank ability to illuminate the shame and isolation that comes with poverty. In the words of Ogle’s mother, "being poor in America is like staring at an all-you-can-eat buffet. You can see all of this food piled high but you can’t have any of it.” Og...
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1 year ago
51 minutes

Shelf Life
Helen Phillips on a mother's primal love, and the perfidy (and promise) of AI in her novel, Hum
Send us a textIs there a more primal terror than a mother’s fear of losing a child. Helen Phillips, one of our greatest speculative writers, explored that terrain in her acclaimed 2020 novel, The Need, in which a mother fears her children are being abducted by her own doppelganger. She returns to that theme ih Hum, a novel set in a near-future when artificial intelligence and surveillance pose urgent questions of what it means to be human, and how a family is capable of finding intimacy in a ...
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1 year ago
51 minutes

Shelf Life
Musician Orenda Fink on Glass Castles, Witchy Mothers, and Family Dysfunction
Send us a textThe musician Orenda Fink, best known for her early 2000s band, Azure Ray, purveyors of a dreamy, confessional pop, has now penned a frank, unsparing memoir, The Witch's Daughter, in which she grapples with her complicated family story in which her mother's profound emotional needs operated as a kind of centrifugal force. “Life with my mother was like being in a trap,” she writes. “Once you entered there was no escaping.” There is no escape, either, for the children in the&...
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1 year ago
51 minutes

Shelf Life
Jennifer Belle on complicated teenage girls, and writing with Madonna
Send us a textWhat does Charles Portis’s 1968 novel, True Grit, twice made into a Hollywood western, have in common with Kay Thompson’s whimsical children's book, Eloise? Here to tell us is Jennifer Belle, the author of five novels, including most recently, Swanna in Love, an indelible, and often very funny portrait of a 14-year-old girl trapped in an artist’s commune in Vermont with her bohemian mother and her mother’s alcoholic lover. Belle is no novice at crafting novels that push re...
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1 year ago
51 minutes

Shelf Life
Curtis Sittenfeld on writing comedy, and Jane Austen's headstrong heroines
Send us a textThe author of seven novels and one collection of stories, Curtis Sittenfeld specializes in sharp-witted female protagonists in stories that reflect a Jane Austen-like cunning in using comedy as a vehicle for social observation. For those who are familiar with her work, it may come as little surprise that Austen’s Pride & Prejudice is among her favorite books. We also get an all access pass behind the scenes of Saturday Night Live thanks to Tina Fey's bestselling ...
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1 year ago
51 minutes

Shelf Life
Ada Zhang on the Lives of Others and stanning Eudora Welty
Send us a textLoss, longing and melancholy dominate the strange and sometimes mordantly funny short stories of Eudora Welty, the writer whose debut 1941 collection, A Curtain of Green is among two books that Ada Zhang has chosen for Shelf Life. The other is William Maxwell's short, taut So Long, See You Tomorrow. Zhang's debut story collection, The Sorrows of Others is a tapestry of first and second generation Chinese immigrants dealing with cultural and geographical dislocation, women on the...
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1 year ago
52 minutes

Shelf Life
The Dead Presidents Society with Actor Dylan Baker
Send us a textWhen did you first encounter Dylan Baker? Perhaps it was as the brazen wife killer Colin Sweeney in the long-running CBS show, The Good Wife. Or maybe it was the FBI bully-in-chief, J. Edgar Hoover in Ava DuVernay’s civil rights-era movie, Selma. Or was it much longer ago as the monster with the human face, Bill Maplewood in Todd Solendz’s 1998 movie Happiness. He says, “I went into the business because I really enjoyed exploring dark places in human beings, it was always ...
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1 year ago
51 minutes

Shelf Life
Ramit Sethi on money, pleasure, and finding moments of awe
Send us a textThe bestselling finance guru-turned-TV star, Ramit Sethi is on a mission to help all of us live what he calls our rich lives, but he's not just another finance bro. The son of Indian immigrants who were too poor to afford restaurants or overseas vacations, he has developed an extraordinary skill in helping people figure out how to spend money on the things that make our lives more enjoyable. One thing that separates Sethi from the crowd? He reads! His choices for thi...
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1 year ago
52 minutes

Shelf Life
Season Three is Coming: turn the page on a new chapter.
Send us a textIn the quiet hush of winter, there's a particular inclination to fold into the pages of unexplored narratives. Since Shelf Life paused its pulse last summer, I've wandered through a constellation of worlds chosen by a new group of celebrated bibliophiles, including the actor Dylan Baker, the finance guru Ramit Sethi, and new voices in fiction like Ada Zhang and Ben Purkett. Stay tuned to find out what books they think you should read.
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1 year ago

Shelf Life
Between Dystopias: Marlon James and Hafizah Augustus Geter Live at Deep Water Lit Fest 23
Send us a textEach year Deep Water Literary Festival in Narrowsburg, NY, identifies a unifying theme, often a particular literary work or an author, and builds a program to engage and interrogate the ways in which the theme resonates for contemporary audiences. In 2023 the festival explored the work of British novelist and journalist George Orwell. In this conversation the award-winning novelist, Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf and A Brief History of Seven Killings, and ...
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2 years ago
46 minutes

Shelf Life
DJ Taylor on George Orwell's literary genesis, and why the author of 1984 still matters
Send us a textThe writer and biographer D.J. Taylor on the rich, complicated and too-short life of one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, George Orwell. Almost 75 years after his death we discuss why the author of 1984 matters as much, if not more, than ever. Includes an excerpt of Orwell's "Some Thoughts on the Common Today," read for Shelf Life by Tilda Swinton.
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2 years ago
52 minutes

Shelf Life
Christopher Bollen on Graham Greene, Agatha Christie, and the abiding pleasures of the whodunnit
Send us a textNovelist Christopher Bollen has been writing twisty thrillers with emotional depth for over a decade. His latest, The Lost Americans, takes readers to Cairo for a deftly-plotted murder mystery set in the high-stakes world of arms traders and Egypt's authoritarian government. As with his writing, so with his book choices: we get intrigue and suspense in London during the Blitz, courtesy of Graham Greene’s 1943 espionage thriller, The Ministry of Fear, and a criminal mastermind in...
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2 years ago
51 minutes

Shelf Life
Send us a text Before you can shape a story, you have to pay attention to the world as it really is—even when it’s messy, even when it stings. That lesson from Louise Fitzhugh’s classic Harriet the Spy has guided the career of reporter and biographer Laurie Gwen Shapiro. Her new book, The Aviator and the Showman, is the first major biography of Amelia Earhart in two decades, praised by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times for peeling back the myths around “Lady Lindy” to reveal the w...