The Avid Reader on WCHE

The Flamethrowers is an intensely engaging exploration of the mystique of the feminine, the fake, the terrorist.

In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it.

“Where did the universe come from? What was there before it? What will the future bring? And finally, why is there something rather than nothing?” Lawrence Krauss’s provocative answers to these and other timeless questions in a wildly popular lecture now on YouTube have attracted almost a million viewers.

On March 18, 1990, thirteen works of art today worth over $500 million were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. It remains the largest unsolved art heist in history, and Claire Roth, a struggling young artist, is about to discover that there’s more to this crime than meets the eye.

At some point in nearly every marriage, a wife finds herself asking, What the @#!% is wrong with my husband?! In David Finch’s case, this turns out to be an apt question. Five years after he married Kristen, the love of his life, they learn that he has Asperger syndrome.

Harold Silver has spent a lifetime watching his younger brother, George, a taller, smarter, and more successful high-flying TV executive, acquire a covetable wife, two kids, and a beautiful home in the suburbs of New York City. But Harry, a historian and Nixon scholar, also knows George has a murderous temper, and when George loses control the result is an act of violence so shocking that both brothers are hurled into entirely new lives in which they both must seek absolution.

The New York Times-bestselling author of The Psychopath Test, Jon Ronson writes about the dark, uncanny sides of humanity with clarity and humor. Lost at Sea reveals how deep our collective craziness lies, even in the most mundane circumstances.

Fobbit 'fä-bit, noun. Definition: A U.S. soldier stationed at a Forward Operating Base who avoids combat by remaining at the base, esp. during Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003-2011). Pejorative.

In the satirical tradition of Catch-22 and M*A*S*H, Fobbit takes us into the chaotic world of Baghdad’s Forward Operating Base Triumph.

Can you imagine more unlikely meetings than these: Marilyn Monroe and Frank Lloyd Wright; Sergei Rachmaninoff and Harpo Marx; T. S. Eliot and Groucho Marx; Madonna and Martha Graham; Michael Jackson and Nancy Reagan; Tsar Nicholas II and Harry Houdini; Nikita Khrushchev and Marilyn Monroe? They all happened. Craig Brown tells the stories of 101 such bizarre encounters in this witty, original exploration into truth-is-stranger-than-fiction.

What does it take to write a great short story? In Object Lessons, twenty-one contemporary masters of the genre answer that question, sharing favorite stories from the pages of The Paris Review.

In this groundbreaking debut, Justin Torres plunges us into the chaotic heart of one family, the intense bonds of three brothers, and the mythic effects of this fierce love on the people we must become.

In 1988, Eric Cho, an aspiring writer, arrives at Macalester College. On his first day he meets a beautiful fledgling painter, Jessica Tsai, and another would-be novelist, the larger-than-life Joshua Yoon.

Hig survived the flu that killed everyone he knows. His wife is gone, his friends are dead, he lives in the hangar of a small abandoned airport with his dog, his only neighbor a gun-toting misanthrope.

Scientists can now read, for the first time, the lost tales buried in the human genome. The Violinist’s Thumb highlights the best of them…

The author of the widely praised debut novel How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe returns with a hilarious, heartbreaking, and utterly original collection of short stories.

Full of incredible characters, amazing athletic achievements, cutting-edge science, and, most of all, pure inspiration, Born to Run is an epic adventure that began with one simple question: Why does my foot hurt? In search of an answer, Christopher McDougall sets off to find a tribe of the world's greatest distance runners and learn their secrets, and in the process shows us that everything we thought we knew about running is wrong.

On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life—the fissures in her parents’ marriage, the loss of old friends, the hopeful anguish of first love, the bizarre behavior of her grandfather who, convinced of a government conspiracy, spends his days obsessively cataloging his possessions. As Julia adjusts to the new normal, the slowing inexorably continues.

What would you sacrifice for the people you love?
“Cleave goes for the gold and brings it home in his thrillingly written and emotionally rewarding novel about the world of professional cycling … Cleave expertly cycles through the characters’ tangled past and present, charting their ever-shifting dynamic as ultra-competitive Zoe and Kate are forced to decide whether winning means more to them than friendship … Cleave likewise pulls out all the stops getting inside the hearts and minds of his engagingly complex characters. The race scenes have true visceral intensity, leaving the reader feeling breathless … From start to finish, this is a truly Olympic-level literary achievement.” – PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

What does one sensitive but ordinary woman makes of a publicly disgraced woman like Fuller, and how do women make use of what they learn from other women? Miss Fuller is a historical novel that also poses timeless questions about how we see and treat the exceptional and dangerous agents of change among us. And it shows the price that any one person might pay, who strives to change the world for the better.

The acclaimed, award-winning author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets returns with his funniest, most romantic, and most purely enjoyable novel yet: the story of an almost-love affair that begins on the Italian coast in 1962 … and is rekindled in Hollywood fifty years later.

“A literary miracle.”—NPR’s Fresh Air
“A high-wire feat of bravura storytelling.”—NYT Book Review
“A masterpiece … damn near perfect.”—Salon

On a warm summer morning in North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick Dunne’s clever and beautiful wife disappears from their rented McMansion on the Mississippi River.

She was the most famous woman in America. And nobody knew who she was.

It is 1850. Margaret Fuller--feminist, journalist, orator, and "the most famous woman in America"--is returning from Europe where she covered the Italian revolution for The New York Tribune. She is bringing home with her an Italian husband, the Count Ossoli, and their two-year-old son. But this is not the gala return of a beloved American heroine. This is a furtive, impoverished return under a cloud of suspicion and controversy.

Like most of humanity, Wade Watts escapes his grim surroundings by spending his waking hours jacked into the OASIS, a sprawling virtual utopia that lets you be anything you want to be, a place where you can live and play and fall in love on any of ten thousand planets.

Is the perfect murder the one you can’t forget or the one you can’t remember? Dr. Jennifer White, a brilliant former surgeon in the early grips of Alzheimer’s, is suspected of murdering her best friend, Amanda.

One of the world’s most celebrated scholars, Stephen Greenblatt has crafted both an innovative work of history and a thrilling story of discovery, in which one manuscript, plucked from a thousand years of neglect, changed the course of human thought and made possible the world as we know it.

Passionately argued, impressively researched, and filled with indelible stories of real people, Quiet shows how dramatically we undervalue introverts, and how much we lose in doing so.

More than simply sustenance, food historically has been a kind of technology, changing the course of human progress by helping to build empires, promote industrialization, and decide the outcomes of wars. Tom Standage draws on archaeology, anthropology, and economics to reveal how food has helped shape and transform societies around the world, from the emergence of farming in China by 7500 b.c. to the use of sugar cane and corn to make ethanol today. An Edible History of Humanity is a fully satisfying account of human history.

Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.

A droll, playful novel, "The New Republic" addresses weighty issues like terrorism with the deft, tongue-in-cheek touch that is vintage Shriver. It also presses the more intimate question: What makes particular people so magnetic, while the rest of us inspire a shrug? What’s their secret? And in the end, who has the better life—the admired, or the admirer?

Foer’s unlikely journey from chronically forgetful science journalist to U.S. Memory Champion frames a revelatory exploration of the vast, hidden impact of memory on every aspect of our lives.

Unlike anyone else, O’Nan delivers a new book every year that speaks directly to the anxieties of our fearful times

"Stone Arabia", Dana Spiotta’s moving and intrepid third novel, is about family, obsession, memory, and the urge to create — in isolation, at the margins of our winner-take-all culture.

"Remarkably fresh, complex and memorable... Max’s adventure would be enough to fill any book." - New York Times Sunday Book Review

Former academic Arthur Opp weighs 550 pounds and hasn’t left his rambling Brooklyn home in a decade. Twenty miles away, in Yonkers, seventeen-year-old Kel Keller navigates life as the poor kid in a rich school and pins his hopes on what seems like a promising baseball career–if he can untangle himself from his family drama. The link between this unlikely pair is Kel’s mother, Charlene, a former student of Arthur’s.

"Flatscreen" tells the story of Eli Schwartz as he endures the loss of his home, the indifference of his parents, the success of his older brother, and the cruel and frequent dismissal of the opposite sex.

A captivating tale, set in Scotland in the early 1960s, that is both an homage to and a modern variation on the enduring classic Jane Eyre.

A major new talent tackles the complicated terrain of sisters. A winsome novel that explores sibling rivalry, the power of books, and the places we decide to call home.

Sam interviews Ben Marcus author of "The Flame Alphabet". Listen as Sam and Ben discuss Ben's new novel about how far we will go, and the sorrows we will endure, in order to protect our families.

Join Sam and Adam as they discuss Adam's book "The Orphan Master's Son".

An epic novel and a thrilling literary discovery, The Orphan Master’s Son follows a young man’s journey through the icy waters, dark tunnels, and eerie spy chambers of the world’s most mysterious dictatorship, North Korea.

Listen to Sam's and Alex discuss Alex's new book "From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant: A Novel". Fashionistas and g-men clash in a masterful debut.

Sam talks with the "wickedly talented" (Boston Globe) and "darkly funny" (New York Times Book Review) Ryan Boudinot, on his new book Blueprints of the Afterlife.

Take an attractive young blonde, a sex shop, a political candidate, and add a Catholic Church for good measure, and you have the recipe for a riveting controversy that riddled a wealthy Philadelphia suburb and divided a community. Follow the quandaries of Jill McDevitt, a determined recent college graduate with a degree in sexuality and a love of pushing the envelope.

Isabel is a single, twentysomething thrift-store shopper and collector of remnants, things cast off or left behind by others. Glaciers follows Isabel through a day in her life in which work with damaged books in the basement of a library, unrequited love for the former soldier who fixes her computer, and dreams of the perfect vintage dress move over a backdrop of deteriorating urban architecture and the imminent loss of the glaciers she knew as a young girl in Alaska.

Glaciers unfolds internally, the action shaped by Isabel's sense of history, memory, and place, recalling the work of writers such as Jean Rhys, Marguerite Duras, and Virginia Woolf. For Isabel, the fleeting moments of one day can reveal an entire life. While she contemplates loss and the intricate fissures it creates in our lives, she accumulates the stories?the remnants?of those around her and she begins to tell her own story.

What a pleasure to encounter a first novel as self-assured and effortlessly told as Ayad Akhtar’s “American Dervish.” Mr. Akhtar, a first-generation Pakistani-American, has written an immensely entertaining coming-of-age story set during the early 1980s among the Pakistanis in the author’s hometown, Milwaukee.

Lev Grossman, author of The Magician King

Sam talks to Lily King, author of Father of the Rain, a New York Times editor's choice book.

Michael Sims, whose new biography of E.B. White, The Story of Charlotte's Web, has been featured on NPR and in USA Today.

Also, join us at Wellington Square Bookshop on Thursday, July 28th from 7:00-9:00PM for a signing by Michael Sims and a Charlotte's Web giveaway!

Sam talks to Kate Christensen, author of The Astral (2011) and The Great Man, which won the 2008 PEN/Faulkner award.

On this edition of the Avid Reader, Sam talks with David J. Linden, professor of neuroscience at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. He's the author of "The Compass of Pleasure: How Our Brains Make Fatty Foods, Orgasm, Exercise, Marijuana, Generosity, Vodka, Learning and Gambling Feel So Good."

Listen in to the Avid Reader interview with Craig Johnson, author of Hell is Empty and six other Walt Longmire mysteries (coming soon to A&E!).

In 2003, Erik Larson published "The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America" to an incredible response from critics and readers. His latest book, "In the Garden of Beasts," follows the first American ambassador to Nazi Germany.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks joins Sam on this edition of the Avid Reader. Her newest novel, CALEB'S CROSSING, tells the story of the first Native American to graduate from Harvard University.

Sam talks to Jean Thompson, whose newest novel, The Year We Left Home, follows an Iowa family over three decades.

When Alice Ozma was in fourth grade, she and her father made a pact: he would read aloud to her every night for 100 nights. 100 nights quickly turned into 1000, and when they saw no reason to stop their tradition, the reading streak continued for nine years-- until Ozma left home for college. Alice talks to Sam about her journey through L. Frank Baum's Oz series, Shakespeare, J.K. Rowling, and Dickens. Sickness, sleepovers and teenage rebellion threaten to break the streak, but Alice and her father are up for the challenge.

In his novel Union Atlantic Adam Haslett describes a global economic crisis similar to our own. He and Sam discuss writing and economics in novels on this edition of the Avid Reader.

Sam talks to Peter Mountford, author of A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism.

Arthur Phillips, author of Prague and The Tragedy of Arthur, joins Sam on the Avid Reader Show.

On this edition of the Avid Reader, Sam talks Lionel Shriver, whose newest novel So Much for That is now available in paperback. In 2005, Shriver was awarded the Orange Prize for her eighth novel, We Need to Talk About Kevin. She shares her thoughts on writing, social novels, and questionable book covers assigned to female authors.

Jonathan Evison joins Sam to talk about West of Here, his epic novel of the Pacific Northwest.

David Halperin talks about his coming-of-age novel Journal of a UFO Investigator. It's a story of aliens, alienation and imagination set in the 1960s.

Sam talks to Bradford Morrow, author of the Diviner's Tale and editor of Conjunctions literary magazine.

Justin Kramon talks to Sam about his debut novel Finny, a coming-of-age tale set at a Maryland boarding school and featuring a "Dickensian coterie" of secondary characters.

An interview with Téa Obreht, whose debut novel "The Tiger's Wife" has been receiving rave reviews. She's also the youngest member of the New Yorker's list of the 20 best writers under 40!

Two regulars from Wellington Square Bookshop's eclectic monthly open mic stop by: Jeff Mastroberti, local poet and Zak Theis, the host of Open Mic and a talented guitarist.

Karen Russell talks to Sam about her first novel, Swamplandia!, a family tale set at a shabby tourist attraction in the Everglades.

The author of The Memory Keeper's Daughter joins Sam on this edition of the Avid Reader to talk about her new book, The Lake of Dreams.

Sam Hankin is joined by Michael Sims, the author of "Adam's Naval," "Natural And Cultural History Of The Human Form," and "Apollo's Fire: A Day On Earth." He's the editor of "The Penguin Book of Victorian Women in Crime," a new anthology of stories featuring fearless, witty women with a knack for exposing injustice.

The Avid Reader talks to Tracy Kidder, prolific author of literary non-fiction, about his books Strength in What Remains and Mountains Beyond Mountains.

Charles Yu, author of How To Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe, talks to Sam about time travel and more.

Sam interviews Thrity Umrigar, bestselling author of THE SPACE BETWEEN US and THE WEIGHT OF HEAVEN.

Sam talks with Chris Cleave, author of LITTLE BEE and INCENDIARY.

We listen to a chapter from David Byrne's travel memoir the Bicycle Diaries.

Sam talks to Susan Weidener about memoirs, writing groups, and her book Again in a Heartbeat.

Helen Simonson, author of Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, talks to Sam about her novel. It's also our book club pick for January!

Paul Harding, 2010 Pulitzer Prize winner for Tinkers, chats with Sam about writing, belief, and the father-son relationship at the heart of his novel.

Sam talks with Jen Bryant, Caldecott Award Honoree for River of Words and author of young adult novel The Fortune of Carmen Navarro.

The best-selling author and book club favorite talks to the Avid Reader about her novels Sarah's Key and A Secret Kept.