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Shelf Life
Shelf Life is a show about books and the people who love them. In each episode, we invite a celebrated bibliophile (think Alan Cumming, John Waters, and Joyce Maynard) to select two of their favorite books, and then we chat about them, drawing connections between their lit choices and their lives and careers.
Podcasting since 2021 • 46 episodes
Shelf Life
Latest Episodes
Helen Phillips on a mother's primal love, and the perfidy (and promise) of AI in her novel, Hum
Is 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 ...
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Season 3
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Episode 7
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51:20
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Musician Orenda Fink on Glass Castles, Witchy Mothers, and Family Dysfunction
The 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 ...
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Season 3
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Episode 6
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51:13
Jennifer Belle on complicated teenage girls, and writing with Madonna
What 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, i...
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Season 3
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Episode 5
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51:23
Curtis Sittenfeld on writing comedy, and Jane Austen's headstrong heroines
The 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 ...
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Season 3
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Episode 4
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51:42
Ada Zhang on the Lives of Others and stanning Eudora Welty
Loss, 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 ...
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Season 3
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Episode 3
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52:08
