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.
Shelf Life
Curtis Sittenfeld on writing comedy, and Jane Austen's headstrong heroines
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Curtis Sittenfeld
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Season 3
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Episode 4
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 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 2011 memoir, Bossypants. It so happens that SNL and Tina Fey were instrumental in Sittenfeld's most recent novel, Romantic Comedy. Says Sittenfeld, “People say, ‘Write the book you want to read’, but I think I was actually writing the world I wanted to exist in.”