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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.
Episodes
52 episodes
Biographer Katherine Bucknell on Christopher Isherwood's Odyssey from Weimar Berlin to California
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 Ka...
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Season 4
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Episode 3
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52:07
Legendary Publisher Edwin Frank in Praise of Rudyard Kipling — and Why the 20th Century Novel Matters
Nobel 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 ...
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Season 4
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Episode 2
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50:40
Jeanette Winterson on ghosts, tech bros, and what her success taught her about class in Britain
It'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 foll...
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Season 4
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Episode 1
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51:26
Jennifer Kabat on America's forgotten populist uprising and the politics of place
Memoir 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 culmi...
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Season 3
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Episode 10
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51:32
Ricky Ian Gordon's Odyssey of Sex, Drugs and Opera
A 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...
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Season 3
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Episode 9
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52:10
YA author Rex Ogle on Life as a Poor Kid in a Land of Plenty
Rex 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 abili...
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Season 3
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Episode 8
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51:16
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
The Dead Presidents Society with Actor Dylan Baker
When 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 mo...
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Season 3
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Episode 2
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51:31
Ramit Sethi on money, pleasure, and finding moments of awe
The 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 o...
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Season 3
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Episode 1
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52:04
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Season Three is Coming: turn the page on a new chapter.
In 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 celebra...
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0:40
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Between Dystopias: Marlon James and Hafizah Augustus Geter Live at Deep Water Lit Fest 23
Each 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...
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46:57
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DJ Taylor on George Orwell's literary genesis, and why the author of 1984 still matters
The 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...
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Season 2
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Episode 23
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52:15
Christopher Bollen on Graham Greene, Agatha Christie, and the abiding pleasures of the whodunnit
Novelist 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 trade...
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Season 2
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Episode 22
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51:37
Joanna Quinn, author of The Whalebone Theater, on secret gardens, complicated heroines, and procrastination.
Few of us need reminding that childhood can be a difficult and challenging time; but it can also be a magical one. That duality is at the heart of The Whalebone Theater, the best-selling debut novel of Joana Quinn. Childhood is central...
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Season 2
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Episode 21
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51:13
Ari Shapiro on singing for Bono, cooking for Nina Totenberg, and what novels teach him.
Tender hearted children growing up in oppressive and claustrophobic societies dominate the two novels chosen by the journalist and musician, Ari Shapiro. The first is Douglas Stuart’s acclaimed sophomore novel, Young Mungo; the second ...
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Season 2
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Episode 20
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55:59
Reading Stephen King with Sera Gamble, co-creator of the hit show, You.
Sera Gamble is perhaps best known as the screenwriter and showrunner for the hit Netflix show You, based on the novels of Caroline Kepnes, in which the romantic hero is not just a pretty face; he’s a serial killer as well. You...
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Season 2
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Episode 19
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53:08
Brooke Gladstone on her terrible waitressing, the future of media, and why Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita resonates today
For 22 years Brooke Gladstone has been demystifying the media for listeners of her indispensable public radio show, On the Media. But her long career, which began in summer stock theater, has also included stints as editor NPR's ...
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Season 2
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Episode 18
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51:41
Jerry Stahl on a bus trip to Auschwitz, his friendship with Anthony Bourdain, and Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust.
A bus trip to Auschwitz in the company of the writer Jerry Stahl, who in 2016 set off for Poland to confront one of the darkest chapters in human history. The resulting book, Nein Nein Nein, is fast-paced, darkly absurd, and mordantly ...
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Season 2
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Episode 17
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52:14
A Year in Reading with Joyce Maynard, Darcey Steinke, Edmund White, and John Waters
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
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Season 2
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Episode 16
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51:30
Marion Nestle on late starts, unhappy families and her war on food myths
If you sometimes fret that your opportunity to make your mark on the world has passed, take a leaf from Marion Nestle’s career. At 50, she found herself divorced, out of a job, and not able to get a credit card. Despite that she persevere...
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Season 2
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Episode 15
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51:25
Leila Taylor on Shirley Jackson's Haunted Houses, Black Goth, and Being a "Creepy Kid."
In this episode, Leila Taylor, the author of Darkly, an expansive rumination on the relationship between Gothic narratives and the Black experience in America, talks haunted houses courtesy of Shirley Jackson, meditations on a cockroac...
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Season 2
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Episode 14
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51:53
