Shelf Life

Mar 04 2025 52 ep. 49 mins
Shelf Life Podcast artwork

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.

  Arts  Fiction  Society & Culture
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Biographer Katherine Bucknell on Christopher Isherwood's Odyssey from Weimar Berlin to California

Mar 04 2025 52 mins  
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

Legendary Publisher Edwin Frank in Praise of Rudyard Kipling — and Why the 20th Century Novel Matters

Jan 21 2025 50 mins  
Send us a text 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 Frank's trailblazing publishing imprint, New York Review Books, built on the principle that too many great books had fallen o

Jeanette Winterson on ghosts, tech bros, and what her success taught her about class in Britain

Dec 31 2024 51 mins  
Send us a text 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 followed, including The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body, and more recently Frankissstein: A Love Story. “I am an ambit

Jennifer Kabat on America's forgotten populist uprising and the politics of place

Nov 06 2024 51 mins  
Send us a text 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 culminated in 1845 with the murder of a police officer, Osman Steele. Drawing on archives, conversations, and her many hikes through th

Ricky Ian Gordon's Odyssey of Sex, Drugs and Opera

Oct 29 2024 52 mins  
Send us a text 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 into singing all night,” he writes in his memoir, Seeing Through: A Chronicle of Sex, Drugs and Opera. But that exuberan

YA author Rex Ogle on Life as a Poor Kid in a Land of Plenty

Oct 08 2024 51 mins  
Send us a text 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 ability to illuminate the shame and isolation that comes with poverty. In the words of Ogle’s mother, "being poor in America i

Helen Phillips on a mother's primal love, and the perfidy (and promise) of AI in her novel, Hum

Sep 03 2024 51 mins  
Send us a text 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 abducted by her own doppelganger. She returns to that theme ih Hum, a novel set in a near-future when artificial intelligence and su

Musician Orenda Fink on Glass Castles, Witchy Mothers, and Family Dysfunction

Aug 24 2024 51 mins  
Send us a text 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 her mother's profound emotional needs operated as a kind of centrifugal force. “Life with my mother was like being in a tra

Jennifer Belle on complicated teenage girls, and writing with Madonna

Apr 29 2024 51 mins  
Send us a text 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, 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 Ver

Curtis Sittenfeld on writing comedy, and Jane Austen's headstrong heroines

Apr 20 2024 51 mins  
Send us a text 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. W