Checkout the Top 10 Author Event Podcasts Downloaded in August 2013.

There were more than 19,400 podcasts downloaded from our website for the month of August!

View our full Fall schedule and don't miss out on all the great author events we have planned for rest of 2013.

	Clark DeLeon | Pennsylvania Curiosities (Volume Four) Recorded 8/8/2013 Listen to MP3 audio “Philadelphia’s favorite columnist” (Philadelphia Magazine), Clark DeLeon wrote “The Scene,” a beloved daily column in The Philadelphia Inquirer, for 20 years. In 2012, DeLeon returned to the Inquirer with a column entitled “A thousand heartfelt reasons to love Philadelphia” and a mission: “To love my city out loud. To help you love our city the way I do, by describing it the way I feel it, see it, experience it.” He is a longtime commentator on local news stations and teaches at Montgomery County Community College. A “sage of Pennsylvania” (Los Angeles Times), DeLeon is the author of four books, including the Curiosity Series, a guide to quirky people, roadside oddities, and offbeat phenomena in the Keystone State. His new book is the fourth volume in the series.
	Wole Soyinka | You Must Set Forth at Dawn Recorded 4/18/2006 Listen to MP3 audio Wole Soyinka is the first African recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature for his novels, plays, poems, and essays. He has been a courageous voice for justice, freedom, and human rights around the world. You Must Set Forth at Dawn continues the autobiographical narrative begun in Ake, Soyinka's memoir of his African childhood, focusing on his turbulent adult years.
	Christopher Hitchens | Hitch-22 Recorded 6/15/2010 Listen to MP3 audio Christopher Hitchens is a prolific and controversial writer, as well as a popular radio and TV commentator. A self-styled radicalist, Hitchens is notorious for his strong opinions and conflicting views: he was against the Vietnam War and for the Iraq invasion. He has written books excoriating Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Henry Kissinger, as well as biographies elevating Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and George Orwell. His polemic against organized religion, God Is Not Great, was a no. 1 New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award. Providing new insight into his life and beliefs, Hitch-22 sheds light on the formative experiences and personal relationships with famous writers and political figures that helped make him the intellectual he is today. In conversation with Marty Moss-Coane, host of WHYY's Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane.
	Beth Kephart | Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir Recorded 8/6/2013 Listen to MP3 audio "A linguistic Midas—everything she puts to paper is golden" (Family Circle), Beth Kephart is the author of more than a dozen books, including five memoirs, several acclaimed novels for young readers, and Flow, an autobiography of the Schuylkill River. Her first memoir A Slant of Sun was a National Book Award finalist and a Salon.com Best Book of the Year. Her many honors include a National Endowment for the Arts grant, a Pew Fellowships in the Arts grant, and the Speakeasy Poetry Prize. A veteran writing teacher, she currently teaches memoir at the University of Pennsylvania. In Handling the Truth, Kephart asks the questions that lie at the heart of memoir, thoughtfully guiding those who read or seek to write the truth. This event will feature a mini memoir class with a variety of exercises designed to improve memoir-writing technique.  Book Trailer: Jilly Joy and Chippy Present: Handling the Truth.
	MK Asante | Buck: A Memoir Recorded 8/22/2013 Listen to MP3 audio (This podcast contains explicit content.) A "rare, remarkable talent that brings to mind the great artists of the Harlem Renaissance" (Philadelphia Inquirer), MK Asante is a writer, filmmaker, and hip-hop artist and recipient of the Langston Hughes Award. His books include It’s Bigger Than Hip Hop, “an empowering book that moves you to action” (Los Angeles Times), and the poetry collection Like Water Running Off My Back, recipient of the Jean Corrie Prize. His documentary film The Black Candle, co-written with Maya Angelou, illuminates the relevance of the principles of Kwanzaa. His essays on art, technology, and culture have appeared in USA Today, Huffington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and the New York Times. Buck, Asante’s poetic and powerful new memoir, describes his rise from North Philadelphia dealer and delinquent to writer, filmmaker, poet, and professor.* *Please note that the last few seconds of the podcast were cut off because our recorder ran out of space.
	Christopher Hitchens | Hitch-22 Recorded 6/15/2010 Listen to MP3 audio Christopher Hitchens is a prolific and controversial writer, as well as a popular radio and TV commentator. A self-styled radicalist, Hitchens is notorious for his strong opinions and conflicting views: he was against the Vietnam War and for the Iraq invasion. He has written books excoriating Mother Teresa, Bill and Hillary Clinton, and Henry Kissinger, as well as biographies elevating Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, and George Orwell. His polemic against organized religion, God Is Not Great, was a no. 1 New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the National Book Award. Providing new insight into his life and beliefs, Hitch-22 sheds light on the formative experiences and personal relationships with famous writers and political figures that helped make him the intellectual he is today. In conversation with Marty Moss-Coane, host of WHYY's Radio Times with Marty Moss-Coane.
	Daniel Bergner | What Do Women Want?: Adventures in the Science of Female Desire Recorded 7/23/2013 Listen to MP3 audio “An eloquent witness” with “a journalist's eye for the telling moment” (The New Yorker), Daniel Bergner is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. His works of nonfiction include The Other Side of Desire, which probed the nature of ecstasy and sexual identity; In the Land of Magic Soldiers, a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year, which portrayed a world of beauty, horror, and redemption in war-ravaged Sierra Leone and received an Overseas Press Club Award; and God of the Rodeo, a New York Times Notable Book of the Year about an annual convict rodeo at a maximum-security penitentiary in Louisiana. Bergner’s new book What Do Women Want? debunks popularized myths about female lust, painting an unprecedented—possibly anarchic—portrait of “the fairer sex.”
	Raymond Sokolov | Steal the Menu: A Memoir of Forty Years in Food Recorded 6/27/2013 Listen to MP3 audio Distinguished restaurant critic and columnist Raymond Sokolov began his career as a foreign correspondent at Newsweek in 1965, where he thoughtfully rendered his first French meal in writing. He became restaurant critic of the New York Times in 1973, paying careful attention to restaurant lore, décor, and politics. Sokolov was a founding editor of the daily Leisure and Arts page at the Wall Street Journal. He is the author of The Saucier's Apprentice and numerous other food books, as well as the novel Native Intelligence and Wayward Reporter, a biography of A.J. Liebling. In his new book, he traces the American food scene from Julia Child’s opus Mastering the Art of French Cooking through today's flourishing and diverse culinary world.  Julie Dannenbaum Memorial Culinary Arts Lecture.
	Colum McCann | TransAtlantic Recorded 7/24/2013 Listen to MP3 audio Recipient of the 2009 National Book Award for Let the Great World Spin, a book which has been compared to Joyce’s Ulysses and described by John Lester in the New York Times as “one of the most electric, profound novels I have read in years…”, Colum McCann joins us to present his new novel TransAtlantic—a book that spans centuries, oceans and continents while interlacing fact and fiction though the lives of abolitionist Frederick Douglas, Senator George Mitchell, and aviation pioneers  John Alcock and Arthur Brown. McCann’s previous novels include Song Dogs, This Side of Brightness, Dancer, and Zoli.
	Anchee Min | The Cooked Seed: A Memoir Recorded 6/25/2013 Listen to MP3 audio "A wild, passionate and fearless American writer" (New York Times), Anchee Min is the author of Red Azalea, a memoir of growing up during the violent trauma of the Cultural Revolution, where Min spent time in a labor camp and was chosen for a lead role in a propagandist movie before the Mao communist regime collapsed. The book exists as “a powerful political as well as literary statement” (The New York Times Book Review). Min has since written six other works of historical fiction, including Becoming Madame Mao and Empress Orchid. Twenty years after the publication of Red Azalea, Min returns with the next chapter of her life story in The Cooked Seed, moving from the appalling deprivations of her birthplace to the sudden bounty of America, without language, money, or a clear path. *Anchee Min gave a moving and impassioned multimedia presentation that included readings, film clips and music. Because some of the clips were without dialogue we have edited them from the presentation. Also note that the sound clarity is variable. We have left intact the music from the final clip because the music is so beautiful. View the final clip.

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