View and listen to the Top 10 Author Event Podcasts Downloaded in October 2013.

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	Ross King | The Judgement of Paris: The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism Recorded 4/20/2006 Listen to MP3 audio Ross King is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Brunelleschi’s Dome and Michaelangelo & the Pope’s Ceiling, as well as the novels Ex-Libris and Domino. The Judgment of Paris chronicles the dramatic decade between two famous exhibitions: the scandalous Salon des Refusés in 1863 and the first Impressionist showing in 1874, where the artists who would make Impressionism the most popular art form in history were showing their first paintings amidst scorn and derision from the French artistic establishment.
	Malcolm Gladwell | David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants Recorded 10/18/2013 Listen to MP3 audio “One of the brightest stars in the media firmament” (Time), Malcolm Gladwell synthesizes academic research with critical analysis and delightfully fascinating writing to fashion astonishing and useful insights about our world and our place in it. His bestselling books travel avenues of science, reason, and anecdote, and include The Tipping Point, Outliers, Blink, and What the Dog Saw. A former business and science writer for the Washington Post, Gladwell has been a staff columnist at The New Yorker since 1996. In his new book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, Gladwell challenges conventional notions of obstacles and apparent setbacks, demonstrating that beauty and progress often arise from what looks like suffering and adversity.
	Jill Lepore | Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin Recorded 10/2/2013 Listen to MP3 audio Jill Lepore’s meticulously researched books explore violence, language, and the absences and asymmetries in the historical record. A New Yorker staff writer and chair of Harvard’s History and Literature Program, she is the author of the Carnegie Medal finalist The Mansion of Happiness: A History of Life and Death; The Story of America: Essays on Origins, an examination of the nature of history and the shaping of its narrative; New York Burning, winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and The Name of War, recipient of the Bancroft Prize. Book of Ages is a detailed portrait of Jane Franklin, Benjamin’s beloved and gifted sister, who was his confidante and lifelong correspondent.
	Nicholas Sparks | The Longest Ride Recorded 9/27/2013 Listen to MP3 audio In conversation with Tamala Edwards,anchor, 6ABC Action News morning edition. One of the world’s most beloved storytellers, Nicholas Sparks maps the varied routes of the human heart and chronicles love lost and found—from irrevocable decisions to chances to rewrite the past. All of his books are New York Times bestsellers, and eight of his novels have been adapted into major motion pictures, including The Notebook, A Walk to Remember, Message in a Bottle, Nights in Rodanthe, and Safe Haven. In 2011, Sparks and his wife launched the Nicholas Sparks Foundation, committed to improving cultural and international understanding through global education experiences for students of all ages. In The Longest Ride, two couples are separated by years and experience but converge in unexpectedly profound ways.
	Reverend Al Sharpton | The Rejected Stone: Al Sharpton and the Path to American Leadership Recorded 10/10/2013 Listen to MP3 audio “The most thoughtful voice on cable” (New York Observer), Reverend  Al Sharpton has more than 40 years’ experience as a dynamic community leader, lightning rod Baptist minister, firebrand politician, and “a relentless protestor” (The New York Times Book Review) for those he champions.  He has served as Director of Ministers for National Rainbow Push coalition and founded his own progressive civil rights organization, the National Action Network, which has chapters across the country.  He is the host of MSNBC’s PoliticsNation,and his radio show, Keepin’ It Real, is syndicated nationwide.  The Rejected Stone, his first book in more than a decade, charts the surprising people and places that have molded Reverend Sharpton’s unexpected conclusions about religion, immigration, gay rights, and the family. In conversation with Tracey Matisak
	Salman Rushdie | Joseph Anton with Martin Amis | Lionel Asbo: State of England Recorded 10/1/2013 Listen to MP3 audio This podcast contains explicit content. After the 1989 publication of his novel The Satanic Verses led Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini to issue a fatwa calling for his death, Salman Rushdie went underground, living under police protection for almost 10 years until the fatwa was lifted in 1998. He draws the title of his new memoir from the alias he adopted during this time, a combination of the first names of two writers he loved: Joseph Conrad and Anton Chekhov. Rushdie is the author of 16 books, including Midnight's Children, winner of the Booker Prize in 1981 and the “Booker of Bookers” Prize in 1993; Shalimar the Clown; and The Enchantress of Florence, which was named one of the Best Books of 2008 by the Washington Post. Spanning four decades, a dozen novels, several short story collections and works of nonfiction, two screenplays, and hundreds of reviews and essays, Martin Amis’s influential career testifies to a lifetime devoted to literature. A writer who is “dark, satirical, and gifted with irascibility” (Los Angeles Times Book Review), Amis has been described as the undisputed master of what the New York Times called “the new unpleasantness.” English tabloid culture takes a beating in his new book, a characteristically gruesome satire about an unusually principled thug raising his bookish nephew. Meelya Gordon Memorial Lecture
	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.
	Donald Fagen | Eminent Hipsters Recorded 10/24/2013 Listen to MP3 audio In conversation with David Dye Imaginative musician and songwriter Donald Fagen is best known as the cofounder, along with Walter Becker, and lead singer of the rock band Steely Dan. Paragons of subversive 1970s music, the band combined pop hooks with sleek jazz harmonies, complicated time changes, cryptic lyrics, and Fagen’s distinctive vocals. “The perfect musical antiheroes for the Seventies” (Rolling Stone), Steely Dan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2001. Fagen released his fourth solo album, Sunken Condos, in 2012. In Eminent Hipsters, he recalls the important cultural figures and currents that shaped his music and recounts his life on the road. Longtime Philadelphia radio personality David Dye has won accolades for his style and presentation at various stations over the course of his distinguished broadcasting career. Since launching World Café—a unique program of contemporary sounds from legendary and emerging artists—Dye has served as the host of this nationally acclaimed show.
	Nicholson Baker | Traveling Sprinkler with Dara Horn | A Guide for the Perplexed Recorded 10/17/2013 Listen to MP3 audio “One of the most beautiful, original, and ingenious prose stylists to have come along in decades” (New York Times), Nicholson Baker is the bestselling author of nine unconventional novels and five works of nonfiction, including the National Book Critics Circle Award winner Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper. His novels, including The Mezzanine, Vox, and House of Holes—a “blue-flaring plume of smut-talk” (New York Times) set in a sexual theme park—candidly explore the human psyche. In Traveling Sprinkler, Paul Chowder, from Baker’s The Anthologist, sets out to write a pop song or a protest song or both at once. One of Granta’s Best Young American Novelists, Dara Horn received the National Jewish Book Award, the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and the Reform Judaism Fiction Prize for her 2003 debut novel In the Image. Her second novel, The World to Come, received the 2006 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and the Harold U. Ribalow Prize, and it was named one of the San Francisco Chronicle’s Best Books of 2006. Horn’s other books include All Other Nights, selected as an Editors’ Choice in The New York Times Book Review, and the bestselling nonfiction e-book The Rescuer. Her new novel A Guide for the Perplexed is an adventure that intertwines stories from Genesis, medieval philosophy, and the perils on the digital frontier. In partnership with the 215 Festival.
	Simon Winchester | The Men Who United the States: America’s Explorers, Inventors, Eccentrics and Mavericks, and the Creation of One Nation, Indivisible Recorded 10/22/2013 Listen to MP3 audio Acclaimed author Simon Winchester follows in the footsteps of the explorers, thinkers, and innovators who helped forge and unify the citizens and geography of the United States in his new book The Men Who United the States. Made an officer of the Order of the British Empire by the Queen in 2006, Winchester explores topics from the urbane to the catastrophic in his New York Times bestselling nonfiction books, which include The Professor and the Madman, Krakatoa, and The Man Who Loved China. His writing also appears in National Geographic and Smithsonian magazine.  Pine Tree Foundation Endowed Lecture.

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