View and listen to the Top 10 Author Event Podcasts Downloaded in May 2014.

Authors coming to the Free Library soon include a sold out book signing with former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, legendary cult filmmaker John Waters, Shakespearean Star Wars mashup writer Ian Doescher, and economist and magazine magnate Steve Forbes, to name just a few! View our full schedule for more upcoming Summer 2014 Author Events.

	James Fearnley | Here Comes Everybody: The Story of the Pogues Recorded 5/5/2014 Listen to MP3 audio “The musical equivalent of a pub crawl” (Rolling Stone), the Pogues’ raucous melding of traditional Irish music with the incendiary energy of punk catapulted the London-based band to international prominence in the 1980s and 90s. Founding Pogues member and accordion player James Fearnley tells the band’s story in Here Comes Everybody, “a warts-and-all tale…about the band and the bond formed across 30 fractious years” (Irish Times), including the group’s troubles with Shane McGowan, its brilliant but drug-addicted frontman and songwriter. A multi-instrumentalist across a variety of musical genres, Fearnley has played on albums with Talking Heads, Steve Earle, and Melissa Etheridge, among others.  In conversation with Wesley Stace   This podcast contains explicit content.
	Christopher Buckley | But Enough About You Recorded 5/15/2014 Listen to MP3 audio “One of the funniest writers in the English language” according to Tom Wolfe, Christopher Buckley is the author of 15 books, including Thank You for Smoking, Little Green Men, and Supreme Courtship. The recipient of the Washington Irving Medal for Literary Excellence and the Thurber Prize for American Humor, Buckley served as chief speechwriter to Vice President George H.W. Bush, and the American political machine is the primary target of his satire. As Janet Maslin wrote in one New York Times review, “By now, just about every species of political huckster has been treated to Mr. Buckley’s style of prescient ridicule, yet political life ceaselessly tosses him bait.” In his new essay collection, Buckley tackles a wide range of subjects with distinctive wit and insight.  Meelya Gordon Memorial Lecture
	Ralph Nader | Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to Dismantle the Corporate State Recorded 4/29/2014 Listen to MP3 audio Ralph Nader “singlehandedly sparked a new era of citizen-driven political and consumer activism (Publishers Weekly) and is largely responsible for major federal consumer protection laws such as the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Freedom of Information Act. His scathing critique of the American auto industry, Unsafe at Any Speed, was instrumental in the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act. Nader has written a score of popular books and has been a five-time third-party Presidential candidate. His new book calls for bipartisan grassroots activism in the face of corporate influence in American politics.
	Russell Gold | The Boom: How Fracking Ignited the American Energy Revolution and Changed the World Recorded 5/8/2014 Listen to MP3 audio Wall Street Journal energy reporter Russell Gold was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Gerald Loeb Award winner for his coverage of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill and its aftermath. His articles on fracking and shale gas were some of the first to explore the issues, personalities, and technologies involved in this once-obscure energy source. In The Boom, “an insider’s guide to the most controversial energy-production technique in the United States" (Kirkus), Gold provides a sober and meticulously researched look at fracking and its place in the American landscape and in the global economy.
	Michael Cunningham | The Snow Queen Recorded 5/22/2014 Listen to MP3 audio Composed with a “luxuriant ability to imagine his characters’ lives in the round” and a “romantic sense of the adventure of the inner life” (The New York Review of Books), Michael Cunningham’s books are narrative experiments—genre bending tours through time—often in conversation with existing literature. His books include The Hours, a novel which won the 1999 Pulitzer Prize and PEN/Faulkner Award and was adapted into an Academy Award-winning film starring Meryl Streep, Nicole Kidman, and Julianne Moore; A Home at the End of the World, made into a film starring Colin Farrell and Sissy Spacek; Golden Days; Flesh and Blood; Specimen Days; and By Nightfall. In his new novel The Snow Queen, he tackles the three great American subjects: religion, drugs, and politics.
	Sandra Tsing Loh | The Madwoman in the Volvo Recorded 5/13/2014 Listen to MP3 audio Sandra Tsing Loh brings a passionately distinctive and “imaginatively twisted and fearless” (Los Angeles Times) voice to her work across a variety of genres. A contributing editor to The Atlantic, she is the author of six books, including Mother on Fire, an irreverent parenting book that she adapted into a one-woman show. She hosts The Loh Down on Science, a daily radio show, and is a regular commentator on NPR’s Morning Edition and PRI’s This American Life. Loh’s new memoir is a vulnerable and manic look into the sweeping hormonal mid-life changes that have shaped her as a mother and artist.
	Colson Whitehead | The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death with Nikil Saval | Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace Recorded 5/20/2014 Listen to MP3 audio Colson Whitehead is the author of five highly acclaimed novels, including The Intuitionist, John Henry Days, and Zone One. He has been a Pulitzer Prize finalist, a MacArthur Fellowship recipient, and a PEN/Faulkner finalist.  His non-fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and Harper’s, among several other publications. The Noble Hustle chronicles Whitehead’s plunge into the gritty world of high-stakes poker.  Philadelphia-based Nikil Saval is an editor at n+1 magazine, which covers politics, culture, and literature across a wide spectrum of viewpoints and genres. His first book, Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, is a surprising and in-depth look at the anatomy and social history of the workplace, from the steno pool to the cubicle farm to the executive suite.
	Roz Chast | Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? Recorded 5/12/2014 Listen to MP3 audio Since first accepting Roz Chast’s cartoons in 1978, The New Yorker has published more than 800 pieces of her work. Now a staff cartoonist with the venerable magazine, Chast has also seen her work regularly printed by Scientific American and Harvard Business Review. She has written or illustrated more than a dozen books, including several collected volumes of her published cartoons, which have been hailed as compendiums of “worry, doom, and gloom that are funny, fresh, and relatable” (Reader’s Digest). In her first memoir, Chast uses cartoons, family photos, and narrative to tell the difficult but comic story of her aging parents.
	Francine Prose | Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 with Mona Simpson | Casebook Recorded 5/1/2014 Listen to MP3 audio Known as a satirist in the tradition of Swift, Francine Prose creates a fictional world of absurd situations and sardonic humor, intelligence, compassion, and grief. A respected novelist, critic, and essayist, she is the author of nearly 30 books, including the National Book Award Finalist Blue Angel. She is former President of the PEN American Center and the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, a Fulbright fellowship, and two National Endowment for the Arts grants, among many other honors. Her new novel, Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932 is based on a photograph taken by Hungarian photographer Brassai, “Lesbian Couple at Le Monocle.”  Award-winning novelist Mona Simpson is the author of Anywhere But Here, adapted for a film starring Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon; The Lost Father; A Regular Guy; Off Keck Road, a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist and recipient of the Heartland Prize of the Chicago Tribune; and My Hollywood. Her many honors include a Whiting Writer’s Award, a Guggenheim grant, and an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In her new novel, Casebook, an eavesdropping boy tries to understand his unraveling family, and instead uncovers the burdens of his parents’ private lives.
	Eliza Griswold | I Am the Beggar of the World: Landays from Contemporary Afghanistan Recorded 4/19/2014 Listen to MP3 audio For the New York Times bestselling book The Tenth Parallel, journalist Eliza Griswold spent seven years traveling the geographic and ideological fronts in Africa and Asia where Christianity and Islam collide. She is also the author of Wideawake Field, a collection of poetry that visits many of these foreign landscapes. A 2012 Guggenheim fellow and former Nieman Fellow, Griswold has also been published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, and a slew of other leading publications. In her new book, she travels to Afghanistan to anthologize poems written by a diverse group of women who challenge the image of the voiceless figure under the burqa.

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