Jeffrey Brown
Award-winning PBS NewsHour Senior Correspondent Jeffrey Brown has garnered Emmy and Cine Golden Eagle Awards and widespread acclaim. His career that has spanned twenty years and a variety of roles, both on camera and off: as arts correspondent, senior producer for national affairs, and now he regularly co-anchors the nightly news program.
As arts correspondent, he's profiled and interviewed many of the world's leading writers, musicians and other artists. As senior producer for national affairs for more than a decade, he helped shape the program's coverage of a range of areas, including the economy, healthcare, social policy, culture and the arts. In addition, he is the creator and host of "Art Beat," the NewsHour's online arts and culture blog.
Prior to joining The NewsHour, Brown helped produce numerous public television series. He attended UC Berkeley (B.A., Classics), the UC Berkeley School of Law, and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (M.S.).
Click here for a conversation with Jeffrey Brown, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, in which they discuss a report examining the connections between education and national security.
Dennis Lehane
Dennis Lehane, the acclaimed master of the "new noir," delivers satisfying, gritty fiction from America's dark urban streets. He is the author of nine novels, including the New York Times bestsellers Gone Baby Gone; Mystic River (made into an Academy Award-winning Clint Eastwood film with Sean Penn and Kevin Bacon); Shutter Island; and The Given Day—as well as Coronado, a collection of short stories and a play. He has also written several episodes of the HBO television program, already a cult classic, The Wire.
His book, Moonlight Mile, is the darkly explosive sequel to Gone, Baby, Gone and delivers the long-awaited return of beloved private investigators Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. Amanda McCready's sudden disappearance as a toddler sent Kenzie and Gennaro deep into a twisted investigation in Gone, Baby, Gone. Now 16 years old in Moonlight Mile, Amanda hasn't been seen in weeks, and it's up to the two PIs to find her again.
Mystic River was a finalist for the 2001 PEN/Winship Award and won both the Anthony Award and the Barry Award for Best Novel, the Dilys Award from the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association and the Massachusetts Book Award in Fiction from the Massachusetts Center for the Book. A Drink Before the War won the Shamus Award for Best First Novel. In addition to Mystic River, two of Lehane’s other books have been made into hit movies: Shutter Island was directed by Martin Scorsese and starred Leonardo DiCaprio, and Gone, Baby, Gone was directed by Ben Affleck and starred Morgan Freeman and Ed Harris. His books have been translated into 22 languages.
“The superb detective novels of Dennis Lehane . . . became a kind of lifeline for me,” (Stephen King, New York Times Book Review)
“[Lehane] deserves to be included among the most interesting and accomplished American novelists of any genre or category” (Washington Post Book World)
Click here for an interview with Dennis Lehane: http://www.harpercollins.com/author/authorExtra.aspx?authorID=17394&isbn13=9780380731855&displayType=bookinterview
Beth Howard
Journalist Beth Howard suffered a devastating loss with the sudden death of her young husband. She packed up the RV he left behind and hit the highways of the United States, finding solace in her grief by baking pies and giving them away. Making Piece: Love, Loss, and Pie is her beautifully written memoir of life after tragedy.
“Beth Howard describes with warmth and wit how the bitter events in life are set off by the sweet ones—much like the ingredients of a good recipe. Making Piece is a moving account of love and loss.” (Jeannette Walls, New York Times bestselling author of The Glass Castle)
An excerpt from Making Piece: Love, Loss, and Pie:
"I am a pie baker and I live in the American Gothic House. Yes, the American Gothic House, the one in the iconic Grant Wood painting of the couple holding the pitchfork. It is the second most famous white house in the U.S.A., second only to the White House. Yes, the White House in Washington, D.C. The American Gothic House is nowhere near Washington, D.C. It is located in rural Southeastern Iowa in a sleepy, former railroad town called Eldon (pop. 928), and while the house is indeed white, it is decidedly smaller and humbler than the presidential one. Because it is famous and old—old as in “built in 1881” old—it is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. But one doesn’t need documentation or a plaque by the front door to know the age of this house. The slanted, worn, wide-plank floorboards, the rectangular shape of the nail heads handcrafted by blacksmiths and the cracks in the front door that let in the winter drafts speak for its many years of weathering a hardscrabble life on the windswept prairie.
"Living in a tourist attraction (which must be where the expression “living in a fishbowl” comes from) takes a special person. And since I live here, I guess that makes me special in that I can handle the daily foot traffic tromping across my front porch, I accept how strangers, unable to restrain their curiosity, peer into my windows . . . and I politely offer to snap the occasional photo of a couple striking the prerequisite pose in front of the Gothic window.
"Out of the hundred-plus places I’ve ever lived, this is the first and only one where I signed a lease requiring that the “tenant shall treat the public in a friendly manner.” And mostly I am friendly. Except when I’ve had too many faces pressed up against the glass in my kitchen window. In which case, the white cotton curtain gets yanked across their hungry eyes, and I retreat to the most private room in the house: ironically, the upstairs bedroom, the one immediately behind the house’s main feature, the Gothic window."
Click here to read Beth Howard's reflection on the Today Show web site, How Pie Saved My Life: http://bites.today.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/03/27/10873334-how-pie-saved-my-life
Frank Delaney
“The most eloquent man in the world,” says NPR, about author, broadcaster, BBC host and Booker Prize Judge, Frank Delaney. His book, Ireland, was a New York Times bestseller; his nonfiction book, Simple Courage, was chosen as one of the top five books of the year by the American Library Association. He is the host of the BBC program, Word of Mouth.
Delaney is a native of Tipperary, Ireland, and theorizes that the Irish have a strong storytelling tradition because the lack of education "gave rise to a verbal subversiveness."
"We were not permitted any education, so therefore we had to be as subversive as we could," says Delaney. "We were already subversive. There's no word in the Irish language, in Gaelic, there's no word for 'Yes.' There's no word for 'No.' I should also point out there's no word for "sex," but we're not going down that road. We were already devious. When the English language was forced upon us, there seems to have been a natural will that said, 'Right. We will use it better than the English ever could themselves. We will make it into a weapon."
Over a career of interviews that has lasted more than three decades, Delaney, an international-best-selling author himself, has interviewed more than 3,500 of the world's most important writers.
Delaney has earned top prizes and best-seller status in a wide variety of formats, from prolific author, a polished broadcaster on both television and radio, to journalist, correspondent, screenwriter, lecturer, playwright and scholar. He has been the president of the Samuel Johnson Society, president of the UK Book Trust, and the Literary Director of the famed Edinburgh Festival.
A judge of many literary prizes (as well as the famous Booker), Delaney also created landmark programs and passionate documentaries on many subjects including Joyce, Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Hemingway, Mailer, Matisse, Van Gogh and the vitality and organic growth of the English language - his famed BBC show on the way we speak, Word of Mouth, is heard all over the English-speaking world. And his six-part series, The Celts, originally broadcast in 40 countries, is still in active DVD distribution, some twenty years after its launch.
Delaney has created a significant podcast series: Re:Joyce, deconstructing, examining and illuminating James Joyce's Ulysses line-by-line, in accessible and entertaining five-minute broadcasts, posted each week on this website. The project is estimated to run a quarter of a century.
Click here to listen to Frank Delaney in conversation with NPR's Weekend Edition Saturday with Scott Simon and read an excerpt from the novel, Ireland. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=4532548
Helen Simonson
Helen Simonson's debut novel, Major Pettigrew's Last Stand, was hailed by critics as a masterpiece of charm and named one of the Top Ten Books of the Year by the New York Times. An absolute delight from beginning to end, it is a romantic comedy set in a quintessential English village.
The Major leads a quiet life valuing the proper things that Englishmen have lived by for generations: honor, duty, decorum, and a properly brewed cup of tea. But then his brother's death sparks an unexpected friendship with Mrs. Jasmina Ali, the Pakistani shopkeeper from the village. Drawn together by their shared love of literature and the loss of their respective spouses, the Major and Mrs. Ali soon find their friendship blossoming into something more. But village society insists on embracing him as the quintessential local and her as the permanent foreigner. Can their relationship survive the risks one takes when pursuing happiness in the face of culture and tradition?
"In the noisy world of today it is a delight to find a novel that dares to assert itself quietly with the lovely rhythm of Helen Simonson’s funny, comforting and intelligent debut," (Elizabeth Strout, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Olive Kitteridge)
"Major Pettigrew has it all," (The New York Times)
"I am a huge fan of Edith Wharton, who wrote of the bitter side of social manners in a way that is also timeless," says Simonson. "The Custom of the Country should be required reading for all those contemplating a career in reality television." Simonson is a native of England's quiet East Sussex. She lives in New York.
Click here for an interview with Helen Simonson: http://www.randomhouse.com/rhpg/rc/2010/11/17/a-conversation-with-helen-simonson-author-of-major-pettigrews-last-stand
Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman is the father of the graphic novel: he has almost single-handedly brought comic books out of the toy closet and onto the literature shelves. In 1992, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his masterful Holocaust narrative Maus— which portrayed Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Maus II continued the remarkable story of his parents’ survival of the Nazi regime and their lives later in America.
Spiegelman believes that in our post-literate culture the importance of the comic is on the rise, for "comics echo the way the brain works. People think in iconographic images, not in holograms, and people think in bursts of language, not in paragraphs."
MetaMaus is a lavish deconstruction of his magnum opus, positioned as a 25th-anniversary commemoration; it also represents Spiegelman's efforts to grapple with the meaning and impact of the long shadows case by Maus years after its publication.
"I'm blessed and cursed by this thing I made that obviously looms large for me and for others," has said. "The result is that I can't do this thing that seems quite easy but that I just can't do, which is: 'That's that, and now I'm working on a new thing, and it's a whole other thing.' I just can't get out of its gravitational field."
Click here for an interview with Art Spiegelman in the Los Angeles Times http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/books/la-ca-art-spiegelman-20111016,0,7783952.story
