Author Author

Many people know John Mauceri from his work as conductor for the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. What is less known is that the orchestra was re-created after a forty-year gap just for him to conduct. He has conducted around the world in a variety of classical formats, and is also an academic and an author. I spoke to him at his home in New York for his latest book, For the Love of Music.

Susan Mailer is the first-born daughter of Norman Mailer and the author of In Another Place: With and Without My Father Norman Mailer. As one might suspect, this memoir is not the usual story. I found it entertaining and informative, especially since I was an admirer of her father's work. She called from Chile, the first time I have conducted an intercontinental interview.

Jarett Kobek is a Turkish-American writer living in California. He is the author of the novella ATTA (2011) and the novel I Hate the Internet (2016), an international best seller that has appeared, or is scheduled to appear, in seven languages. His current novel is Only Americans Burn in Hell, a kind of Swiftian, take no prisoners satire. I spoke with him at our studios, and he made me laugh.

I had the opportunity to see Janis Joplin perform at the Fillmore East. She was astonishing. Her untimely death was a blow to the 60s music scene, and felt personally by her fans. There has been much misinformation over the years about Janis's life, some of it her own creation. Holly George-Warren has done a brilliant and sensitive job of sifting through the life of this icon, and produced a complete and sympathetic biography. I spoke with her at our studios.

[This interview is unabashedly left progressive. Even if you consider yourself a conservative, I urge you to listen. Thom Hartmann is a scholar of American history and politics and I have not found him to get his facts wrong.] Talkers Magazine ranks Thom as the #1 progressive talk show host in America, with a cumulative audience of 6.5 million (excluding the TV audience). For 9 years he also hosted an evening TV program that was first carried by Free Speech TV and later picked up by RT TV out of Washington, DC. He separated from RT in 2017. He is also a four-time Project Censored-award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of 24 books in print. He invented the "hunters in a farmer's world" reframe for ADHD and wrote 5 books on the subject. His latest book is a history and analysis of the US Supreme Court. I learned a lot from it.

Cara Wall is a graduate of the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and Stanford University. While at Iowa, Cara taught fiction writing in the undergraduate creative writing department as well as at the Iowa Young Writer’s Studio in her capacity of founder and inaugural director. She went on to teach middle school English and History and has been published by Glamour, Salon and The San Francisco Chronicle. She lives in New York City with her family. Her latest novel is The Dearly Beloved. I spoke with her at our studios.

Kira Jane Buxton's writing has appeared in The New York Times, NewYorker.com, McSweeney’s, The Rumpus, Huffington Post and more. She calls the tropical utopia of Seattle home and spends her time with three cats, a dog, two crows, a charm of hummingbirds and a husband. Her latest book is Hollow Kingdom. I spoke with Kira at our studio.

Michael Benanav is an author In addition to his books, Michael writes and/or shoots for The New York Times, Lonely Planet, The Christian Science Monitor Magazine, Geographical, Afar, CNN.com, Wend and Hand/Eye among others. His photographic work has been selected to appear in the National Geographic book, Rarely Seen: Images of the Extraordinary and he's a freelance photographer known for immersing in foreign cultures and bringing compelling stories and images back from distant places. When not in some remote nook of the planet, Michael can often be found hiking in the hills behind his home in northern New Mexico. I spoke with him about his latest book, Himalaya Bound: One Family's Quest to Save Their Animals & an Ancient Way of Life.

Mona Awad was born in Montreal and has lived in the US since 2009. Her debut novel, 13 WAYS OF LOOKING AT A FAT GIRL (Penguin), won the Amazon Best First Novel Award, the Colorado Book Award and was shortlisted for the Giller Prize and the Arab American Book Award. It was also long-listed for the Stephen Leacock Award for Humour and the International Dublin Award. Her new novel, BUNNY was released June 11, with Viking Press. I spoke with her by phone, and the call dropped about halfway through the interview. We resumed shortly. It does not do any harm to our conversation.

Erica Ferencik is a Massachusetts-based novelist, screenwriter and stand-up comic. Ferencik was born in Urbana, Illinois and later obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in painting and French from University of Massachusetts and later a Master of Arts in creative writing from Boston University. Ferencik did stand-up comedy for ten years at various comedy clubs in Boston and New York and was also a material writer for David Letterman during the early years of his national late-night show. Her novel, Into the Jungle, is a thriller about an aimless teenager who winds up living in a village in the Bolivian jungle because she has followed a man she loves back to his home. I spoke with her here in our studios.