The Book Show Each week on The Book Show, host Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina interviews authors about their books, their lives and their craft. Notable guests on the show include Toni Morrison, Mary Gordon, David McCullough, Nathaniel Philbrick, Bill Wyman, Salman Rushdie, Khaled Hosseini and A.S. Byatt. Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina is is the Kathe Tappe Vernon Professor in Biography at Dartmouth College, where she also chairs the English Department. She is the author or editor of seven books of nonfiction which have been widely reviewed, and has appeared numerous times on British radio and television. Her books are Carrington; Black London; Black Victorians/Black Victoriana; Frances Hodgson Burnett: The Unexpected Life of the Author of the Secret Garden; as well as the Norton Critical Edition of The Secret Garden and the forthcoming Annotated Secret Garden, and Mr. and Mrs Prince: How an Extraordinary 18th Century Family Moved out of Slavery and into Legend. She teaches courses on the novel. Gretchen has been hosting The Book Show” since 1997. E-mail The Book Show. Recent and upcoming shows: Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,095 - week of July 13 Elizabeth Garner - Garner's imaginative novel The Ingenious Edgar Jones, a young boy in Victorian Oxford runs afoul of his parents and the law, when no one can understand his technical. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,094 - week of July 6 Eva Hoffman - Hoffman's novel Appassionata follows a women pianist on a European concert tour, where she gets involved with a possibly dangerous Chechen political activist. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,093 - week of June 29 Anita Jain - When Anita Jain hit her thirties and couldn't find a mate, she opted to try for arranged marriage. Her book Marrying Anita chronicles her move to New Delhi in search of a new life. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,092 - week of June 22 Brad Gooch - The fiction of Flannery O'Connor is read even more today than when she was alive. Brad Gooch shows the woman behind stories like "A Good Man is Hard to Find," in his biography Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,091 - week of June 15 Kamila Shamsie - Shamsie's novel Burnt Shadows runs from the 1945 bombing of Hiroshima and ends in the early 21st century, seen through the lives of a multicultural family. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,090 - week of June 8 Colm Toibin - Toibin's sixth novel, Brooklyn is set in 1950s Ireland and Brooklyn, New York. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,089 - week of June 1 Arika Okrent - Okrent’s new book In the Land of Invented Languages tells the fascinating and highly entertaining history of man’s enduring quest to build a better language. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,088 - week of May 25 Gregory Maguire - Since Wicked was first published in 1995, millions of readers have discovered Maguire's fantastically encyclopedic Oz, a world filled with characters both familiar and new, darkly conceived and daringly reimagined. In A Lion Among Men, we return to Oz, seen now through the eyes of the Cowardly Lion. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,087 - week of May 18 Patricia T. O'Conner - Think you know the English language? Patricia T. O'Conner may surprise you when she talks about informative and witty book Origins of the Specious: Myths and Misconceptions of the English Language, co-authored with her husband Stewart Kellerman. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,086 - week of May 11 Elinor Lipman - Lipman's ninth novel, The Family Man, has just been published. Henry Archer is a gay man whose life changes when he receives a call from his ex-wife and reunites with the adopted daughter he lost 25 years earlier. Critics call it "a delightful Manhattan romp." Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,085 - week of May 4 Geoff Dyer - Both Venice, Italy and Varanasi, India figure in Geoff Dyer's new novel about the loss and discovery of self in Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,084 - week of April 27 Marlon James - James explores slavery on a Jamaican plantation at the end of the eighteenth century in his new novel The Book of Night Women. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,083 - week of April 20 Maeve Binchy - Binchy's latest novel, Heart and Soul, is set in a cardiac care clinic in Dublin. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,082 - week of April 13 Germaine Greer - Greer's new book, Shakespeare's Wife, is a fascinating exploration of the reasons critics have long misunderstood Ann Hathaway and her relationship to her husband, William Shakespeare. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,081 - week of April 6 Annie Gauger - An instant bestseller on its initial publication in 1908, The Wind in the Willows has become one of the greatest books in children’s literature. Scholar Annie Gauger has uncovered extraordinary new material on Kenneth Grahame, his troubled family life, and the origins of the story. With a stirring introduction by Brian Jacques, The Annotated Wind in the Willows promises to become the authoritative edition of this classic work, published just in time to honor the author’s 150th birthday. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,080 - week of March 30 Robert Goolrick - Set in a small Wisconsin farming and manufacturing town still crumbling a decade after the depression of the 1890s, A Reliable Wife tells the story of a wealthy businessman who advertises for “a reliable wife” in newspapers across America. Filled with remarkable characters and drenched with colour and atmosphere, A Reliable Wife is a story of love and madness, longing and murder, played out in a world that seems to have gone temporarily off its axis. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,079 - week of March 23 Matthew Pearl - With The Last Dickens, Matthew Pearl reopens one of literary history’s greatest mysteries in his most enthralling novel yet, a tale filled with the dazzling twists and turns, the unerring period details, and the meticulous research that thrilled readers of bestsellers The Dante Club and The Poe Shadow. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,078 - week of March 16 Martha Sandweiss - In the Gilded Age, a celebrated geologist named Clarence King ran in the highest social circles in Manhattan, Newport, and Europe. What people didn't know was that he had a black wife and children hidden away in Brooklyn. Martha Sandweiss talks about her book Passing Strange. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,077 - week of March 9 Jeffrey Lent - Lent's latest novel, After You've Gone, takes place in upstate New York, Nova Scotia, and Amsterdam shortly after the end of World War I. When Henry Dorn's wife and adult son die suddenly in a car accident, he suddenly moves to Amsterdam, unexpectedly finding new love. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,076 - week of March 2 David Hajdu - The history of comic books in America took a dark turn in the 1940s and 50s, with lurid topics, Congressional hearings, and book burnings. David Hajdu talks about his book "The Ten-Cent Plague." Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,075 - week of February 23 Nancy Atherton - Aunt Dimity Slays the Dragon is the fourteenth book in Atherton's bestselling "Aunt Dimity" mystery series. Her first book, Aunt Dimity’s Death, was voted one of the Century’s 100 Favorite Mysteries by the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,074 - week of February 16 Alison Weir - Katherine Swynford, lover and later wife to John of Gaunt, became one of the most important figures in medieval England--subsequent monarchs and six American presidents are descended from her. Alison Weir discusses her new book, Mistress of the Monarchy. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,073 - week of February 9 T.C. Boyle - Boyle's latest novel, The Women, looks at the life of architect Frank Lloyd Wright through four women who loved him. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,072 - week of February 2 Ha Jin - Ha Jin, whose novels examine China and Chinese in America, looks at immigration and individual aspirations in his new novel, A Free Life. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,071 - week of January 26 Pagan Kennedy - In the 1940s, before hormone replacement and plastic surgery were common, Michael Dillon challenged biology and gender to change from a man to a woman, ushering in modern revolutionary medicine. Pagan Kennedy talks about her book The First Man-Made Man: The Story of Two Sex Changes, One Love Affair, and Twentieth-Century Medical Revolution.. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,070 - week of January 19 Bernardine Evaristo - Evaristo turns history on its head in her new novel Blonde Roots, an imaginative look at slavery and the slave trade in which Europeans are the enslaved and Africans the enslavers.. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,069 - week of January 12 Jeffrey Meyers - It's been 300 years since Samuel Johnson was born, and Jeffrey Meyers takes a new look at the great man of British letters and thought in his biography Samuel Johnson: The Struggle. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,068 - week of January 5 Philip Roth - Roth's novel, Exit Ghost follows 71-year-old novelist Nathan Zuckerman when he leaves his Berkshire retreat for a week in Manhattan, and encounters old friends and new desires.(Replay of show #1008, Air Date: 11/13/07) Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,067 - week of December 29 Kate Maloy - In Maloy's novel Every Last Cuckoo, a woman in her mid-seventies loses her husband, and finds that her farmhouse becomes a have for the lost, unhappy, and needy. Support WAMC with your Amazon.com purchase of this book. Click image. Show #1,066 - week of December 22 Jenna Woginrich - At the tender age of 21, Woginrich decided to become a homesteader--all while working full time. She talks about her book Made from Scratch. Listen to Recent Book Shows