Each week on The Book Show, host Joe Donahue interviews authors about their books, their lives and their craft. It is a celebration of both reading and writers. Joe holds interesting conversations with a variety of authors including Malcolm Gladwell, Lawrence Wright, and Emily St. John Mandel.
As the son of a librarian, Joe has been part of the book world since childhood. His first job was as a library assistant, during college he was a clerk at an independent book store and for the past 25 years he has been interviewing authors about their books on the radio.
He is also the host of The Roundtable on WAMC Northeast Public Radio, a 3-hour general interest talk show. Notable authors he has interviewed include: Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, John Updike, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Arthur Miller, Stephen King, Amy Tan, Anne Rice, Philip Roth, E.L Doctorow, Richard Russo, David Sedaris and Maya Angelou.
Joe has won several awards for his interviews, including honors from the Associated Press, the Edward R. Murrow Awards, the New York State Association of Broadcasters, The Headliners, The National Press Club and the Scripps-Howard Foundation.
E-mail The Book Show.
-
Tayari Jones’s fiction, including her previous novel, ‘An American Marriage,’ confronts the deepest questions of love, identity and belonging with a rare combination of lyrical grace and moral clarity. Her new novel, ‘Kin,’ is tale of two girls born in the segregated South and how they journey from home and back. -
Best-Selling Author Anna Quindlen’s latest novel, ‘More Than Enough,’ centers on Polly Goodman, a high-school English teacher whose closest confidants are the women in her book club. When the group jokingly gives Polly a DNA ancestry test, the results uncover an unexpected family connection that raises new questions about her past. -
Bestselling author Emma Donoghue’s new novel, “The Paris Express,” brings us to Autumn, 1895. Paris is as chaotic as it is glamorous, with industry and invention creating huge wealth and terrible poverty. One morning, an anarchist boards the ill-fated Granville-to-Paris express train, determined to make her mark on history. -
Allegra Goodman has long been a novelist of conscience and close observation, attentive to the ways ordinary lives are shaped by faith, class, intellect, and love. Her latest novel, 'This Is Not About Us,' turns her gaze toward a group bound by shared beginnings and tested by adulthood. -
Lauren Groff has long been one of the most daring and emotionally precise writers working today. Her new collection, ‘Brawler,’ returns her to the short story with a set of fierce, searching narratives about people pushed to their limits. -
C.J. Box has carved out a singular place in contemporary American fiction, blending mystery and the mythic landscapes of the West with characters rooted in moral complexity. His latest novel ‘The Crossroads,’ game warden Joe Pickett is discovered shot and near death while his family seeks justice. -
Journalist Eugene Robinson has spent decades chronicling American democracy. In his new book, 'Freedom Lost, Freedom Won,' Robinson blends sweeping history with personal narrative, grounding the national struggle for civil rights in his own family’s story. -
Few contemporary writers have examined the inner life with the intensity and candor of Karl Ove Knausgaard. His latest is 'The School of Night.' In it, he interrogates memory, identity, art, and the meaning we try to impose on our lives. -
Hailed by The Booker Prize judges as a 'fierce and philosophical interrogation of human existence,' Charlotte Wood’s 'Stone Yard Devotional' chronicles 'one woman’s inward journey to make sense of the world and her life when conflicts and chaos are abundant in both realms.' -
George Saunders is one of the most original voices in American fiction. His new novel, 'Vigil,' follows Jill 'Doll' Blaine, an afterlife usher summoned to guide an unrepentant oil tycoon toward death. Over one wild night, Saunders confronts power, greed, climate reckoning, and mercy itself.
