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.
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“Alphabetical Diaries” by Sheila Heti contains a decade’s worth of thoughts, arranged in alphabetical order. The book is a chronicle of the self, of the fundamentals and idiosyncrasies of human experience, that plays out thrillingly in the space that Heti has staked out between life and art, reality and fiction. -
“The Bee Sting,” a novel by Paul Murray, is about family, fortune, and the struggle to be a good person at the end of the world. -
The winner of the Booker Prize 2023, “Prophet Song” by Paul Lynch, presents a terrifying and shocking vision of a country sliding into authoritarianism and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together. -
Best-selling author of “The Things They Carried,” Tim O’Brien, is on The Book Show this week to discuss his first new novel in two decades. “America Fantastica” is a propulsive caper chock full of O’Brien’s commentary on the state of American politics and culture. -
As a prolific novelist of books for adults and kids, Carl Hiaasen has a subject: Florida. It is his beat. In “Wrecker,” Hiaasen’s new novel for Young Readers, Valdez Jones VIII needs to deal with smugglers, grave robbers, and pooping iguanas -- just as soon as he finishes Zoom school. -
Ann Patchett is the author of nine novels, including “Bel Canto,” “State of Wonder,” “Commonwealth” and “The Dutch House,” a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Her latest, “Tom Lake,” is a meditation on youthful love, married love, and the lives parents have led before their children were born. -
“Day” is the first novel in a decade from Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Cunningham. It’s a family saga set in New York City before and during the COVID-19 pandemic and takes place on three separate days in April, one each in the years 2019-2021. -
CNN anchor and chief Washington correspondent and New York Times best-selling author Jake Tapper’s third thriller, “All the Demons Are Here,” brings readers to the 1970s underground world of cults, celebrities, tabloid journalism, serial killers, disco, and UFOs. -
“Elegy plus comedy is the only way to express how we live in the world today,” says a character in “The Vulnerables,” the ninth novel by National Book Award winner Sigrid Nunez. “The Vulnerables” offers a meditation on our contemporary era, asking how present reality affects the way a person looks back on their past. -
National Book Award-winning author Alice McDermott’s latest, “Absolution,” is the riveting account of women’s lives on the margins of the Vietnam War. American women and wives have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in “Absolution” they take center stage.
