What does Charles Portis’s 1968 novel, True Grit, twice made into a Hollywood western,  have in common with Kay Thompson’s whimsical children's book, Eloise? Here to tell us is Jennifer Belle, the author of five novels, including most recently, Swanna in Love, an indelible, and often very funny portrait of a 14-year-old girl trapped in an artist’s commune in Vermont with her bohemian mother and her mother’s alcoholic lover. Belle is no novice at crafting novels that push readers outside their comfort zone, and heartily defends the right of all novelists to do the same. Here she talks abou ..read more

The author of seven novels and one collection of stories, Curtis Sittenfeld specializes in sharp-witted female protagonists in stories that reflect a Jane Austen-like cunning in using comedy as a vehicle for social observation.  For those who are familiar with her work, it may come as little surprise that Austen’s Pride & Prejudice is among her favorite books.  We also get an all access pass behind the scenes of Saturday Night Live thanks to Tina Fey's bestselling 2011 memoir, Bossypants. It so  happens that SNL and Tina Fey were instrumental in Sittenfeld's most recent nove ..read more

Loss, longing and melancholy dominate the strange and sometimes mordantly funny short stories of Eudora Welty, the writer whose debut 1941 collection, A Curtain of Green is among two books that Ada Zhang has chosen for Shelf Life. The other is William Maxwell's short, taut So Long, See You Tomorrow. Zhang's debut story collection, The Sorrows of Others is a tapestry of first and second generation Chinese immigrants dealing with cultural and geographical dislocation, women on the threshold of adulthood, and intergenerational misunderstanding. Her characters reveal as much about themselves in wh ..read more

Loss, longing and melancholy dominate the strange and sometimes mordantly funny short stories of Eudora Welty, the writer whose debut 1941 collection, A Curtain of Green is among two books that Ada Zhang has chosen for Shelf Life. The other is William Maxwell's short, taut So Long, See You Tomorrow. Zhang's debut story collection, The Sorrow of Others is a gallery of first and second generation Chinese immigrants dealing with cultural and geographical dislocation, women on the threshold of adulthood, and intergenerational misunderstanding. Her characters reveal as much about themselves in what ..read more

When did you first encounter Dylan Baker? Perhaps it was as the brazen wife killer Colin Sweeney in the long-running CBS show, The Good Wife. Or maybe it was the FBI bully-in-chief, J. Edgar Hoover in Ava DuVernay’s civil rights-era movie, Selma. Or was it much longer ago as the monster with the human face, Bill Maplewood in Todd Solendz’s 1998 movie Happiness.  He says, “I went into the business because I really enjoyed exploring dark places in human beings, it was always how I searched out roles.” But if his screen portrayals often show men abusing their power; his book choices for this ..read more

When did you first encounter Dylan Baker? Perhaps it was as the brazen wife killer Colin Sweeney in the long-running CBS show, The Good Wife. Or maybe it was the FBI bully-in-chief, J. Edgar Hoover in Ava DuVernay’s civil rights-era movie, Selma. Or was it much longer ago as the monster with the human face, Bill Maplewood in Todd Solendz’s 1998 movie Happiness.  He says, “I went into the business because I really enjoyed exploring dark places in human beings, it was always how I searched out roles.” But if his screen portrayals often show men abusing their power; his book choices for this ..read more

The bestselling  finance guru-turned-TV star, Ramit Sethi is on a mission to help all of us live what he calls our rich lives, but he's not just another finance bro. The son of Indian immigrants who were too poor to afford restaurants or overseas vacations, he has developed an extraordinary skill in helping people figure out how to spend money on the things that make our lives more enjoyable. One thing that separates Sethi from the crowd? He reads!  His choices for this episode of Shelf Life are Christopher Alexander’s  The Timeless Way of Building, a clarion call to think about ..read more

In the quiet hush of winter, there's a particular inclination to fold into the pages of unexplored narratives. Since Shelf Life paused its pulse last summer, I've wandered through a constellation of worlds chosen by  a new group of celebrated bibliophiles, including the actor Dylan Baker, the finance guru Ramit Sethi,  and new voices in fiction like Ada Zhang and Ben Purkett. Stay tuned to find out what books they think you should read.  ..read more

Each year  Deep Water Literary Festival in Narrowsburg, NY, identifies a unifying theme, often a particular literary work or an author, and builds a program to engage and interrogate the ways in which the theme resonates for contemporary audiences. In 2023 the festival explored the work of British novelist and journalist George Orwell. In this conversation the award-winning novelist, Marlon James, author of Black Leopard, Red Wolf and A Brief History of Seven Killings, and the poet and memoirist Hafizah Augustus Geter, author of The Black Period, parse the meaning and dynamics of dystopia ..read more

The writer and biographer D.J. Taylor on the rich, complicated and too-short life of one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, George Orwell. Almost 75 years after his death we discuss why the author of 1984 matters as much, if not more, than ever. Includes an excerpt of Orwell's "Some Thoughts on the Common Today," read for Shelf Life by Tilda Swinton ..read more