CL Speaks

Karin Slaughter’s been hearing it for years: She writes like a man. Women authors like her don’t get called on the violence in their books nearly as much as men do. And she doesn’t look like someone who traffics casually in blood, guts and guns and the killers who use them.

“I guess I should be like 600 pounds with a beard or something, with lots of leather,” she says, “which would be scary.”

No thanks. Fractured, the second departure from her wildly popular Grant County series, is scary enough. The novel lifts characters from her previous non-Grant County work, Triptych, and drops them into a murder/rape/kidnapping in Atlanta’s tony Ansley Park neighborhood.

Read the rest of this feature

David Lee Simmons speaks with Karin Slaughter - Download

Podcast produced by Alejandro A. Leal - Photo by Allison Rosa

Today’s Air Loaf features Max Arbes chatting with CL’s David Lee Simmons about author Leif Enger who will reading tonight at the Decatur Library.

Air Loaf is broadcast weekdays on 1690 WMLB-AM at approximately 8:10 a.m., 12:20 p.m. and 6:20 p.m.

Download

Today’s Air Loaf features CL’s own Chanté LaGon and Curt Holman chatting about two new memoirs — Augusten Burroughs’ The Wolf at the Table and Rick Bragg’s The Prince of Frogtown.

Air Loaf is broadcast weekdays on 1690 WMLB-AM at approximately 8:10 a.m., 12:20 p.m. and 6:20 p.m.

Download

Today’s Air Loaf features CL’s own Chanté LaGon and David Lee Simmons chatting about the 2008 Summer Guide — dropping today! Check it out for the best 111 things to do this summer.

Air Loaf is broadcast weekdays on 1690 WMLB-AM at approximately 8:10 a.m., 12:20 p.m. and 6:20 p.m.

Download

Brown reads and signs Feasting on Asphalt. $29.50. Thurs., May 8. 7 p.m. Variety Playhouse, 1099 Euclid Ave. 404-681-5123. www.variety-playhouse.com.

Download

Alton Brown is as famous for the visual style that permeates his Food Network show, “Good Eats,” as he is for his manic energy. But what becomes surprisingly apparent in thumbing through the pages of Feasting on Asphalt: The River Run, the book version of his TV road show’s second season, is what a talented wordsmith Brown is. Photographer and former chef Jean Claude Dhien’s photos vividly capture the spirit of a food journey, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s seen Brown’s TV work.

But at some point, you have to put your travels down on paper, and here Brown proves as meticulous with words as he does with recipes.

“I wrote it for myself,” Brown says via cell phone from his latest foray, which he says is somewhere in Mississippi. “With the photography, I wanted to let the people gaze on those photos. But it was also part catharsis. It was a different style for me.”

The writing comes off as part diary-style ranting on the evaporation of family-owned dining establishments and part celebration of what is left. His keen eye for observation serves him well at stops such as Baton Rouge, La.: “Out back, Lionel Key reaches into a burlap bag of dried sassafras leaves and deposits them into the hollowed center of a hunk of cypress stump. The device is as ancient as the matching four-foot pestle, which was passed down to Lionel by his great-uncle, who taught his nephew his craft. That is how to pound filé powder (aka gumbo file), the mystical spice … used to thicken soups and stews alike.”

“We wrote the whole thing from memory, because I found it more meaningful,” Brown says. “I’d read Travels with Charley in Search of America by John Steinbeck … I wanted to hear that sense of grandeur. I wanted to write in a sense that evokes another time period.”

Podcast produced by Alejandro Leal / Photo courtesy Don Chambers/Chamber Studios

Frances Richey worked through the anguish of watching her son go off to war in Iraq the only way she knew how: writing poetry. In The Warrior: A Mother’s Story of a Son at War, the reader discovers a mother’s love and a poet’s vivid imagery.

Download

Sarah Walters is on a quest for love and fulfillment. So the Charleston debutante moves to New York City and struggles through a series of bad relationships in Katie Crouch’s debut novel, Girls in Trucks.

Crouch’s own story isn’t that far removed from her protagonist’s. Crouch is also a Charleston native who’s lived in New York, and admits to making a lot of dating mistakes.

“The book is autobiographical emotionally,” Crouch says over the phone from her San Francisco home. “I sort of took my life and then heightened it, because if I wrote a book about my life it would be pretty dull.”

Read the rest of this feature

Krista Derbecker Gilliam speaks with Katie Crouch

Download

Podcast produced by Alejandro Leal / music provided by the Podshow Music Network.

Baur reads from and signs Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food Mon., April 21, 7:30-9:30 p.m. Borders, 3637 Peachtree Road, Suite C. 404-237-0707. www.farmsanctuary.org.

It’s hard out there for a vegan. And not because vegans or even vegetarians secretly crave the Wendy’s Baconater, but because their values clash with the established status quo.

Stereotypes of wan hippies and crazy-eyed activists undermine the concrete moral and ethical issues behind the animal-rights-based movements. It’s for this reason that the first few sections of vegan and activist Gene Baur’s compelling new book, Farm Sanctuary: Changing Hearts and Minds About Animals and Food, are slightly troublesome. Early on, Baur rightly notes that “we do, all too often, accept something – whether it’s a product, a piece of information, or food – because it taps into superficial desires or familiar habits and assumptions that are neither healthy, smart, nor in our or others’ best interests.”

Read the rest of this feature

Download

Podcast produced by Alejandro Leal / Music for this podcast was provided by the Podsafe Music Network

DAN VEACH is the editor and publisher of The Atlanta Review, and the creator of the nonprofit Poetry Atlanta. He won the Sotheby’s International Poetry Competition in 1982 and has published multiple poems in various journals. April is National Poetry Month and Veach, along with poet Turner Cassity, will give a reading Wed., APRIL 9, at Callanwolde Fine Arts Center. $3-$5. 8:15 p.m. 980 Briarcliff Road. 404-872-5338. www.callanwolde.org.Download

Podcast produced by Alejandro Leal / Music for this podcast was provided by the Podsafe Music Network.

Pearl Cleage will be at Charis Books on Thurs., March 27, for a reading from her sixth novel Seen it All and Done the Rest, a Q&A and signing. Free. 7:30-9 p.m. Charis Books & More, 1189 Euclid Ave. 404-524-0304. charisbooksandmore.com.

Novelist and playwright Pearl Cleage has lived in Atlanta for almost 40 years.

She’s written several plays including A Song for Coretta, which wrapped up last month at 7 Stages, and her first book, What Looks Like Crazy on an Ordinary Day, was an Oprah Book Club pick and best seller. Cleage wrote a column for the Atlanta Tribune for a decade and has contributed to Essence, Ms., Rap Pages, Vibe and Ebony as well.

Download

Podcast produced by Alejandro Leal / Photo by Albert Trotman

The Bellwether Prize is an award that recognizes unpublished literature of social responsibility. Barbara Kingsolver, critically acclaimed author of multiple works including The Poisionwood Bible and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, founded the prize in 2000 and names a winner biennially. The winner receives $25,000 and a book deal with a major publishing house. The most recent recipient, in 2006, was Hillary Jordan, a newcomer to the literary scene with her debut novel, Mudbound, published earlier this month by Algonquin Books.

Read the full feature here

Hillary Jordan reads and signs Mudbound. Free. Mon. March 24. 7:30 p.m. Wordsmiths Books, 141 E. Trinity Place, Decatur. 404-378-7166. www.wordsmithsbooks.com.

Listen as Hillary Jordan speaks with Krista Derbecker Gilliam and reads from Mudbound - Download

Podcast produced by Alejandro Leal / Photo by William Coupon

In Rock On, Kennedy makes the office fun again via describing the strange things going on around him, and inside his own head while working in the music industry.

What were you hoping your book conveyed about the corporate world?

I really attempted to write humorously and with a fair heart about navigating through those little deals with ourselves as we move into adulthood. You start out saying you aren’t going to change and you are going to keep it real. The first job you get you’re like, “OK, I’m going to keep it real but they do want me to wear sweaters and button-up shirts.” It isn’t an easy transition to navigate for any of us coming from an idealist everyday life. You have to figure out how much of yourself do you set aside so you can fit into this corporate structure to succeed. It isn’t an easy thing and I hope I didn’t make it look like anyone who tries seems like a jerk, because I was right there wearing the Prada shoes going, “Yes, I think this makes me look like a sensible adult.”

Read the rest of this feature

Abi Berwager speaks with Dan Kennedy

Download

The Girl Who Stopped Swimming (released this week) opens with Laurel, a thirtysomething wife and mother living a peaceful existence in an upscale gated community, who wakes up one summer evening to find the ghost of her daughter’s best friend, pointing to the pool, where the ghost’s dead body floats in the water. Laurel enlists her estranged actress sister, Thalia, to help her with the aftermath, and what follows is one part mystery, one part ghost story and eight parts family interaction.

Joshilyn Jackson reads and signs The Girl Who Stopped Swimming

Free-$10. Tues., March 4. 6 p.m. Margaret Mitchell House & Museum, 990 Peachtree St. 770-578-3502. www.gwtw.org.

Read the full feature here

Photo by Gilbert King

Download

Podcast produced by Alejandro Leal

Journalist, author, editor and cultural commentator Kurt Andersen has served as editor-in-chief of New York magazine, co-founded Spy magazine, hosts the Peabody Award-winning radio show “Studio 360,” and has written two 600-plus-page novels: Turn of the Century and, now, Heyday. His Heyday tour brings him to the Decatur Library Wednesday, Jan. 16.

The protagonist, Ben Knowles, is obsessed with his romantic, cowboys-and-Indians idea of America. While he’s English, he’s mistaken as an American, often when sweaty, disheveled, hurried or speaking out. What is the message here about America? Certainly, America for a Briton of the upper class, which is what Ben was, is a rougher, more straightforward place where the respectable protocols were not necessarily observed, you know, and that’s why he loved it. The sense that America was in flux and that anything could happen – that all possibilities were still open here – is what attracted Ben to the place and what he loved about it.

Read the rest of the interview

Listen in as Andersen reads from Heyday, and speaks with Debbie Michaud about research for the book - [mp3]

Photo by Thomas Hart Shelby / podcast produced by Alejandro Leal

Adina Fleming speaks with Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer-prize-winning author - download

In the unglamorous world of ancient-book conservation, the Sarajevo Haggadah is a celebrity. A prized gem of medieval Judaica, the Haggadah’s remarkable survival since its creation in the 1400s in Spain, through centuries of war and persecution, makes it a valuable item. A Haggadah, named from the Hebrew root “to tell,” is a traditional Jewish book used at the Passover Seder relating the story of the Jews’ exodus from Egypt.

But the Sarajevo Haggadah is far from traditional, and its existence is shrouded in mystery. Decorated in richly colored illustrations at a time when the Jewish commandment against creating graven images prevented most books from containing any pictures whatsoever, the Haggadah’s illustrations show scenes both intriguing and mystifying to scholars, and what little is known about its history makes its survival both puzzling and amazing.

For author Geraldine Brooks, it was this very mix of the known and the unknown surrounding the Sarajevo Haggadah that inspired her historical novel, People of the Book.

Continue reading “The truth, as she sees it”

Photo by Randi Baird / Podcast produced by Alejandro Leal

At the risk of committing a biblical sin, author A.J. Jacobs would like to boast. “I’m on the cover of an evangelical Christian magazine at the same time as I’m in Playboy and Penthouse!” he declares with pride over the phone from Toronto, where he’s promoting his latest book.

In The Year of Living Biblically: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible (Simon & Schuster), Jacobs chronicles a timely exploration of religion that follows the Esquire senior editor through the ups, downs and quizzical looks of living the ultimate biblical life. Jacobs’ appearance will be one of the highlights of the 16th annual Book Festival of the MJCCA, which kicks off this weekend.

Read the rest of the feature here.

Above right, Jacobs in full quest mode

Adina Flemming speaks with author AJ Jacobs about his lates book - Download.

Photo by Michael Cogliantry/Simon & Schuster
Podcast edited by David Lee Simmons and Alejandro Leal; produced by Alejandro Leal.

Mike Sager’s “literary anthropology” approach to narrative journalism stands on the shoulders of Hunter S. Thompson and Gay Talese. Revenge of the Donut Boys: True Stories of Lust, Fame, Survival and Multiple Personality, a collection of his magazine articles, includes profiles of Ice Cube, Mark Cuban and the Newark, N.J., car thieves of the book’s title.

How did you get your start at the Washington Post? I worked at night and sort of the first few months started taking everything in and then started to freelance. I would come in during the day in my three-piece plaid interview suit left over from college … then I’d go home back to Arlington and change into my T-shirt collection and jeans and come back at night and do the 7-at-night-till-3 shift. It was such a psychological battle that people were saying, “Oh, your brother was here.” … I was doing story after story. [Bob] Woodward was the editor of Metro at the time, so I was constantly up his butt and everyone else’s butt to get in there. I took a tip over the phone and just went and did it myself. And it turned out to be this Senate investigation. I guess that was finally the thing that Woodward could relate to.

Read the full feature here

David Lee Simmons speaks with Sager and the author reads from Revenge of the Donut Boys - Download.

Music for this podcast was provided by the Podsafe Music Network. Podcast produced by Alejandro Leal 

Sugarcane Academy: How a New Orleans Teacher and His Storm-Struck Students Created a School to Remember

Harvest Books

Full disclosure: Tisserand served as my editor at the New Orleans alternative newspaper Gambit Weekly, and we shared the same evacuation “compound” out in southwest Louisiana after Katrina. It is from there that Tisserand began chronicling his efforts and those of his friends to work with popular teacher Paul Reynaud to keep their children educated both in exile and after their return to their flooded city. Tisserand, author of the award-winning The Kingdom of Zydeco, writes with economy and a profound sense of humanity in trying to tell the story through the eyes of parents, children and their teacher.

David Lee Simmons speaks with Michael Tisserand - Download.

Podcast produced by Alejandro Leal