Showing results for "2019" in Art & Literature

A Reese Witherspoon Book Club Pick “I had been so engaged by Ann Patchett’s multifaceted story, so lured in by her confiding voice, that I forgot I was on the job. […] As the best personal essays often do, Patchett’s is a two-way mirror, reflecting both the author and her readers.” —...

Joining us at Audible Studios is former SAS sergeant Chris Ryan. Ryan enrolled in the British Army at the age of 16, where he then passed selection to join the 22 SAS Regiment under ‘B’ squadron. Ryan spent the next seven years of his life serving around the world on covert and overt operations. Ryan was a key member of the infamous Bravo Two Zero SAS patrol in Iraq during the Gulf War. The patrol was compromised and was forced to head towards Syria on foot. Ryan was the only one of the eight-man team to not be captured or killed.

Joining us at Audible Studios is radio presenter, psychologist and journalist Claudia Hammond. She was born in Bedfordshire and began radio presenting at the age of 14 with a request programme on Hospital Radio Bedford. Hammond attended Sussex University and studied applied psychology, and then Surrey University to study for an Msc in health psychology. After university, Hammond began lecturing in psychology and reporting for BBC Radio 5 Live.

Joining us at Audible Studios is Heather Morris, an author whose debut novel, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, was a huge success. Morris grew up in New Zealand and has split her adult life between there and Australia. Morris worked in the Social Work Department at Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne from 1995-2017. During this time, Morris decided to pursue her love of storytelling and enrolled in a professional scriptwriting course. In 2003, her life and career path changed. She was introduced to Lale Sokolov, upon whose story she based The Tattooist of Auschwitz.

Joining us at Audible Studios is British-Irish television and radio presenter Dermot O'Leary. Recently, O'Leary has published the third in his children's books series Toto the Ninja Cat and the Superstar Catastrophe as well as beginning a podcast for Audible Originals, called People Just People, in which he interviews guests he admires to find out how they got to where they are in life.

Joining us at Audible Studios is Louise Doughty, an English fiction and non-fiction writer, a playwright and a journalist. Doughty studied for an MA in Creative Writing. As her writing for newspapers and radio began to garner more attention, she wrote and released her first novel, and hasn't stopped since then. One of her novels, Apple Tree Yard, was adapted into a BBC series under the same name.

Joining us at Audible Studios for a second time is acclaimed historian and best-selling author Alison Weir, who has drawn on a range of sources to produce a startling image of Anna of Kleve: a charming woman loved by all who knew her, even by the King who rejected her. We spoke about Weir's fascination with history and research, the rumours that circulated about Henry VIII’s fourth wife, Anna von Kleve, and which Tudor queen she’d most like to be able to speak to.

Audible Studios welcomes back Dr Julia Shaw to discuss her latest non-fiction book on psychology and the mind - Making Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side. Julia talks about why humans are fascinated with evil, what research she’s done on the topic, how this links with her study of memory, and her personal feelings on the term evil. In Making Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side, Dr Julia Shaw uses psychology, science and philosophy to look at why humans do the evil things they do.

Joining us at Audible Studios for the second time is R. R. Haywood, author of Amazon UK’s number one horror series The Undead, and Washington Post best-selling author of The Undead series and the Extracted trilogy (both of which are Audible best sellers!). He talks to us about the first book in his new trilogy, The Worldship Humility, a science-fiction novel detailing the escapades of a petty thief and an Airlock Operative who accidentally steal a code with information about a new habitable planet.

“The Real Lolita is a tour de force of literary detective work. Not only does it shed new light on the terrifying true saga that influenced Nabokov’s masterpiece, it restores the forgotten victim to our consciousness.” —David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon Vladimir...

Born into the beautiful bedlam of downtown New York in the eighties, iO Tillett Wright came of age at the intersection of punk, poverty, heroin, and art. This was a world of self-invented characters, glamorous superstars, and strung-out sufferers, ground zero of drag and performance art. Still...

Lands of Lost Borders carried me up into a state of openness and excitement I haven’t felt for years. It’s a modern classic."" —Pico Iyer A brilliant, fierce writer makes her debut with this enthralling travelogue and memoir of her journey by bicycle along the Silk Road—an illuminating...

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR New York Times Book Review The New Yorker Entertainment Weekly Time Washington Post San Francisco Chronicle Chicago Tribune Christian Science Monitor Slate St. Louise Post-Dispatch Cleveland Plain Dealer Seattle...

When Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker’s art critic and the leading art writer of his generation, published his eye-opening autobiographical essay, “The Art of Dying,” in December 2019, he reported that he had lung cancer and had been given six months of life. Fortunately, his treatment was showing some improvement, and so, he wrote, “These extra months are a luxury that I hope to have put to good use.”

From CNN’s veteran Chief White House Correspondent Jim Acosta, an explosive, first-hand account of the dangers he faces reporting on the current White House while fighting on the front lines in President Trump’s war on truth. In Mr. Trump’s campaign against what he calls “Fake News,”...

From American master Richard Ford, a memoir: his first work of nonfiction, a stirring narrative of memory and parental love How is it that we come to consider our parents as people with rich and intense lives that include but also exclude us? Richard Ford’s parents—Edna, a feisty, pretty...