Memoirist, composition theorist, and educator Jonathan Alexander joins hosts Eric Newman and Kate Wolf to talk about his new critical memoir "Creep: a Life, a Theory, an Apology." With wit and sharpness, Alexander walks us through the definitional morass that informs our cultural accounts of the "creep" in a wide ranging discussion that shuttles from the Deep South to Hollywood to the White House. Also, author Janet Fitch return to recommend Sergei Dovlatov's The Suitcase: A Novel.
Janet Fitch, author of the legendary novel White Oleander, joins co-hosts Eric Newman and Medaya Ocher to talk about her new work, The Revolutions of Marina M, which tells the story of a young woman poet coming of age in the heady, early days of the October Revolution. Fitch talks about her approach to writing such a sweeping novel, her visits to Russia before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union, how she's able to represent sex so well on the page, and the importance of balancing the utopian dream with mundane reality when writing about, and living through, revolutions.
Also, Author Dan Lopez drops by to recommend Richard Lloyd Parry's Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone, which reflects on humanity's relationship to death and life while telling the story of a small town in Japan that suffered a tremendous loss of life during the March 2011 Tsunami.