Legendary publisher and editor Robert Gottlieb talks with Laurie about his new memoir Avid Reader; reflects on his glory days at Knopf and The New Yorker; and expresses confidence about the state of writing today. Tracy Tynan offers PG Wodehouse as comfort reading for these treacherous times. Tom and Laurie launch a new poetry feature with a reading of WB Yeats The Second Coming.

Laurie is joined by LARB legal editor Don Franzen for a discussion on the two competing California Ballot Initiatives related to the Death Penalty: Proposition 62 that calls for an end to the Death Penalty in the state; and Proposition 66, a confusing pro-Death Penalty measure, that calls for speeding up executions. To provide clarity, Laurie and Don are joined by Stephen Rohde, from Death Penalty Focus, and the legendary former District Attorney of Los Angeles County, Gil Garcetti.

Despina Stratigakos, author of Hitler at Home, joins Laurie and co-host Boris Drayluk for a wide-ranging discussion about how tasteful interior design operated as propaganda in the Third Reich; the powerful woman who was at the heart of that effort, Gerdy Troost; and the lessons we should draw from this tale for our own celebrity-saturated politics. Also, Nicholson Baker returns to explain his mysterious relationship to Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory.

Costume designer and author Tracy Tynan joins Tom and Laurie to talk about her new memoir Wear and Tear: The Threads of My Life. The daughter of a legendary couple from Swinging London in the 60s - theater critic Kenneth Tynan and actress-turned-author Elaine Dundy - Tynan spins tales of a daringly dysfunctional, but beautifully dressed, nuclear family. Also, LARB editor Evan Kindley drops by to recommend a book by (appropriately) the British developmental psychoanalyst DW Winnicott.