Check out the next Book Babes radio show today (January 16) at 11:30 a.m., airing on WMNF-FM 88.5 in Tampa. The program also streams on the Internet at that time at www.wmnf.org.
If you miss the live show, no worries. All the programs are now being archived on the WMNF site as -- although it's still a bit of a slog to find them (we're working on that): Click On Demand at the left of the Home Page, then Archives, then Public Affairs (just below Alan Watts on the schedule grid) then The Book Babes and finally scroll down to the archives. Thanks for being patient!
On the January 16 program, The Book Babes discuss the news of Tom Wolfe's latest book and give some juicy book recommendations: "The Sound of Language: A Novel" by Amulya Malladi, an original trade paperback from Ballantine (Margo's pick) and "Once Upon a Quinceanera," by Julia Alvarez, out from Viking (Ellen's pick).
In the show's final segment, Margo talks to Ellen when she's in San Francisco participating in the first ever West Coast board meeting of the National Book Critics Circle (first ever out-side-of-New-York board meeting, in fact). The NBCC board gathered to pick the finalists for its annual awards. Ellen, chair of the Autobiography committee, talks about two books -- two very different diaries -- she was backing in that category: "The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982," by Joyce Carol Oates (Ecco) and "Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin's Russia," Anna Politkovskaya (Random House). As you can see below, both made the final cut. So did Alvarez's "Once Upon a Quinceanera." So, Ellen was three for three.
Here is the complete list of the NBCC finalists:
AUTOBIOGRAPHY
Joshua Clark: "Heart Like Water: Surviving Katrina and Life in Its Disaster Zone" (Free Press)
Edwidge Danticat: "Brother, I'm Dying" (Knopf)
Joyce Carol Oates: "The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, 1973–1982" (Ecco)
Sara Paretsky: "Writing in an Age of Silence" (Verso)
Anna Politkovskaya: "Russian Diary: A Journalist's Final Account of Life, Corruption and Death in Putin's Russia" (Random House)
NONFICTION
Philip Gura: "American Transcendentalism" (Hill & Wang)
Daniel Walker Howe: "What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America 1815-1848" (Oxford University Press)
Harriet Washington: "Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present" (Doubleday)
Tim Weiner: "Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA" (Doubleday)
Alan Weisman: "The World Without Us" (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s)
FICTION
Vikram Chandra: "Sacred Games" (HarperCollins)
Junot Diaz: "The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao" (Riverhead)
Hisham Matar: "In The Country of Men (Dial Press)
Joyce Carol Oates: "The Gravediggers Daughter" (Ecco)
Marianne Wiggins: "The Shadow Catcher" (Simon & Schuster)
BIOGRAPHY
Tim Jeal, Stanley: "The Impossible Life Of Africa’s Greatest Explorer" (Yale University Press)
Hermione Lee: "Edith Wharton" (Knopf)
Arnold Rampersad: "Ralph Ellison" (Knopf)
John Richardson: "The Life Of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932" (Knopf)
Claire Tomalin: "Thomas Hardy" (Penguin Press)
POETRY
Mary Jo Bang: "Elegy" (Graywolf)
Matthea Harvey: "Modern Life" (Graywolf)
Michael O'Brien: "Sleeping and Waking" (Flood)
Tom Pickard: "The Ballad of Jamie Allan" (Flood)
Tadeusz Rozewicz: "New Poems" (Archipelago)
CRITICISM
Acocella, Joan: "Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints" (Pantheon)
Alvarez, Julia: "Once Upon a Quniceanera" (Viking)
Faludi, Susan: "The Terror Dream" (Metropolitan/Holt)
Ratliff, Ben: "Coltrane: The Story of a Sound" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
Ross, Alex: "The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century" (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
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