The monthly newsletter fills you in on our Book Club selections, author interviews, and links to literary news and events. When you sign up for the newsletter now through the end of the year, you can also register to receive a complimentary subscription to Bookforum! Sign up now!

Writer David Rakoff died Thursday at the age of 47. His humorous essays examined a wide range of subjects, from his annoyance at first-world problems to undertaking a 21-day fast to his own bout with cancer. His most recent essay collection, Half Empty, won the 2011 Thurber Prize for American Humor. He was a frequent contributor to This American Life, and the author of the essay collections Don’t Get Too Comfortableand Fraud. He responded to our Guest Picks question “What’s one thing you are a fan of that people might not expect?” with “As someone often seen as hating everything and being immune to pleasure, which isn’t true, I love everything (except sports). I’m just scared of it.” He was on the Leonard Lopate Show a number of times, and was always a generous guest. You can listen to those interviews below.

Seventeen-year-old boxer Claressa Shields won a gold medal in the Olympics Thursday. It’s the first time women have competed in boxing in the Olympics, and it has been her goal to box in London since 2009. Shields was on the Leonard Lopate Show in February, along with her coach Jason Crutchfield and former pro fighter Christy Halbert, and you can listen to that interview here.

Shields and the other women who competed for a chance to fight in the 2012 Olympics were the subject of a radio documentary produced by WNYC’s Marianne McCune. Go For It: Life Lessons From Girl Boxers.

Robert Hughes brought great gusto and eloquence to the craft of art criticism.  The native Australian could be scathing in his opinions, saying the art world had "finally turned into a kind of entropic, institutionalized parody of its old self.”  He just died August 6, at the age of 74. You can hear his interview with Leonard from 2006, when he described his life before, and after, a traumatic car crash in 1999, from which he’d never quite recovered.

Gore Vidal was many things—a writer, social critic, playwright, political candidate, sometime actor, and perennial iconoclast. He was on the Leonard Lopate Show several times. You can listen to two of his more recent conversations below.

John Damani Mahama was on the Lopate Show on July 10 to discuss his memoir and his political rise to become the Vice President of Ghana. Yesterday, following the death of Pres. John Atta Mills, Mr. Mahama was sworn in as Ghana's 4th president.  You can listen to Leonard's conversation with John Dramani Mahama:

Industrial hygienist and environmental health expert Monona Rossol was here last week to talk about the safety concerns about fire retardants. We got a lot of comments and questions during that segment, and Monona has responded with answers.

On March 27 filmmakers Nina Rosenblum and Daniel Allentuck were on the show to talk about their documentary  “Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League’s New York.” Their film is opening in New York tonight at the Quad Cinema, and the filmmakers are doing a Q&A at the 7:00 screening.

Listen to the interview here!

Some choice quotations about bicycles, art, and tattoo care heard on this week's show.

The 2012 Tony Awards were presented on June 10, and you can hear Leonard’s conversations with some of the winners!

A collection of the amazing, profound and funny things we heard on the Lopate Show this week.

Topher Grace really enjoyed making out with Scarlett Johansson in the movie “In Good Company.”

There's going to be a lot of action (drilling for oil, mining, shipping, melting ice) in the Arctic very soon.

Humans have been making cheese for 4,000 years.

This story about Guatemala is amazing. (You should also check out This America Life's episode about it.)

It’s better to get your vitamins from eating a well-balanced diet than to get them from supplements.

When the Pulitzer Prize winners were announced in April, many people were surprised that no fiction award was given this year. The publishing industry is understandably irritated by this decision—or indecision. Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzers for Columbia University, explained that a three-person jury chooses three finalists out of hundreds of books, then sends the finalists to the Pulitzer board, which, this year, was unable to determine a winner. The finalists were Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, published after the author’s death.

Susan Larson, a Pulitzer fiction juror, spoke with NPR’s Lynn Neary about the board’s not picking a winner.

Novelist and bookstore owner Anne Patchett wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times about her disappointment. 

The New York Times asked eight experts to weigh in on who they thought deserved the award this year.

Weigh in: What novels do you think should have won this year? Leave a comment below to let us know!

A collection of the unexpected, somewhat random things we learned on the Lopate Show this week.

The nominations for the 2012 Tony Awards were announced on Tuesday, May 1, and you can hear Leonard's conversations with many of this year’s nominees. (You can find a full list of the nominees here.) The awards will be presented on June 10.

Looking for ways to cut back the amount of garbage you're producing? We have some helpful hints!

Our weekly roundup of the quirky, profound, and unexpected things we heard on the Lopate Show this week.

Documentary filmmaker Ben Anderson  was in our studio Monday where he discussed his takeaway from the front lines in Afghanistan. In his reporting, Anderson shadowed three different battalions of NATO forces over the course of four years. He documented his experiences in his new book, No Worse Enemy, which draws from the more than 300 hours of footage he captured during his time there. Much of that footage was even used in a documentary he produced for HBO in 2010, The Battle For Marjah.

Both documentary and commercial filmmakers have used our ongoing conflicts in a number of feature films released in the last few years: Stop Loss, The Hurt Locker, No End In Sight, In The Valley of Elah, Generation Kill, Green Zone, and Lions for Lambs all centered on the operations in Iraq. But The Battle for Marjah is one of only a few films that focus specifically on Afghanistan (Sebastian Junger and the late Tim Hetherington’s chilling documentary Restrepo is another).

This got me wondering about our relationship with Afghanistan in cinema. Recent films about the Iraq War have largely been box office blanks, even the ones that were well reviewed—Bob Tourtellotte wrote about this on Reuters' Fan Fare blog. Has that kept studios and filmmakers from focusing on the important subject of Afghanistan? Are there films about Afghanistan worth looking into that we’ve missed? Do you think filmmakers will revisit the subject in years to come?

A collection of the touching, funny, and off-beat things we heard on the air this week.