wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

The main character in Roger Rosenblatt's new novel lives in the Hamptons -- the summer playground for New York's insultingly rich. There is no shortage of annoyances to fuel Harry March's rants, but his anger overloads when his neighbor Lapham air conditions the lawn of his super-sized ...

Remember the old Saturday Night Live skit that asked, "What if Eleanor Roosevelt Could Fly?" Sound artist Jane Philbrick asked a question just as unlikely: "What if retired Senator Jesse Helms could recite a lesbian love poem by Gertrude Stein?" Andrew Adam Newman found out how Philbrick's quixotic project ...

Much of the hand-wringing about violence these days has to do with TV, movies, and video games. But Chuck Palahniuk tells Kurt that books can sometimes be the best medium for vicarious head bashing. Palahniuk reads a bit from his new book Haunted. And he breaks the ...

LeRoy's novels drew heavily on his own grim past as a drug abuser and teenage truckstop prostitute. He achieved critical success and rare literary stardom -- until it turned out he didn't exist. Kurt trades tales with Simon Dumenco, a magazine editor who knew "him" (in person, ...

Kurt discusses fraud novelists with Simon Dumenco and forged paintings with Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum. Hoving was the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York for 10 years. An international authority on art fraud, he's the author ...

In Cambridge, Massachusetts a company called E-ink is close to perfecting a great dream of the computer world -- electronic ink. The firm has developed an incredibly thin portable digital display that really looks like ink on paper. The letters on E-ink's displays change as easily as those on a ...

Kurt and Azar Nafisi talk about how artists around the world view American art and culture. Nafisi is a professor at Johns Hopkins University, and the author of a critical study of Vladimir Nabokov's novels published in Iran. She taught literature in English at the University of Tehran, the Free ...

Benjamin Franklin is widely remembered for his discovery of electricity. But according to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stacy Schiff, his greatest achievement may have been his diplomatic skills in the years immediately after the Declaration of Independence was issued. Franklin persuaded the French government to provide the equivalent of $13 billion ...

Writer Jack Kerouac was best known for his 1957 book On the Road, and the free spirited Beat was nobody’s family man. Jan Kerouac only met her father twice, and as an adult she struggled to understand him. In 1989 Jan heard an archival recording of ...

Frieda Hughes was only two years old when her mother, Sylvia Plath, committed suicide. She was raised by an equally famous poet — her father, Ted Hughes. Frieda herself became a poet, and she has had to jostle with her parents' reputations and 40 years of gossip about their notoriously ...

Howard Zinn, the popular Boston University historian and political activist who had been an early opponent of US involvement in Vietnam, passed away at the age of 87. Leonard interviewed him in March of 2001 for his book on war...

Sen. John McCain spoke with Leonard in September 2000 about his memoir, Faith of My Fathers. He discussed his family's naval background, his time in POW camps, as well as his own presidential ambitions for the 2000 election.

Robert S. McNamara served as the eighth United States Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968, for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. The architect of the ill-fated escalation of American forces during the Vietnam War, McNamara spent his later years publicly disavowing his decisions as "wrong, terribly ...

Caroline Kennedy and Ellen Alderman, co-authors of The Right to Privacy, talk about threats to Americans' right to privacy, and tell stories of individuals who have gone to court to protect their privacy rights.

David Carradine was best known for his role in the television series, "Kung Fu," but he came from a family of actors and appeared in more than 100 films, working with directors like Martin Scorsese and Ingmar Bergman. He also starred in both of Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” films. He ...

Budd Schulberg may be best-known for his Oscar-winning screenplay for "On the Waterfront," but he wrote many short stories and novels, collaborated with F. Scott Fitzgerald, helped to arrest Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl, and named names to the House Un-American Activities Committee. He died earlier this week at the age ...