Ayad Akhtar: Finding a Voice to Address the American 'Us'
In this episode of Beyond the Page, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with Ayad Akhtar, the new president of PEN America and author of Homeland Elegies, about the uncanny experience of writing his late...
14 Sep 202048min
Susan Orlean: On the Eccentric Nature of Curiosity
In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with SUSAN ORLEAN, longtime New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author of The Library Book and The Orchid Thief, about librarie...
20 Aug 202030min
The Red Daughter: The Remarkable Life of Stalin’s Daughter
In his sixth novel, The Red Daughter, novelist (and regular Beyond the Page host, JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ imaginatively inhabits the life of Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926 – 2011), the only daughter of Josep...
30 Juli 202041min
Roger Wilkins: “Bearing Witness”
In 2002, the late civil rights champion Roger Wilkins gave one of the most memorable talks ever given at the Writers’ Conference. Roger’s great grandfather was a slave. Two generations later, Roger’s...
20 Juli 202027min
George Packer: How Do We Wrap Our Arms Around America?
As the country reeled under the weight of one shock after another—first the pandemic, then levels of mass unemployment not seen since the Great Depression, and most recently an unprecedented wave of p...
15 Juni 202035min
Alexander Maksik on Caring For an Ill and Aging Parent From a Distance
What happens, what emotional threads get pulled when halfway around the globe a father gets sick from Covid? In an evocative personal essay for The New Yorker, My Father's Voice from Paris, novelist A...
30 Maj 202032min
The End of Secrets: Family History in the Age of Bio-Ethics
In the spring of 2016, author DANI SHAPIRO received the stunning news through a genealogy website that her father was not her biological father. Her memoir, Inheritance, captures her urgent quest to ...
23 Apr 202042min
Frank McCourt: The Underlying Story
In 1996, (a 66-year-old) retired New York City public school teacher named Frank McCourt published his first book, a memoir about his brutally impoverished Irish Catholic childhood in the slums of Lim...
17 Mars 202024min
