The Show
Christy Cashman and Debbie DiMasi host a no holds barred conversation with amazing authors about their books. Joined by a diverse group of special guests, they get to the heart of the story unveiling loads of insight into the characters, the story line and the writing process.
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More than 12 additional minutes of web exclusive content we couldn't fit into our television interview with Hannah Tinti, author of The Good Thief.
Before there was The Open Book Club, there was Books and Blues
Production shots from the taping of Open Book Club episodes.
Before there was The Open Book Club, there was Books and Blues
Production shots from the taping of Open Book Club episodes.
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Featured Episode:
The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III
A relentless, raw, searing, passionate, page-turning narrative, a big-hearted and painful novel about sex and parenthood and honor and masculinity. Set in the seamy underside of American life at the moment before the world changed, it juxtaposes lust for domination with hunger for connection, sexual violence with family love.It seizes the reader by the throat with the same psychological tension, depth, and realism that characterized Andre Dubus’s #1 bestseller, House of Sand and Fog—and an even greater sense of the dark and anguished places in the human heart.
Previous Episodes:
The Senator's Wife
Once again Sue Miller takes us deep into the private lives of women with this mesmerizing portrait of two marriages exposed in all their shame and imperfection, and in their obdurate, unyielding love. The author of the iconic The Good Mother and the best-selling While I Was Gone brings her marvelous gifts to a powerful story of two unconventional women who unexpectedly change each other’s lives.
Bridge of Sighs
Bridge of Sighs is classic Russo, coursing with small-town rhythms and the claims of family, yet it is brilliantly enlarged by an expatriate whose motivations and experiences—often contrary, sometimes not—prove every bit as mesmerizing as they resonate through these richly different lives. Here is a town, as well as a world, defined by magnificent and nearly devastating contradictions.
The Good Thief
Twelve year-old Ren is missing his left hand. How it was lost is a mystery that Ren has been trying to solve for his entire life, as well as who his parents are, and why he was abandoned as an infant at Saint Anthony's Orphanage for boys. Richly imagined, gothically spooky, and replete with the ingenious storytelling ability of a born novelist, The Good Thief introduces one of the most appealing young heroes in contemporary fiction and ratifies Hannah Tinti as one of our most exciting new talents.
The Condition
The Condition tells the story of the McKotches, a proper New England family that comes apart during one fateful summer. Compassionate yet unflinchingly honest, witty and almost painfully astute, The Condition explores the power of family mythologies, the self-delusions, denials, and inescapable truths that forever bind fathers and mothers and siblings.
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love.
Power Play by Joseph Finder
It was the perfect retreat for a troubled company. No cell phones. No BlackBerrys. No cars. Just a luxurious, remote lodge surrounded by thousands of miles of wilderness.
The Given Day by Dennis Lehane
Set in Boston at the end of the First World War, New York Times bestselling author Dennis Lehane's long-awaited eighth novel unflinchingly captures the political and social unrest of a nation caught at the crossroads between past and future.
The Garden of Last Days by Andre Dubus III
One early September night in Florida, a stripper brings her daughter to work. April’s usual babysitter is in the hospital, so she decides it’s best to have her three-year-old daughter close by, watching children’s videos in the office, while she works.
The Family Man by Elinor Lipman
Henry is a courtly lawyer, gay, successful, lonely. Thalia is now 29, an actress-hopeful, estranged from her newly widowed crackpot mother—Denise, Henry's ex. She agrees to pose as the girlfriend of an unsavory actor who is forlornly down on his romantic luck. When Thalia and her complicated social life move into the basement of Henry's Upper West Side townhouse,she finds a champion in her long-lost father, and he finds peace in the commotion.
