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The Avid Reader Show

The Avid Reader Show

Samuel Hankin

The Avid Reader is a podcast for book lovers. Tune in for interviews, recommendations, and insider news from Sam Hankin, host and owner of independent bookstore Wellington Square Bookshop - www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com
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Top 10 The Avid Reader Show Episodes

Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best The Avid Reader Show episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to The Avid Reader Show for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite The Avid Reader Show episode by adding your comments to the episode page.

The Avid Reader Show - Episode 620: Lee Durkee - The Last Taxi Driver
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05/26/21 • 53 min

Hailed by George Saunders as “a true original—a wise and wildly talented writer,” Lee Durkee takes readers on a high-stakes cab ride through an unforgettable shift. Meet Lou—a lapsed novelist, struggling Buddhist, and UFO fan—who drives for a ramshackle taxi company that operates on the outskirts of a north Mississippi college town. With Uber moving into town and his way of life vanishing, his girlfriend moving out, and his archenemy dispatcher suddenly returning to town on the lam, Lou must finish his bedlam shift by aiding and abetting the host of criminal misfits haunting the back seat of his disintegrating Town Car. Lou is forced to decide how much he can take as a driver, and whether keeping his job is worth madness and heartbreak.
Shedding nuts and bolts, The Last Taxi Driver careens through highways and back roads, from Mississippi to Memphis, as Lou becomes increasingly somnambulant and his fares increasingly eccentric. Equal parts Bukowski and Portis, Durkee’s darkly comic novel is a feverish, hilarious, and gritty look at a forgotten America and a man at life’s crossroads.
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The Avid Reader Show - Ducks, Newburyport

Ducks, Newburyport

The Avid Reader Show

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10/28/19 • 46 min

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Lucy Ellman, author of Ducks, Newburyport released is September by Biblioasis (Biblio-aas-iz).
Lucy’s novels include the autobiographical Sweet Desserts, Varying Degrees of Hopelessness and Man Or Mango.
She is a contributor to The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Times Literary Supplement and lots of other prestigious publications.
Later in her career she published Dot In The Universe, Doctors and Nurses and Mimi.
Ducks, Newburyport is her longest and most novel novel, if it is a novel, which is shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.
Welcome Lucy and thanks for joining us today.
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The Avid Reader Show - Episode 579: Interior Chinatown Charles Yu
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12/31/20 • 47 min

Willis Wu doesn’t perceive himself as the protagonist in his own life: he’s merely Generic Asian Man. Sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son, but always he is relegated to a prop. Yet every day, he leaves his tiny room in a Chinatown SRO and enters the Golden Palace restaurant, where Black and White, a procedural cop show, is in perpetual production. He’s a bit player here, too, but he dreams of being Kung Fu Guy—the most respected role that anyone who looks like him can attain. Or is it?
After stumbling into the spotlight, Willis finds himself launched into a wider world than he’s ever known, discovering not only the secret history of Chinatown, but the buried legacy of his own family. Infinitely inventive and deeply personal, exploring the themes of pop culture, assimilation, and immigration—Interior Chinatown is Charles Yu’s most moving, daring, and masterful novel yet.
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A searing and brave memoir that offers a new understanding of suicide as a distinct mental illness.

As the sun lowered in the sky one Friday afternoon in April 2006, acclaimed author Donald Antrim found himself on the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building, afraid for his life. In this moving memoir, Antrim vividly recounts what led him to the roof and what happened after he came back down: two hospitalizations, weeks of fruitless clinical trials, the terror of submitting to ECT—and the saving call from David Foster Wallace that convinced him to try it—as well as years of fitful recovery and setback.

One Friday in April reframes suicide—whether in thought or action—as an illness in its own right, a unique consequence of trauma and personal isolation, rather than the choice of a depressed person. A necessary companion to William Styron’s classic Darkness Visible, this profound, insightful work sheds light on the tragedy and mystery of suicide, offering solace that may save lives.

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The Avid Reader Show - Tommy Orange There There

Tommy Orange There There

The Avid Reader Show

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06/13/18 • 21 min

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Tommy Orange author of There There published just last week by Knopf. Tommy is a recent graduate of the MFA program at The Institute of American Indian Arts. He is a 2014 Macdowell Colony Fellow and a 2016 writing by writers fellow. He is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes of Oklahoma.
There There is an ensemble book, in some ways, reminding me of movies like Robert Altman’s Nashville where you have this large cast of characters, seemingly unrelated to the other but as the book progresses their paths begin to cross and they edge closer to each other until the reader recognizes the total connection between each and everyone of them. The most difficult thing about this process is holding each of these people in your head and then clearly see and follow the paths they take. This is what Tommy Orange has accomplished in There There.
This cast of characters, an aspiring documentary filmmaker, a boy who teaches himself traditional Native American dance by watching YouTube, another morbidly obese man lost in his own challenge. Well I guess they’re all lost in their own challenges.
These are just a couple of the twelve, really over twelve characters that propel this book to its final and overwhelming climax.

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The Avid Reader Show - A Mind At Play Soni-Goodman

A Mind At Play Soni-Goodman

The Avid Reader Show

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08/07/17 • 36 min

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guests are Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman.
Jimmy has served as an editor at the New York Observer and the Washington Examiner and as managing editor of the Huffington Post. His work has appeared in Slate, the Atlantic and CNN.
Rob has written for Slate, the Atlantic and his scholarly works have appeared in History of Politcal Thought and the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal.
Together the two have co-authored work appearing in Politico, The Huffington Post and The Atlantic. Their first book, a biography of Cato the younger was titled Rome’s Last Citizen, The Life And Legacy of Cato, Mortal Enemy Of Caesar.
Today we will be talking with them about their latest collaboration A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented The Information Age.
Now the name of Claude Shannon (1916-2001) is not a well known one and is not the man that people generally think of when pondering how we got to--- where we are in our digital age.
But when Shannon was only 21, in a masters thesis he figured out that instead of using mechanical switches, a true computer would make use of electrical ones that would not only control the electrical flow of intelligence or information but would perhaps fake being a real human brain. This may seem like old stuff now but this was written back in 1937 or so, before almost anyone thought of the world in anything but analogies. The way that many of us still do our mental arithmetic or tell time. Here was someone ready to usher us into a digital age, an information age long before there were the tools or the minds able to grasp the concepts that he was propounding.
That alone would be a legacy to remember a man for. But Shannon went on to work during WW II as a cryptographer, meeting and becoming friends with Alan Turing. He did all kinds of other cool stuff including his lifelong interest in jazz, his fascination with juggling and his invention of the ultimate machine. The box we all know of that turns itself off after you turn it on.
Fortunately for us these two guys decided that this was a life worth looking at closely and have given us this biography of a genius, a code breaker, a mathematician and oddball of sorts and most importantly, the father of the age we now find ourselves smack dab in the middle of.
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The Avid Reader Show - Q&A with Alex Gilvarry, author of "Eastman was Here"
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09/05/17 • 0 min

Sam Hankin of the Avid Reader discussed "Eastman was Here" on the Avid Reader radio show. Alex will be appearing at the Wellington Square Bookshop for a reading, Q&A and signing on Monday, September 11th at 7:00pm.
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The Avid Reader Show - By Gaslight Steven

By Gaslight Steven

The Avid Reader Show

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11/04/16 • 41 min

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The Avid Reader Show - Here I Am Jonathan Safran Foer

Here I Am Jonathan Safran Foer

The Avid Reader Show

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05/22/17 • 27 min

Good Afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Jonathan Safran Foer author of Here I Am, published last year but just being released in paperback tomorrow by Picador.
As most of you know Jonathan’s previous works include Everything is Illuminated, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Tree of Codes and his non-fiction work Eating Animals.
The title Here I Am ostensibly refers to Abraham’s response to God when the Lord calls out to him. The Lord tells Abraham--- He said, "Take now your son, your only son, whom you love, Isaac, and go to the land of Mariah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains of which I will tell you."...
Now what does this have to do with a book about Jacob and Julia Bloch, their foundering marriage and their three sons Sam, Max and Benjy, grandfather (Irv) and great-grandfather (Isaac) as they face the possible destruction of Israel and an upcoming bar mitzvah.
It’s the way Abraham responds and it is a gnomon of the Jewish religion and culture. You don’t respond by saying “Hey”, or What’s up, or what do you need or I’ll be there in a minute.
It’s Here I am. For you. All of me. Whatever it is you ask.
It could also mean that Jonathan is telling the reader, and there is an autobiographical tint to the book. Jonathan could be saying, here I am guys. This is me. Not me like this is everything that happened in my life. But here are my brothers, here is my Mom and Dad. Here is my elementary school. Here is my synagogue.
The key is, and it runs through it is that in Judaism, the Judaism of Jonathan and the way I was brought up. There are certain things you don’t question. The unconditional love of a child, the obedience and loyalty to an ancestor, the belief in the preservation and defense of a homeland. And Primarily and you either have it or not, a rock solid, non-resonating core set of beliefs that might make you a bit irritating or humorous but gives you a piece of bedrock on which to stand.
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The Avid Reader Show - Charlie Jane Anders The City In The Middle Of The Night
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03/25/19 • 46 min

Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Today our guest is Charlie Jane Anders, author of this, her new novel, The City In The Middle Of The Night. published in February by Tor. She’s the organizer of the Writers with Drinks series and was a founder of i09, a website about sci fi, science and futurism, Her stories have appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Lightspeed, Tin House and lots of anthologies. Her novel, Six Months, Three Days won a Hugo Award.
The City In The Middle Of The Night explores a land where night and day, miserable and extremely hot and cold nights and days, compete with each other, while a very narrow perimeter allows a scrappy but flawed civilization to claw out an existence, more than subsistence, but less than bucolic.
This, because the planet is rotationally locked with its sun, just as our moon is rotationally locked with our planet, which is why we see only one side of the moon and have no idea what they other side looks like other than the recent Chinese lunar lander.
A mothership has left our dying planet for a generations long trip to this planet, not knowing what will be found there, and as the new residents try to creat a habitable world, the mothership revolves slowly up above, mythologized and revered.
The cold war of two cities on this planet form the loose thread of this novel. Two women, almost lovers, very close friends have a relationship which evolves, as does this “war” over the course of this book. The two protagonist are joined with a panoply of well drawn peripheral friends as each faction tries to achieve control or power over the other.
Added to this story is that of an alien life, misunderstood by some but embraced, literally and figuratively by the hero of our story.
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FAQ

How many episodes does The Avid Reader Show have?

The Avid Reader Show currently has 788 episodes available.

What topics does The Avid Reader Show cover?

The podcast is about Fiction, Reading, Independent, Podcasts, Books and Arts.

What is the most popular episode on The Avid Reader Show?

The episode title 'Episode 620: Lee Durkee - The Last Taxi Driver' is the most popular.

What is the average episode length on The Avid Reader Show?

The average episode length on The Avid Reader Show is 37 minutes.

How often are episodes of The Avid Reader Show released?

Episodes of The Avid Reader Show are typically released every 12 hours.

When was the first episode of The Avid Reader Show?

The first episode of The Avid Reader Show was released on Dec 2, 2010.

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