Each week on The Book Show, host Joe Donahue interviews authors about their books, their lives and their craft. It is a celebration of both reading and writers. Joe holds interesting conversations with a variety of authors including Malcolm Gladwell, Lawrence Wright, and Emily St. John Mandel.
As the son of a librarian, Joe has been part of the book world since childhood. His first job was as a library assistant, during college he was a clerk at an independent book store and for the past 25 years he has been interviewing authors about their books on the radio.
He is also the host of The Roundtable on WAMC Northeast Public Radio, a 3-hour general interest talk show. Notable authors he has interviewed include: Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, John Updike, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, Arthur Miller, Stephen King, Amy Tan, Anne Rice, Philip Roth, E.L Doctorow, Richard Russo, David Sedaris and Maya Angelou.
Joe has won several awards for his interviews, including honors from the Associated Press, the Edward R. Murrow Awards, the New York State Association of Broadcasters, The Headliners, The National Press Club and the Scripps-Howard Foundation.
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Colum McCann is the New York Times bestselling author of “Let the Great World Spin.” His new novel, “Twist,” tells a propulsive story of rupture and repair in the digital age, delving into a hidden world deep under the ocean. -
Julia Alvarez, bestselling author of “In the Time of the Butterflies” and “How the García Girls Lost Their Accents,” returns with “The Cemetery of Untold Stories” - a novel about storytelling that reminds us that the events of our lives are never truly finished, even at the end. -
Bestselling novelist Allegra Goodman’s latest, “Isola,” is inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine. It is an epic saga about a French noblewoman deserted on an island where her survival depends on the power of her faith and love. -
Hailed by The Booker Prize judges as a “fierce and philosophical interrogation of human existence,” Charlotte Wood’s “Stone Yard Devotional” chronicles “one woman’s inward journey to make sense of the world and her life when conflicts and chaos are abundant in both realms.” -
Private investigator Elvis Cole and his enigmatic partner, Joe Pike, race to find a terrifying, unidentified killer in "The Big Empty," the 20th Elvis Cole novel. Author Robert Crais delivers Cole and Pike's toughest case yet, testing their loyalty to their clients and themselves. -
Scott Turow’s latest novel is “Presumed Guilty” - a sequel to “Presumed Innocent,” the #1 bestseller that redefined the legal thriller and is the basis for Apple TV+’s most-watched drama series ever. The book examines whether the system can ever provide true justice for those who are presumed guilty. -
Adam Ross is the author of the novel, “Mr. Peanut,” which was selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times. It came out in 2010. 2025 brings his next novel, “Playworld,” a big and big-hearted book examining one transformative year in the life of a child actor coming of age in a bygone Manhattan. -
“Alphabetical Diaries” by Sheila Heti contains a decade’s worth of thoughts, arranged in alphabetical order. The book is a chronicle of the self, of the fundamentals and idiosyncrasies of human experience, that plays out thrillingly in the space that Heti has staked out between life and art, reality and fiction. -
Poet Kaveh Akbar joins us to discuss his first novel “Martyr!” which follows Cyrus Shams on a journey of introspection and discovery. Cyrus is a drunk, an addict, and a poet. His obsession with martyrs and dealing with the death of his mother drives him to examine the mysteries of his past. -
Pico Iyer is the acclaimed and bestselling author of more than a dozen books translated into twenty-three languages, most recently “The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise” and “The Art of Stillness.” His latest, “Aflame,” is an exploration of the abiding clarity and calm to be found in quiet retreat.
