Best Alexander Raul Podcasts (2024)

1
TC BOYLE MONTH: Jackie Brown's Robert Forster performs "Slate Mountain" by T.C. Boyle 47:56

3h ago47:56

47:56

By Step Into the Story...

1
Jennifer Savran Kelly, "Endpapers" (Algonquin Books, 2023) 38:21

3h ago38:21

38:21

It's 2003, and artist Dawn Levit is stuck. A bookbinder who works at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, she spends all day repairing old books but hasn't created anything of her own in years. What's more, although she doesn't have a word for it yet, Dawn is genderqueer, and with a partner who wishes she were a man and a society that wants her to be a …

1
Gina Chung, "Green Frog: Stories" (Vintage, 2024) 36:05

6h ago36:05

36:05

From the author of Sea Change comes Green Frog: Stories (Vintage, 2024) a short story collection that explores Korean American womanhood, bodies, animals, and transformation as a means of survival. Equal parts fantastical--a pair of talking dolls help twins escape a stifling home, a heart boils on the stove as part of an elaborate cure for melancho…

1
TC BOYLE MONTH: Big's Elizabeth Perkins performs "Hands On" by T.C. Boyle / Dear John's Jere Burns performs "La Conchita" by T.C. Boyle 1:02:04

5d ago1:02:04

1:02:04

By Step Into the Story...

1
TC BOYLE MONTH: The Queen's Gambit's John Schwab and Coupling's Sarah Alexander perform "Three Quarters of the Way to Hell" by T.C. Boyle 43:53

9d ago43:53

43:53

By Step Into the Story...

1
TC BOYLE MONTH The Sinner's Bill Pullman performs "Hopes Rise" by T.C. Boyle 47:20

16d ago47:20

47:20

By Step Into the Story...

1
TC BOYLE MONTH: The Diplomat's Miguel Sandoval performs "Sin Dolor" by T.C. Boyle 51:13

23d ago51:13

51:13

By Step Into the Story...

1
TC BOYLE MONTH: Jurassic Park's Jeff Goldblum performs "My Pain Is Worse Than Your Pain" by T.C. Boyle 56:24

28d ago56:24

56:24

By TC BOYLE

1
In The Cosmos Pt. 2 58:23

27d ago58:23

58:23

By Step Into the Story...

1
In The Cosmos Part l featuring an All Star Cast of Actors & Musicians 54:20

23d ago54:20

54:20

By Step Into the Story...

1
The Good Wife's Juliana Margulies & Amexicano's Raul Castillo plus The Walking Dead's Xander Berkeley perform stories by Dan Chaon 57:52

2M ago57:52

57:52

By Step Into the Story...

1
Nell Freudenberger, "The Limits" (Knopf, 2024) 54:39

1M ago54:39

54:39

The most thrilling work yet from the best-selling, prize-winning author of The Newlyweds and Lost and Wanted, a stunning new novel set in French Polynesia and New York City about three characters who undergo massive transformations over the course of a single year. From Mo'orea, a tiny volcanic island off the coast of Tahiti, a French biologist obs…

1
The Good Fight's Michael Boatman performs "Federation for the Like-Minded" by Sidik Fofana 27:28

2M ago27:28

27:28

By Step Into the Story...

1
Bosch's Sarah Clarke performs "Two Step" by Maile Meloy 26:49

1M ago26:49

26:49

By Step Into the Story...

1
Marie Mutsuki Mockett, "The Tree Doctor" (Graywolf Press, 2024) 53:47

2M ago53:47

53:47

When the unnamed narrator of Marie Mutsuki Mockett's stirring second novel returns to Carmel, California, to care for her mother, she finds herself stranded at the outset of the disease. With her husband and children back in Hong Kong, and her Japanese mother steadily declining in a care facility two hours away, she becomes preoccupied with her mot…

1
The Walking Dead's David Morrissey & The Last Kingdom's Ian Hart perform Kevin Barry's Beer Trip to Llandudno 40:18

3M ago40:18

40:18

By Step Into the Story...

1
Scott Alexander Howard, "The Other Valley" (Atria Books, 2024) 41:22

2M ago41:22

41:22

Sixteen-year-old Odile is an awkward, quiet girl vying for a coveted seat on the Conseil. If she earns the position, she'll decide who may cross her town's heavily guarded borders. On the other side, it's the same valley, the same town. Except to the east, the town is twenty years ahead in time. To the west, it's twenty years behind. The towns repe…

1
CSI's Robert David Hall performs "The Pass" by Steve Almond 36:51

3M ago36:51

36:51

By Step Into the Story...

1
Appropriate Behavior's Halley Feiffer performs "Ask For Pain" by Julie Orringer 22:40

2M ago22:40

22:40

By Step Into the Story...

1
Marie-Helene Bertino, "Beautyland" (FSG, 2024) 46:56

3M ago46:56

46:56

At the moment when Voyager 1 is launched into space carrying its famous golden record, a baby of unusual perception is born to a single mother in Philadelphia. Adina Giorno is tiny and jaundiced, but she reaches for warmth and light. As a child, she recognizes that she is different: She possesses knowledge of a faraway planet. The arrival of a fax …

1
Cameron McWhirter and Zusha Elinson, "American Gun: The True Story of the AR-15" (FSG, 2023) 1:08:32

3M ago1:08:32

1:08:32

In the 1950s, an obsessive firearms designer named Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 rifle in a California garage. High-minded and patriotic, Stoner sought to devise a lightweight, easy-to-use weapon that could replace the M1s touted by soldiers in World War II. What he did create was a lethal handheld icon of the American century. In American Gun: …

1
Samantha Harvey, "Orbital" (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023) 56:31

4M ago56:31

56:31

A slender novel of epic power, Orbital (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2023) deftly snapshots one day in the lives of six women and men hurtling through space--not towards the moon or the vast unknown, but around our planet. Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, these astronauts and cosmonauts--f…

1
Julius Taranto, "How I Won a Nobel Prize" (Little, Brown, 2023) 48:40

5M ago48:40

48:40

Helen is one of the brightest minds of her generation: a young physicist on a path to solve high-temperature superconductivity (which could save the planet). When she discovers that her brilliant adviser is involved in a sex scandal, Helen is torn: should she give up on her work with him? Or should she accompany him to a controversial university, f…

1
Raul Palma, "A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens" (Dutton, 2023) 35:33

5M ago35:33

35:33

A genre-bending debut with a fiercely political heart, A Haunting in Hialeah Gardens (Dutton, 2023) explores the weight of the devil's bargain, following the lengths one man will go to for the promise of freedom. Hugo Contreras's world in Miami has shrunk. Since his wife died, Hugo's debt from her medical bills has become insurmountable. He shuffle…

1
Courtney Denelle, "It's Not Nothing" (Santa Fe Writers Project, 2022) 47:52

5M ago47:52

47:52

Rosemary Candwell's past has exploded into her present. Down-and-out and deteriorating, she drifts from anonymous beds and bars in Providence, to a homeless shelter hidden among the hedge-rowed avenues of Newport, and through the revolving door of service jobs and quick-fix psychiatric care, always grasping for hope, for a solution. She's desperate…

1
Mark Ernest Pothier, "Outer Sunset" (U Iowa Press, 2023) 40:56

5M ago40:56

40:56

Jim Finley--a recently retired English teacher living alone on the shifting edge of San Francisco--has been set, unwittingly, on the back porch of life. Trying to harmonize the voices in his head, he sits most days by his stack of "to-do" books until, one day, his daughter comes home with the worst news of her life. Everything changes. As his broke…

1
Rebecca Turkewitz, "Here in the Night" (Black Lawrence Press, 2023) 35:56

5M ago35:56

35:56

The thirteen stories in Rebecca Turkewitz's debut collection, Here in the Night (Black Lawrence Press, 2023), are engrossing, strange, eerie, and emotionally nuanced. With psychological insight and finely crafted prose, Here in the Night investigates the joys and constraints of womanhood, of queerness, and of intimacy. Preoccupied with all manner o…

1
Kyle Dillon Hertz, "The Lookback Window" (Simon and Schuster, 2023) 39:07

5M ago39:07

39:07

Growing up in suburban New York, Dylan lived through the unfathomable: three years as a victim of sex trafficking at the hands of Vincent, a troubled young man who promised to marry Dylan when he turned eighteen. Years later--long after a police investigation that went nowhere, and after the statute of limitations for the crimes perpetrated against…

1
Lexi Freiman, "The Book of Ayn" (Catapult, 2023) 37:39

5M ago37:39

37:39

An original and hilarious satire of both our political culture and those who rage against it, The Book of Ayn (Catapult, 2023) follows a writer from New York to Los Angeles to Lesbos as she searches for artistic and spiritual fulfillment in radical selfishness, altruism, and ego-death. After writing a satirical novel that The New York Times calls c…

1
Eliza Minot. "In the Orchard" (Knopf, 2023) 40:44

5M ago40:44

40:44

A novel about womanhood, modern family, and the interior landscape of maternal life, as seen through the life of a young wife and mother on a single day. At night, Maisie Moore dreams that her life is perfect: the looming mortgages and credit card debt have magically vanished, and she can raise her four children, including newborn Esme, on an undul…

1
Booksellers' Best Books of 2023 50:17

6M ago50:17

50:17

Every year one of my absolute favorite episodes is the Booksellers Best-Of episode for which I get to interview independent bookstore managers, owners, and booksellers about the books that meant the most to them over the course of a year. This year I welcome an exciting new bookseller to the program: Christine Bollow is the Co-Owner and Director of…

1
Bryan Washington, "Family Meal" (Riverhead Books, 2023) 46:43

6M ago46:43

46:43

From the bestselling, award-winning author of Memorial and Lot, an irresistible, intimate novel about two young men, once best friends, whose lives collide again after a loss. Cam is living in Los Angeles and falling apart after the love of his life has died. Kai's ghost won't leave Cam alone; his spectral visits wild, tender, and unexpected. When …

1
Julie Schumacher, "The English Experience" (Doubleday, 2023) 32:21

6M ago32:21

32:21

Today I talked to Jule Schumacher about her new novel The English Experience (Doubleday, 2023). Jason Fitger may be the last faculty member the dean wants for the job, but he's the only professor available to chaperone Payne University's annual "Experience: Abroad" (he has long been on the record objecting to the absurd and gratuitous colon between…

1
Alexandra Chang, "Tomb Sweeping: Stories" (Ecco Press, 2023) 46:00

6M ago46:00

46:00

Compelling and perceptive, Tomb Sweeping (Ecco Press, 2023) probes the loyalties we hold: to relatives, to strangers, and to ourselves. In stories set across the US and Asia, Alexandra Chang immerses us in the lives of immigrant families, grocery store employees, expecting parents, and guileless lab assistants. A woman known only to her neighbors a…

1
Laura Sims, "How Can I Help You" (Putnam, 2023) 46:31

7M ago46:31

46:31

No one knows Margo's real name. Her colleagues and patrons at a small-town public library only know her middle-aged normalcy, congeniality, and charm. They have no reason to suspect that she is, in fact, a former nurse with a trail of countless premature deaths in her wake. She has turned a new page, so to speak, and the library is her sanctuary, a…

1
Mina Seçkin, "The Four Humors" (Catapult, 2022) 46:21

7M ago46:21

46:21

Mina Seçkin's novel The Four Humors (Catapult, 2022) follows a young Turkish-American woman who, rather than grieving her father's untimely death, seeks treatment for a stubborn headache and grows obsessed with a centuries-old theory of medicine. Twenty-year-old Sibel thought she had concrete plans for the summer. She would care for her grandmother…

1
Angie Kim, "Happiness Falls" (Hogarth Press, 2023) 56:42

7M ago56:42

56:42

"We didn't call the police right away." Those are the electric first words of this extraordinary novel about a biracial Korean American family in Virginia whose lives are upended when their beloved father and husband goes missing. Mia, the irreverent, hyperanalytical twenty-year-old daughter, has an explanation for everything--which is why she isn'…

1
Andrew Ridker, "Hope" (Viking, 2023) 58:11

7M ago58:11

58:11

The year is 2013 and the Greenspans are the envy of Brookline, Massachusetts, an idyllic (and idealistic) suburb west of Boston. Scott Greenspan is a successful physician with his own cardiology practice. His wife, Deb, is a pillar of the community who spends her free time helping resettle refugees. Their daughter, Maya, works at a distinguished Ne…

1
Caroline O'Donoghue, "The Rachel Incident" (Knopf, 2023) 1:10:44

8M ago1:10:44

1:10:44

Rachel is a student working at a bookstore when she meets James, and it's love at first sight. Effervescent and insistently heterosexual, James soon invites Rachel to be his roommate and the two begin a friendship that changes the course of both their lives forever. Together, they run riot through the streets of Cork city, trying to maintain a bohe…

1
Hilary Leichter, "Terrace Story" (Ecco, 2023) 41:52

8M ago41:52

41:52

Annie, Edward, and their young daughter, Rose, live in a cramped apartment. One night, without warning, they find a beautiful terrace hidden in their closet. It wasn't there before, and it seems to only appear when their friend Stephanie visits. A city dweller's dream come true! But every extra bit of space has a hidden cost, and the terrace sets o…

1
John Fulton, "The Flounder: Stories" (Blackwater Press, 2023) 48:20

9M ago48:20

48:20

The riddles of desire, youth, old age, poverty, and wealth are laid bare in this radiant collection from a master of the form. From inner-city pawnshops to high-powered law firms, from the desert of California to the coast of France, The Flounder (Blackwater Press, 2023) paints a vivid portrait of how complex and poignant everyday life can be. Told…

1
Katherine Heiny, "Games and Rituals: Stories" (Knopf, 2023) 35:25

9M ago35:25

35:25

Today I talked to Katherine Heiny about Games and Rituals: Stories (Knopf, 2023). The games and rituals performed by Heiny's characters range from mischievous to tender: In "Bridesmaid, Revisited," Marlee, suffering from a laundry and life crisis, wears a massive bridesmaid's dress to work. In "Twist and Shout," Erica's elderly father mistakes his …

1
Nazli Koca, "The Applicant" (Grove Press, 2023) 42:29

10M ago42:29

42:29

It's 2017 and Leyla, a Turkish twenty-something living in Berlin is scrubbing toilets at an Alice in Wonderland-themed hostel after failing her thesis, losing her student visa, and suing her German university in a Kafkaesque attempt to reverse her failure.Increasingly distant from what used to be at arm's reach--writerly ambitions, tight knit frien…

1
Jeff Deutsch, "In Praise of Good Bookstores" (Princeton UP, 2022) 54:15

10M ago54:15

54:15

Do we need bookstores in the twenty-first century? If so, what makes a good one? In Praise of Good Bookstores (Princeton UP, 2022), Jeff Deutsch--the director of Chicago's Seminary Co-op Bookstores, one of the finest bookstores in the world--pays loving tribute to one of our most important and endangered civic institutions. He considers how qualiti…

1
Kate Doyle, "I Meant It Once" (Algonquin Books, 2023) 48:37

10M ago48:37

48:37

With this sharp and witty debut collection, author Kate Doyle captures precisely that time of life when so many young women are caught in between, pre-occupied by nostalgia for past relationships--with friends, roommates, siblings--while trying to move forward into an uncertain future. In "That Is Shocking," a college student relates a darkly funny…

1
Ruth Madievsky, "All-Night Pharmacy" (Catapult, 2023) 46:24

11M ago46:24

46:24

On the night of her high school graduation, a young woman follows her older sister Debbie to Salvation, a Los Angeles bar patronized by energy healers, aspiring actors, and all-around misfits. After the two share a bag of unidentified pills, the evening turns into a haze of sensual and risky interactions--nothing unusual for two sisters bound in an…

1
Victor LaValle, "Lone Women: A Novel" (One World, 2023) 48:18

11M ago48:18

48:18

Adelaide Henry carries an enormous steamer trunk with her wherever she goes. It's locked at all times. Because when the trunk opens, people around Adelaide start to disappear. The year is 1915, and Adelaide is in trouble. Her secret sin killed her parents, forcing her to flee California in a hellfire rush and make her way to Montana as a homesteade…

1
Molly Lynch, "The Forbidden Territory of a Terrifying Woman" (Catapult, 2023) 42:24

11M ago42:24

42:24

Ada--a woman from Montreal living reluctantly in Michigan--vanishes from her bed one night while her husband Danny is asleep beside her, her young son, Gilles, in the next room. Desperate to locate Ada before Gilles understands what has happened, Danny begins a search. But the feds are already involved: across the country and around the world, moth…

1
Tania James, "Loot: A Novel" (Knopf, 2023) 45:35

12M ago45:35

45:35

Abbas is just seventeen years old when his gifts as a woodcarver come to the attention of Tipu Sultan, and he is drawn into service at the palace in order to build a giant tiger automaton for Tipu's sons, a gift to commemorate their return from British captivity. His fate--and the fate of the wooden tiger he helps create--will mirror the vicissitud…

1
Anne Berest, "The Postcard" (Europa Editions, 2023) 54:32

12M ago54:32

54:32

January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest's maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques--all killed at Auschwitz. Fifteen years after the postc…

Podcasts Worth a Listen

Alexander Raul Podcasts

Podcasts Worth a Listen

Quick Reference Guide