Novelist Jane Smiley tells Jim Fleming Dickens had extraordinary energy and vitality, and by writing sympathetically about the poor and working class, he changed English literature forever.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Michael Dirda tells Anne Strainchamps that modern readers of Beowulf owe a great deal to J.R.R. Tolkien.
Jeffrey J. Kripal talks to Steve Paulson about his book, "Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal."
Open relationships are no vestige of the swinging seventies. Although we don't know how many people have opened up, sex-educator Tristan Taormino says that you probably know someone in an open relationships, you just might not know that you know.
Taormino tells Steve Paulson that there are myriad manifestations of "open..."
Historian Maria Rosa Menocal tells Anne Strainchamps about the Golden Age for European Jews when the Moors established an Islamic state in Spain.
There's a big debate among ecologists right now over whether we can have hope in the face of climate change. Science writer Emma Marris says we need it. And it’s not just newspaper headlines and environmental campaigns that need to change, we need to rethink “nature.”
Jan Louter is a Dutch film director. The PBS series Independent Lens just aired his piece “A Sad Flower in the Sand” about novelist John Fante. Fante wrote a 1939 novel called “Ask the Dust” ...
What will extraterrestrial life look like? Paul Davies thinks it might be stranger than you can imagine.
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