Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
Audio
Leonard Zwilling tells Jim Fleming about boxing’s impact on the English language. It’s yielded such words and phrases as fan, throw in the towel, and up to scratch.
Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard discusses his six-volume autobiographical novel, "My Struggle."
You could also listen to an extended interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard.
Mark Jacobson and his wife took their three children on a 90-day trip around the world. They've written a book called "12,000 Miles in the Nick of Time: A Semi-Dysfunctional Family Circumnavigates the Globe."
Joan Didion, who died last week at the age of 87, helped shape a highly personal brand of nonfiction that came to be known as the New Journalism. Her early essay collections "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" (1968) and "The White Album" (1979) influenced generations of writers. Her later memoirs, "The Year of Magical Thinking" and "Blue Nights," chronicled the deaths of her husband and daughter. In 2011 Didion talked with Steve Paulson about illness and growing old in the wake of the death of her daughter, Quintana.
As a child, Michael Ondaatje took a long ocean voyage from Sri Lanka to England. This is the seed of his novel "The Cat's Table." He talks with Jim Fleming about the fine line between fiction and memoir.
Classical pianist Leon Fleisher was sidelined for many years by a medical condition that crippled his right hand.
Celtic historian John Matthews tells Steve Paulson that Merlin probably was a real person and that wizards are related to our ancient shamans.
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