Paul Auster is both a film-maker and a novelist. His new book is “The Book of Illusions: A Novel.” It’s about a professor who discovers the work of a silent film comedian.
Intelligent. Optimistic. Curious.
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Nicholas Carr believes the Internet is rewiring the human brain with its instant access to all sorts of information. Are we losing our ability to focus on one thing for any length of time?
Jeremy Denk isn't only a gifted concert pianist; he also has a flair for writing about music. He tells Steve Paulson about a lifetime of studying the art of piano.
Lorrie Moore has a new collection of short stories. She tells Steve Paulson that life is filled with absurdity; ghost stories are great fodder for fiction; and North America now owns the short story.
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.
Poet Lisa Russ Spaar tells Jim about her book “Acquainted with the Night” - an anthology of verse about insomnia, or written by insomniacs.
Kenneth Helphand tells Jim Fleming how a photo of a French soldier tending a rose bush in a trench during WWI resulted in his book.
Food is certainly the most palatable expression of culture, and the most easily shared.
LA Times food critic Jonathan Gold has spent his career seeking out the best plates of authentic – or reinterpreted - culture. In this UNCUT interview, he talks with Anne Strainchamps about food in translation.
It'll get your stomach growling, so have some snacks handy!
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