Books & Authors

Recorded live at the Southwest Florida Reading Festival, this dynamic panel of crime writers features Laura Lippman, Carla Norton and Randy Rawls. We cover research, plotting, and why this genre is considered a "guilty pleasure."

A father is murdered in a brutal home invasion and a daughter's boyfriend is jailed for the crime. Is the daughter also involved? Can family loyalty go too far? This gripping novel explores these and other questions.

A live conversation with author John Benditt about his new novel, THE BOATMAKER, that took place at BookCulture on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. A man builds a boat and sails away from his isolated island to explore the greater world in this fable-like story.

The author of the wildly successful Lemony Snicket children's books takes on an adult tale of 3 teens, a man with Alzheimer's and a nursing home orderly who steal a pirate ship and take to the high seas in San Fransisco Bay ... or so they think. Win a signed copy of this book! Subscribe to this podcast then send a screenshot of your subscription to: cary@bksandauthors.com for your chance to win!

Dinaw Mengestu's novel The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears was the choice for The Big Read, a program where readers in a community read and discuss a particular book together. I had the opportunity to talk with Dinaw about the book, and our community, at the kickoff event.

Only his father’s death could get tough guy James Hart back to his rundown hometown of Crystal Springs, Florida. When he arrives, he learns that he has missed his father’s funeral, but is just in time to get tangled up in his brother’s life of petty, and not so petty, crime. A Tree Born Crooked is the story of James’s return to the life and family he finds he can never really leave.

Alameddine's latest is a National Book Award finalist and exquisite. Aaliyah Sobhi is 72 years old. She lives alone in her Beirut apartment, and occupies herself by translating books into Arabic. Long divorced and childless, she has the freedom to let her formidable intelligence roam into explorations of her beloved city, politics, war, family, and most of all, literature.

Author Cheryl Strayed discusses her memoir, "Wild," and her collection of Dear Sugar columns from The Rumpus, "Tiny Beautiful Things."

In The Remedy for Love, a Maine lawyer runs into an unkempt looking young woman at the grocery store and lends a hand at her spartan cabin in the woods. But a huge snowstorm is on the way and the two of them end up there together, running out of food, water and fuel -- and getting to know each other -- for the duration of the storm.

Electric City tells the story of the rise and fall of a town along the Hudson River where, in 1887, Thomas Edison relocated his Edison Machine Works. The novel shows the changes in the town and the people who live there right up through the 1960s when a major blackout shows some of the holes in the fabric of the manufacturing powerhouse.

Caroline Moorehead's Village of Secrets tells the story of a small French village known as Le Chambon-sur-Lignon. Located in a remote and nearly inaccessible section of eastern France, it served as a sanctuary for Jews and others wanted by the Nazis during World War II. Many of the thousands who were shielded there were children who had been orphaned when their parents were taken to concentration camps.

A Long Island podiatrist stumbles on a bottle of horseradish on a cold Friday night and, in his anger, thoughtlessly chucks it through the window of a local business. That broken window sets of a chain of events, unexpected and hilarious, in the podiatrist’s life that let us see into his disappointments and delights. The author is a long-time writer and executive producer on Seinfeld.

The Radiance of Tomorrow follows residents of a village in Sierra Leone who return to their home after a devastating civil war has wiped out the place, as well as many of their loved ones.

Celeste Ng was at the Morristown Festival of Books talking about her terrific new novel, Everything I Never Told You. The book traces the life of the Lees, an Asian-American family living in 1970s Ohio.

At the Brooklyn Book Festival in September 2014, Jaime Clarke, Andre Dubus III, and Joshua Ferris talked about technology in their latest work and in their own lives.