This Is the Author
658 episodes - English - Latest episode: 3 days ago - ★★★★★ - 20 ratingsA podcast about authors reading their audiobooks from Penguin Random House Audio.
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Episodes
S3 E36: Tyra Banks And Carolyn London, Authors of Perfect Is Boring
April 03, 2018 19:00 - 6 minutes - 8.72 MB"Our book is about so many wonderful things. It’s really about being raw, and real, and not being ashamed to speak the truth, and I get that from my mom. Growing up I could ask her any and everything, whether it be about sex, drugs, dating, relationships—it did not matter! She would answer me honestly." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/561936/perfect-is-boring/
S3 E35: Gayle Forman, Author of I Have Lost My Way
March 27, 2018 16:14 - 9 minutes - 13.6 MB"My book is about three young people: Freya, Harun, and Nathaniel. They are complete strangers who have seemingly nothing in common except for this one key thing, which is that each of them, in their own way, is lost. They collide, literally, in New York's Central Park, and that kicks off a day together where they form this intense friendship and a little bit of romance as they kind of come to understand that maybe the way out of their own loss lies is inhabiting one another’s." Learn more: ...
S3 E34: Anya Yurchyshyn, Author of My Dead Parents
March 27, 2018 16:13 - 2 minutes - 4.01 MB"I wrote MY DEAD PARENTS because after my mother died I was cleaning out her house and found love letters that my parents had exchanged long before my sister and I were born. The letters were so fascinating and totally confusing because the people that my parents were in those letters were so different form the people I knew." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/247514/my-dead-parents/
S3 E33: Mitch Landrieu, Author of In The Shadow Of Statues
March 20, 2018 18:54 - 2 minutes - 2.88 MB"My book is about taking down Confederate monuments in New Orleans, but it’s really about race in America, and particularly in the Deep South. I wrote this book because it was time for the people in the South and the people of America to face the issue of race and be truthful about it." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/575468/in-the-shadow-of-statues/
S3 E32: Jeffrey Kluger, Author of To The Moon!
March 20, 2018 18:50 - 8 minutes - 11.6 MB"This story is the story of the first human beings to go to the Moon. Now we often think of Apollo 11 as the first lunar mission, and of course that was the first mission that landed people on the Moon, but Apollo 8 was the first time human beings broke out of earthly orbit, went into orbit around another world, and, to my way of thinking, effectively became a species of two worlds." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/557389/to-the-moon/
S3 E31: Jon Sciezka, Author of Frank Einstein and the Space Time Zipper
March 13, 2018 16:43 - 5 minutes - 7.26 MB"The whole series was about Frank Einstein, 10-year-old kid genius, who invents the most amazing things. And this last one was the most fun of all because he invented a zipper that could connect different parts of space time. I mean, not easy to do but Frank Einstein, genius, has a way to do it" Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/588767/frank-einstein-and-the-space-time-zipper/
S3 E30: Claire Evans, Author of Broad Band
March 13, 2018 16:37 - 11 minutes - 16.1 MB"My book is about women throughout computing and internet history. It’s really a story of the 20th and 21st century told through anecdotes of women’s experiences interfacing with technology." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/545427/broad-band/
S3 E29: Brian Castner, Author of Disappointment River
March 13, 2018 16:35 - 5 minutes - 7.66 MB"My book is about a man named Alexander Mackenzie and a journey he took in 1789. He was looking for the Northwest Passage and what he actually found was the Arctic Ocean. Alexander Mackenzie has been lost a bit to history, at least in the United States, and I started writing this book when I discovered that Mackenzie was the first European to cross North America, or the first recorded crossing of North America." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/543135/disappointment-r...
S3 E28: Katie Heaney, Author of Would You Rather?
March 09, 2018 18:31 - 3 minutes - 4.55 MB"My book is a memoir of my coming out and entering into my first relationship. It’s sort of a follow-up to my first memoir, which came out four years ago, which was about how I had never had a boyfriend and couldn’t figure out why. And this book is about the years that followed and kind of figuring that all out." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/554715/would-you-rather/
S3 E27: Sarah MacBride, Author of Tomorrow Will Be Different
March 09, 2018 18:29 - 6 minutes - 9.04 MB"My book is about my own journey as a transgender person, as an advocate, and as someone who’s working for equality for LGBTQ people across the country. The story really is about my relationship with my late husband, Andy, who was a transgender man, and it was really through my relationship with Andy that I learned some of my most important lessons in this fight for equality." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/557681/tomorrow-will-be-different/
S3 E26: Nathaniel Philbrick, Author of Second Wind
March 09, 2018 18:27 - 5 minutes - 7.14 MB"My book is called SECOND WIND and it's a memoir of the comeback I tried to do in the Sunfish Class back in 1992-93. And it’s a very personal book because it’s not just about trying to become a Sunfish North American Champion again, it’s about my life on Nantucket as a stay-at-home dad and how I had alienated myself from the sport of sailing that had once meant everything to me." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/558410/second-wind/
S3 E25: Junot Díaz, Author of Islandborn
March 09, 2018 18:26 - 7 minutes - 10.7 MB"ISLANDBORN is about a little girl named Lola who is an immigrant, but she left the island when she was very, very little so she didn’t grow up with any memories of the island. And what happens is she’s one of those girls who’s surrounded by her immigrant community and everybody talks about the island, and everybody reminisces about this place that they left, and she has no memories of it. And she really wants some sort of connection, she wants to remember." Learn more: http://www.penguinran...
S3 E24: Chelsea Clinton, Author of She Persisted Around The World
March 09, 2018 18:23 - 4 minutes - 5.71 MB"It’s about 13 remarkable women who have positively changed the course of history for the better through their contributions in science, in advancing women’s rights, in helping push the boundaries of what we understand about medicine, in giving more beauty to the world and helping more people understand why conservation is all of our responsibilities, and so much more. All 13 of these women deeply inspire me, and I hope that they inspire the girls and boys who will read the book when it comes...
S3 E23: Ian Buruma, Author of A Tokyo Romance
March 02, 2018 17:53 - 4 minutes - 6.31 MB"My book is about my experience of living in Japan as a young man, as a student at a film school in Tokyo in the 1970s. It was a very extraordinary time to be there as a young Westerner who was interested in Japanese film and theater." Learn more about A Tokyo Romance: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/534126/a-tokyo-romance/
S3 E22: Janice Kaplan, Author of How Luck Happens
March 02, 2018 17:52 - 3 minutes - 4.78 MB"My book is called HOW LUCK HAPPENS and it is about how you make luck happen in your life. I started thinking about the topic after I wrote THE GRATITUDE DIARIES and I was inspired to look at other big topics that affect our lives and happiness. It occurred to me that we think of luck as something that just falls from the sky, but as I researched the topic with my co-author, Barnaby Marsh, I realized that we have so much more control over events than we sometimes realize." Learn more about H...
S3 E21: Maria Shriver, Author of I've Been Thinking...
March 02, 2018 17:51 - 3 minutes - 5.11 MB"The story of my book is that I’ve been writing these “I’ve Been Thinking” columns for some time now in my Sunday paper and lots of friends and readers encouraged me to put them together into a book because they seem to help people with their day-to-day life. I’m a big believer in inspiration books that I have by the side of my bed that have helped me in my own life and I know how important books like this are to people if they’re going through rough patches or they’re dealing with something ...
S3 E20: Will Mackin, Author of Bring Out The Dog
March 02, 2018 17:49 - 5 minutes - 8.11 MB"My book is about a SEAL team at war, and someone who wants to belong to that team: someone who wants to be a part of something bigger than himself. He tries to imagine what that is as he’s trying to become that bigger thing." Learn more about Bring Out The Dog: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/232350/bring-out-the-dog/
S3 E19: Amy Kaufman, Author of Bachelor Nation
February 21, 2018 21:33 - 3 minutes - 5.39 MB"I’ve described BACHELOR NATION as a combination of an oral history of the franchise, a cultural analysis of why so many smart feminists are obsessed with the show, and also a lot of juicy, behind-the-scenes tidbits about how the sausage is made."
S3 E18: Robert Reich, Author of The Common Good
February 21, 2018 21:32 - 8 minutes - 12.3 MB"THE COMMON GOOD is about the obligations we owe one another, the duties we owe each other as members of the same society. I wrote THE COMMON GOOD because we’re living in an incredibly stressful and cynical and narcissistic era."
S3 E17: Robin Ryan, Author of Retirement Reinvention
February 21, 2018 21:31 - 3 minutes - 5.22 MB"My book is about retiring and how that whole world is changing for baby boomers. It’s going to be so much different than the way our parents looked at retirement."
S3 E16: Emily Chang, Author of Brotopia
February 13, 2018 16:05 - 3 minutes - 2.89 MB"My book is about the experience of women in Silicon Valley. It is called BROTOPIA: Breaking Up the Boys’ Club of Silicon Valley. It is my first book. And I wrote it because while Silicon Valley is an incredible place that's created incredible things, there is one glaring flaw and that is that women have largely been excluded from the greatest wealth creation in the history of the world. There are very few women building and working at these companies."
S3 E15: Melissa Dahl, Author of Cringeworthy
February 13, 2018 16:04 - 6 minutes - 5.58 MB"My book, CRINGEWORTHY, is a nonfiction book about feelings of embarrassment, self-consciousness, awkwardness, and just generally things that make me cringe. And I wrote it because these are feelings that have driven me insane for most of my life."
S3 E14: Kate Bowler, Author of Everything Happens For A Reason
February 06, 2018 15:26 - 5 minutes - 5.05 MB"My book is about trying to figure out my own prosperity gospel. I thought I was an expert in this movement called the American Prosperity Gospel, which has millions of believers who think that God will give them health and wealth and all manner of good things in response to their own righteousness. And so I wrote an academic book about it and thought myself to be quite the careful and distant observer of it."
S3 E13: Danny Wallace, Author of F You Very Much
February 06, 2018 15:24 - 6 minutes - 6.16 MB"My book is about rudeness. It’s about the world getting ruder...from social media to television to impatience in politics. And it’s been happening more and more in Britain and it’s been happening a lot more in America. It just seems like we treat each other in a much worse way than we used to."
S3 E12: Laura Smith, Author of The Art Of Vanishing
February 06, 2018 15:23 - 5 minutes - 5.16 MB"My book is about my search for Barbara Newhall Follett, the child prodigy and adventurer who vanished in 1939. But it’s also about my marriage and my quest for independence but also stability. And I think that a lot of things about Barbara’s life really resonated with me."
S3 E11: Hilary Jacob Hendel, Author of It's Not Always Depression
February 06, 2018 15:21 - 4 minutes - 4.55 MB"I was inspired to write from the first time that I encountered this change triangle at an academic conference. I had spent my whole life studying psychology and biology, and what makes people move and grow and tick, and I had never learned any of this information on emotions before."
S3 E10: Katie Hurley, Author of No More Mean Girls
February 01, 2018 15:37 - 10 minutes - 9.19 MB"My book is about raising confident and compassionate girls. I’ve been working with girls in therapy and in groups for almost 20 years now and I’ve seen a lot of changes in girlhood. One thing that I started to notice about 10 years ago was that the mean girl phenomenon seemed to be starting younger and younger."
S3 E09: Shawn Achor, Author of Big Potential
February 01, 2018 15:36 - 11 minutes - 10.1 MB"I started to realize that if happiness was all about just you, there’s this invisible cap that occurs in terms of your happiness where we can’t seem to sustain the growth or continue its growth up even higher. So we started to think a little bit differently about happiness. And the conclusion I came to, which is the reason I wrote BIG POTENTIAL, is that I think that happiness, while it is an individual choice, is not just a personal choice; it’s also an interconnected one."
S3 E08: Mike Steib, Author of The Career Manifesto
February 01, 2018 15:34 - 3 minutes - 3.57 MB"My book is an inspiring, research-driven, field-tested guide to creating an extraordinary career and meaningful life. It’s based on over a decade of study and practice, and offers actionable steps to becoming more purposeful, productive, and effective in all areas of your work. And it’s really fun."
S3 E07: Daniel J. Siegel And Tina Payne Bryson, authors of The Yes Brain
January 23, 2018 21:28 - 7 minutes - 7.14 MB"Our book is about what parents and other caregivers can do in their interactions with their kids that actually develop a more integrated brain that creates a receptive state for learning and keeping the inner spark of your child alive and well."
S3 E06: Light Watkins, author of Bliss More
January 23, 2018 19:43 - 7 minutes - 6.63 MB"My book is about how to approach meditation as a layperson. A lot of times when we think about meditation we normally associate it with this sort of monastic type of activity. I learned how to meditate with this person 15 years ago who really changed my life and changed my understanding of the practice and I wanted to share those principles with other people who were like me, who were struggling to meditate, people who had a lot of questions around the practice. In order to give them answers...
S3 E05: Thomas Pierce, Author of The Afterlives
January 09, 2018 15:42 - 5 minutes - 5.35 MB"My book is about loss and impermanence, death but most essentially, love; it’s a love story. It’s about a young man named Jim Bird, who at the beginning of the book, dies, technically for just a few minutes, and returns with no memory of any lights, or angels or tunnels, or anything exciting like that. Anything that indicates there might be something waiting for him on the other side, or waiting for any of us for that matter. And coming back with that knowledge spurs an investigation of sort...
S3 E04: Matt De La Peña, Author of Love
January 09, 2018 15:39 - 3 minutes - 3.34 MB"When you’re young, love is given to you if you’re lucky enough to have at least one caring parent or caretaker, but over the course of a child’s life, I think the idea of love evolves. I was trying to explore that. And I think at some point there’s always going to be a fall from grace and I wanted to see how does a kid go from realizing their initial perception of love doesn’t fit with the real world and it has to be something bigger and greater, something they seek on their own."
S3 E03: Daniel Pink, Author of When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing
January 09, 2018 15:37 - 3 minutes - 3.29 MB"I wrote this book because I wanted to read it. A couple of years ago I realized I was making all kinds of “When” decisions in my life. Everything from “when” to exercise during the day to “when” to do certain kinds of work, to “when” to abandon a project. And I realized I was making those decisions in a pretty haphazard way."
S3 E02: Gary Noesner, Author of Stalling For Time
January 02, 2018 21:43 - 3 minutes - 3.52 MB"The book’s about my career as a negotiator in responding to a wide range of hostage barricade and suicide incidents -- covering prison rides, right-wing malicious stand-offs, religious zealot sieges, terrorist embassy takeovers, airplane hijackings, and the kidnapping of American citizens abroad."
S3 E01: Mark Epstein, Author of Advice Not Given
December 19, 2017 18:19 - 6 minutes - 6.16 MB"In this New Year, you might want to try meditation. Some of you may have wondered about the benefits, stress reduction, lowering of anxiety, helping you cope more efficiently, be less frustrated, less addicted in your behavior. The most important thing from the beginning is not to turn it into another self-improvement project. Meditation can be useful if you don’t expect too much from it. So let me guide you a little bit into the way I think about it."
S2 E79: Dan Harris, Author of Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics
December 19, 2017 14:35 - 4 minutes - 4.32 MB"Our book is about...well the short answer is our book is about meditation. The slightly longer answer is our book is for people who think meditation is not for them or that they could never do it. I had written a previous book called 10% HAPPIER which was all about how I, as a skeptical news man, stumbled upon meditation and how it made a significant difference in my life. I assumed, kind of naively, that when I wrote my book and explained all of my reasons for meditating, including the fact...
S2 E78: Lawrence O'Donnell, Author of Playing With Fire
November 07, 2017 18:23 - 12 minutes - 12.8 MB"PLAYING WITH FIRE is set in the 1968 presidential campaign, but the book is about nothing less than life and death, because that's what was at stake in the 1968 presidential campaign."
S2 E77: Juli Berwald, Author of Spineless
November 07, 2017 18:22 - 6 minutes - 6.1 MB"My book is called SPINELESS, and I named it that because it’s about jellyfish, and jellyfish are indeed, spineless. And it’s that very spinelessness that’s given them the ability to proliferate in today’s oceans. But it’s not just about jellyfish, it’s also about me growing my spine as a writer, a middle-aged woman, in a land-locked Austin, Texas."
S2 E76: Khizr Khan, Author of American Family
October 24, 2017 14:21 - 9 minutes - 9.35 MB"I wrote this book, AN AMERICAN FAMILY, to tell the story of my family’s immigration to the United States. But behind all this, the American values that inspired me to decide to come to the United States and then make it a home."
S2 E75: Emma Johnson, Author of The Kickass Single Mom
October 17, 2017 20:22 - 6 minutes - 6.22 MB"I had been working in the single-mom space through my blog and podcast, and speaking and media engagements, for more than five years. I was raised by a single mom, I became a single mom, and I had a lot of initial shame around being a single mom. And, you know what? It happens to suit me really well. And I found myself relaxing into this time that I’m in and finding all these women—there’s ten million single moms in our country, millions worldwide, and these women have nothing to be ashamed ...
S2 E74: Kristen Hadeed, Author of Permission to Screw Up
October 10, 2017 20:47 - 4 minutes - 4.04 MB"My book is about how I learned to be a leader and how I built my company. I wrote it because when I started I would spend every Friday night in the bookstore, reading about CEOs and successful organizations, so that I could learn from them. And I found wonderful stories and amazing stories of success, but I always left wondering how they did it."
S2 E73: Roger Hodge, Author of Texas Blood
October 10, 2017 20:46 - 4 minutes - 3.93 MB"My book is about life in the Texas border country. It follows my family’s migration into Texas from Missouri in the 1850s. But in a larger sense, it’s about the migration of different peoples, through a distinctly unwelcoming landscape over the last 14,000 years."
S2 E72: Anna Akana, Author of So Much I Want to Tell You
October 10, 2017 20:46 - 4 minutes - 4.43 MB"My book, SO MUCH I WANT TO TELL YOU: Letters to My Little Sister, is a collection of essays and lessons that I’ve learned over the past decade since her suicide in 2007."
S2 E71: Eric Metaxas, Author of Martin Luther
October 03, 2017 14:57 - 7 minutes - 7.39 MB"People always ask me why I wrote the book, where did I get the idea to write the book. As with most of my books, the idea did not come from me, it came from others, specifically two friends to whom I dedicate the book. One is Markus Spieker, who lives in Germany, and the other is my dear friend here in New York, Greg Thornbury, who is the president of the Kings College. I had never thought about writing a biography of Luther, but these two very dear friends kept pushing me to think about it ...
S2 E70: Whitney Cummings, Author of I'm Fine...and Other Lies
October 03, 2017 14:56 - 8 minutes - 7.98 MB"I think that I realized there were a lot of stories and ideas that didn’t really make sense to talk about on stage in a stand-up context because they were just too embarrassing, or not funny enough, or just too personal, and I couldn’t figure out a way to perform them live. And so I started writing them down and they just sat in this document, and I just hoped one day I’d get brave enough to do it or smart enough to figure out how to do them on stage, and I just couldn’t. People kept suggest...
S2 E69: Peter Shankman, Author of Faster Than Normal
October 03, 2017 14:52 - 5 minutes - 5.46 MB"FASTER THAN NORMAL is about understanding that a trait that many of us are born with, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, or ADHD, is not the curse or the disability that we’ve been told it is all of our lives, that if managed properly, allows us to be faster than normal, to have quicker a brain, to come up with answers faster than other people, to create, to explore, to learn faster and differently, to get more hours in our day back, to get more of our life back. It is a gift, not a c...
S2 E68: Jess Shatkin, Author of Born to Be Wild
October 03, 2017 14:50 - 6 minutes - 5.99 MB"My book is about adolescents—how they age, how they grow, and how they make decisions. Why do they do what seem like the most insane things at times? I wrote my book because I’ve always been really interested in the teenage years, and not only teens, but adolescence, that period of time from about 10,11,12 until about 25, 26,27, when we actually start to not only become, but act, like adults. Those years so many things change and we all remember those years in in our own lives so acutely, s...
S2 E67: Jaime Lowe, Author of Mental
October 03, 2017 14:47 - 6 minutes - 6.09 MB"As a magazine writer, I’m always looking for other people’s stories and trying to talk to people about what their lives are like. I always knew that that came from a place from having some pretty crazy experiences as somebody who’s bipolar and that I had all these stories that seemed outlandish and bananas, and that maybe I had to start with my own story. It all definitely started when lithium, the medication that I was taking for bipolar disorder, stopped working for me. All of a sudden, bi...
S2 E66: Gretchen Rubin, Author of The Four Tendencies
September 12, 2017 16:05 - 6 minutes - 1.49 MB"My book THE FOUR TENDENCIES is about a personality framework that I’ve identified called the Four Tendencies that divides all of humanity into four types: Upholder, Questioner, Obliger, and Rebel. I got my first insight into this framework when I had lunch with a friend and she said something that got me obsessed with this question of personality types. She said, 'I know I would be happier if I would go running, and when I was in high school I was on the track team and I never missed track p...