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
S2 E65: Jim Stengel, Author of Unleashing the Innovators
September 05, 2017 20:14 - 8 minutes - 1.97 MB"I was inspired to write this book, UNLEASHING THE INNOVATORS, because I love big companies, I worked in one for 25 years, and in my consulting practice, company after company I meet is struggling with culture change, and revitalization, and growth, and energy, and risk and dealing with fear of failure. And many of them were using startups to try to kind of put new energy into the company. And yet, I didn’t think there was a playbook for that."
S2 E64: Erwin Raphael McManus, Author of The Last Arrow
September 05, 2017 20:11 - 10 minutes - 2.42 MB"Hi, my name is Erwin Raphael McManus. I live here in Los Angeles, California and I’m the lead pastor of a community of faith called Mosaic. I just wrote a book called THE LAST ARROW. And THE LAST ARROW is really about living a life without regret. I began to ask the question, “what is it about people that often times confuses quitting with failing?” Since so many times in life we lower our expectations, and so in some ways the subtext title for me is that we should never settle."
S2 E63: Mariam Gates, Author of Meditate With Me
August 29, 2017 16:22 - 4 minutes - 999 KB"What inspired me to write MEDITATE WITH ME: A Step-by-Step Mindfulness Journey was I wanted kids to have a way to slow down. I wanted to give kids a beloved book that they could connect to, that they could interact with, practices that were easy for them, a way to feel their breath in their body, a way to slow down when they need it, and a way to really calm themselves…a way to sort of start practicing self-soothing techniques that they’ll really need throughout their entire lives."
S2 E62: Michelle Kuo, Author of Reading with Patrick
July 11, 2017 13:15 - 6 minutes - 1.62 MB"My book, READING WITH PATRICK, is about a student of mine named Patrick, and this remarkable literary and intellectual awakening we experienced together in a county jail in Arkansas. He was a student in my class who was incredibly bright, really quiet, and just had trouble coming to school. I really encouraged him to come to school to write and to read and we had this incredible year together where he improved incredibly. Three years after this, I’ve left Arkansas—it’s a place where a lot of...
S2 E61: Jen Waite, Author of A Beautiful, Terrible Thing
July 11, 2017 13:11 - 5 minutes - 1.35 MB"It is about basically finding an email when my daughter was three weeks old that led me to the discovery that my husband was not who I thought he was. And showing the really perfect fairy tale 'before' aspects of our relationship and then the 'after' parts, where I’m just uncovering lie after lie and kind of unraveling this double life he had been living. I wrote my book because I actually didn’t feel like I had a choice not to. It kind of wrote itself in four months and it felt like I was ...
S2 E60: Sarah Sentilles, Author of Draw Your Weapons
June 27, 2017 15:22 - 6 minutes - 1.51 MB"It took me 10 years to write DRAW YOUR WEAPONS. I wrote it after seeing two photographs. The first photograph I saw was a picture of a man and he was holding a violin, and I read the newspaper story about him. It turned out he was a conscientious objector during World War II who’d protested the internment of Japanese Americans, and was put in prison. While he was there, he built a violin. And the newspaper story I read about him was about his grandson completing that violin and giving it to ...
S2 E59: Anne Helen Petersen, Author of Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud
June 20, 2017 14:09 - 7 minutes - 1.82 MB"I found myself writing about a lot of these women in my day job, which is a culture writer at BuzzFeed. And it seemed clear to me that there was something that was changing. I used to be a professor, and I focused on media studies but also gender studies. And so I was very familiar with the ways that attitude towards women, an embrace of feminism, and unruliness generally, kind of ebb and flow over decades."
S2 E58: Victor LaValle, Author of The Changeling
June 13, 2017 15:24 - 4 minutes - 1.09 MB"The story behind my book THE CHANGELING is that I became a new father and started taking endless numbers of photos of my son, and posting them to Facebook almost immediately. And then I had to ask myself why in the world was I sharing something so private."
S2 E57: Eddie Izzard, Author of Believe Me
June 13, 2017 15:24 - 9 minutes - 2.29 MB"Somebody asked me ‘Do you want to do an autobiography?’ I wasn’t going to do it now—I say this in my introduction. I thought it’s what you do at the end...I did not know the rules. But they said, 'Do it!' I thought, okay, I’ll do one. It’s a halfway point. This is my first half of life."
S2 E56: Maile Meloy, Author of Do Not Become Alarmed
June 06, 2017 15:52 - 5 minutes - 1.27 MB"My book is about two families who go on a cruise together down the coast of Central America. They meet an Argentinian family and everyone goes ashore. And then a series of small things go wrong and the six kids go missing. So the novel goes back and forth between the parents, who are frantic, and the kids, who are more resourceful than anyone knew, including them."
S2 E55: David Gessner, Author of Ultimate Glory
June 06, 2017 15:48 - 8 minutes - 2.11 MB"After I graduated from college, I set about becoming a writer and playing ultimate frisbee. And I kept doing those things for about 15 years. I wrote about a lot of things—I wrote about my dad’s death, I wrote about the natural world—but it never really occurred to me to write about ultimate. And then after my first book was published I got picked up by a big agent at ICM, and she looked over all my stuff and said, “This is what we should do.” And it was a quick proposal I’d written about go...
S2 E54: Alan Alda, Author of If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?
June 06, 2017 15:46 - 7 minutes - 1.67 MB"The book is about communicating and relating to other people, and it’s called IF I UNDERSTOOD YOU, WOULD I HAVE THIS LOOK ON MY FACE? And that’s really what it’s about, it's about the value of relating. I think the basis of communicating is when you understand what’s going on in the head of the person you’re talking to or communicating with, whether you’re talking to them in person or in a written piece of material. You’ve got to know what they’re going through—otherwise, you’re just sprayin...
S2 E53: Heather Haupt, Author of Knights in Training
May 30, 2017 12:42 - 7 minutes - 1.74 MB"This book is about celebrating everything that makes our boys uniquely boy, and using their strengths to inspire and prepare them to grow up into the men they long to become, by taking a step back into history and taking on knight training."
S2 E52: Samantha Irby, Author of We Are Never Meeting in Real Life
May 30, 2017 12:40 - 2 minutes - 728 KB"My book is about eating snacks and being mad. I wrote my book because I’d already written one and that was pretty fun. I was inspired by revenge; I want everyone who ever doubted me or was ever mean to me to see that I have a book in bookstores and feel really bad about their own lives."
S2 E51: Lolly Daska, Author of The Leadership Gap
May 30, 2017 12:38 - 3 minutes - 812 KB"The book is inspired by three of my mentors: Viktor Frankl, Joseph Campbell, and Carl Jung. It is based on their teaching and learnings. I talk about archetypes and their shadows. Within each of us there are a polarity of character. One will lead us to greatness and one will lead us to our gaps."
S2 E50: Benjamin Taylor, Author of The Hue and Cry at Our House
May 23, 2017 13:40 - 4 minutes - 1.12 MB"My book is about an extremely consequential 12-month period in American history, and also in the history of my family and my own maturation. Being 11 and 12 is a very interesting time of life, when you, for the first time, begin to establish your frame of reference for the world outside of your experience at home. And, in my case, it was a discovery of history as an inescapable current. We were all writing. These were dangerous years."
S2 E49: Adam Lashinsky, Author of Wild Ride
May 23, 2017 13:38 - 4 minutes - 1.08 MB"As a writer for Fortune magazine, I look for the biggest, most important, most interesting, most colorful business stories, period. I also have lived in Silicon Valley for almost 20 years now. And so, as Uber was exploding on the scene, it fairly quickly became obvious to me that that was the story that had all the qualities I was looking for…”
S2 E48: John T. Edge, Author of The Potlikker Papers
May 16, 2017 13:33 - 4 minutes - 1.06 MB"It’s a food history of the modern South that begins in 1955 with the Montgomery bus boycotts. Women who baked cakes and pies and sold them literally fueled the bus boycotts. And it ends in 2015 as a newer South comes into focus. A newer South in which tamale makers of Mexican descent are as much a part of the Southern story as anyone else."
S2 E47: Jeffrey Tambor, Author of Are You Anybody?
May 16, 2017 13:31 - 6 minutes - 1.46 MB"When I was a young actor in New York, I premiered in a show called Sly Fox, which starred the great George C. Scott. I had three lines in the show. Actually, I had one line and I said it three times. It was, 'You look wonderful, sir,' which I added 'oh' to. 'Oh, you look wonderful, sir.' That was free of charge. I remember walking out the stage door one day and there was this legendary autograph hound that went from theater to theater, and he was standing right in front of me as I walked out...
S2 E46: Amy Thielen, Author of Give a Girl a Knife
May 16, 2017 13:28 - 6 minutes - 1.44 MB"This story is really about homecoming. It’s about cooking and getting into the world of cooking in all its so many crazy, wild places. From home cooking to the kitchens of New York City, to farmhouse kitchens and warehouse squat kitchens, this book really shows how you can cook well or you can learn something about cooking anywhere you are."
S2 E45: Andrea Petersen, Author of On Edge
May 16, 2017 13:27 - 5 minutes - 1.4 MB"My book, most generally, is about anxiety. It’s half memoir, about my own anxiety issues that I’ve struggled with for the last twenty-five years, along with a deep dive into the science of anxiety, looking at everything from the genetics to the neuroscience behind anxiety."
S2 E44: Claire Dederer, Author of Love and Trouble
May 09, 2017 14:57 - 6 minutes - 1.44 MB"My book is about my sexual coming of age and my adolescence and my going off the rails a bit in my mid-life. The book came about because I started writing about my adolescence and it was hard remembering that time. Also, I realized I really hate coming-of-age memoirs and I started to wonder why was I writing one. As a teenager and young adult I had been, well, I was kinda trouble. I was sexually fast and took drugs and dropped outta school and was kinda a bad kid. And I wasn’t quite that bad...
S2 E43: Mayim Bialik, Author of Girling Up
May 09, 2017 14:52 - 5 minutes - 1.33 MB"I wrote a book called Girling Up, which is a map of the process of becoming a young woman from being a girl, and the book literally covers everything from puberty to how we grow, how our brains work, how and why we socialize, how we cope with hard things in life and how we matter in the world."
S2 E42: Daniel Whiteson, Author of We Have No Idea
May 09, 2017 14:49 - 5 minutes - 1.35 MB"I wrote this book with Jorge Cham because we were really excited to share our enthusiasm for exploring the unknown, or looking out into the universe and thinking about the possible crazy things that could be revealed to us. There are lots of books out there about science and explaining what science does know and all the amazing things science has learned, but we really felt like nobody was talking about what we don’t know, what’s out there left for young people who are going into science to ...
S2 E41: Jill Santopolo, Author of The Light We Lost
May 09, 2017 14:47 - 3 minutes - 772 KB"My book The Light We Lost is about two people who meet in college on September 11, 2001, and fall in love, but the universe has other plans for them. This story follows them over the next 13 years as they come in and out of each other’s lives. I wrote my book because of a really bad breakup actually and I wanted to tell a story about someone who was feeling what I was feeling at the moment."
S2 E40: Mary Pope Osborne, Author of Magic Tree House
May 02, 2017 17:53 - 4 minutes - 1.15 MB"Over the years, narrating Magic Tree House has become more and more fun. In the beginning I was kind of nervous and I wanted to make sure I did all the voices right. I practiced a lot ahead of time, and now, after what, 55 books, it’s just a way of life. I know the characters so well and I know the stories and I enjoy so much making them come alive for myself again."
S2 E39: Tasha Eurich, Author of Insight
May 02, 2017 14:46 - 4 minutes - 1.12 MB"In my work as an organizational psychologist, in almost 15 years, I noticed that to a person, people who I was coaching and working with were most successful, knew who they were, how they were seen and how they fit into the world around them. But over and over I saw a shortage of self-awareness, not just in the companies I worked in, but nearly everywhere I looked. And I think a lot of people would agree."
S2 E38: Scott Anderson, Author of Fractured Lands
May 02, 2017 14:45 - 6 minutes - 1.53 MB"I’ve been a magazine journalist for about 25 years and have spent a great deal of time in the Middle East during that time, writing about the upheavals in the region. And about 2 ½ years ago the editor-in-chief of the NYT Magazine came to me with a proposal of taking a really comprehensive look at the Arab’s spring revolts that began in 2011, that utterly transformed the Middle East. And he held out the idea that if what I found was compelling enough that they might give me the entire issue ...
S2 E37: Deborah Tannen, Author of You're the Only One I Can Tell
May 02, 2017 14:43 - 3 minutes - 842 KB"My book You’re the Only One I Can Tell, Inside the Language of Women’s Friendships, is about women talking to friends. My last two books were about sisters and about mothers and daughters. Women’s friendships are the third, all-female relationships in women’s lives. I was inspired to write it, both because, friendships have been so important to my own life, but also because I’ve heard so much about friends from my friends."
S2 E36: Lance Rubin, Author of Denton Little's Still Not Dead
April 25, 2017 13:33 - 5 minutes - 1.24 MB"This is Lance Rubin, author of Denton Little’s Death Date and Denton Little’s Still Not Dead. The first book is about a 17-year-old named Denton Little who lives in a world that’s much like our own except for one key difference -- everybody knows their death date. And, Denton Little is a 17-year-old whose death date, when the first book starts, is tomorrow, the same day as his senior prom."
S2 E35: Kelly Osbourne, Author of There Is No F*cking Secret
April 25, 2017 13:31 - 4 minutes - 999 KB"My book is called There is No F*cking Secret, Lessons from a Badass Bitch, and what inspired me to write this book is that so many people have decided who they think I am, and tell me who they think I am, and come to me all the time and ask me what my secret is. And, I want the world to see who I really am, and the only way I could do that is by writing this book."
S2 E34: Erin Chack, Author of This is Really Happening
April 25, 2017 13:30 - 4 minutes - 1.19 MB"We just got finished recording the audio version of my book “This is Really Happening.” My book is about my life. It’s an essay collection about growing up, being in love, it’s about being afraid, it’s about being sick and it’s about getting over it and moving on."
S2 E33: Chipper Jones, Author of Ballplayer
April 25, 2017 13:28 - 6 minutes - 1.55 MB"I wrote my book Ballplayer for a couple of different reasons. I wanted to give the reader some insight into my upbringing, my family life, what it was like to be in the dugout, to be in the clubhouse in those pitcher’s meetings on those pitcher’s mounds."
S2 E32: Nicole Lapin, Author of Boss Bitch
April 18, 2017 19:25 - 2 minutes - 669 KB"My book is about being the boss of your life and taking charge of your career. It’s about being the boss you and being the boss of a bigger company and being the boss of your own business."
S2 E31: Barbara Oakley, Author of Mindshift
April 18, 2017 19:23 - 5 minutes - 1.36 MB"I’d like to tell you about Mindshift and the story behind it. I wrote the book because I was really lucky, I had a second chance at life. But you can have a second chance too. Here’s what I mean. I grew up to be incapable in math and science, as in I flunked my way through elementary, middle and high school math and science. And yet, as an adult I learned how to change my brain from being a math-phobe to --it’s hard for me to even believe it -- a professor of engineering."
S2 E30: Annabelle Gurwitch, Author of Wherever You Go, There They Are
April 18, 2017 19:21 - 13 minutes - 3.1 MB"I’m one of those people who has always felt this way about family. What am I doing with these people, there has to be a mistake! And as a kid I was always trying to join other families so the first family I ever wanted to join was Star Athlete Federation ‘cause I was a total trekkie and they had those very great, form fitting, very attractive outfits on you know, space was also cool and they were all so together, it was all so cool."
S2 E29: Jo Piazza, Author of How to be Married
April 18, 2017 19:20 - 10 minutes - 2.39 MB"My book is about what it’s really like to be married. We live in this world where everyone instagrams and facebooks the most perfect parts of their marriage and partnerships but we never really talk about the nitty-gritty. What I realized about getting married – and I got married on the later side, I was 35 years old – is that no one gives you advice for the actual marriage."
S2 E28: Jen Sincero, Author of You Are a Badass at Making Money
April 18, 2017 19:19 - 4 minutes - 1.17 MB"My book, You Are a Badass at Making Money: Master the Mindset of Wealth, is about figuring out what’s holding you back from making money, how to get over it and start changing things in your life so that you can start making money."
S2 E27: Elif Batuman, Author of The Idiot
April 12, 2017 17:40 - 8 minutes - 2.12 MB"My book is based on the draft of a novel I wrote and gave up on over 15 years ago when I was in my early 20s and I only reread it in my thirties and at that point I had gotten a PhD in Literature and I spent time teaching undergraduates and I published a book of essays -- which you definitely read or listen to as an audiobook -- it’s called The Possessed."
S2 E26: Marcus du Sautoy, Author of The Great Unknown
April 11, 2017 13:26 - 4 minutes - 1.05 MB"I’m a Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford but a few years ago I took over from Richard Dawkins as the Professor for the Public Understanding of Science. The title always makes me laugh a little bit because I think everyone expects I must know the whole of science and here I am to explain it to you all. But it got me thinking, certainly no scientists must know it all but maybe there might come a point when science knows everything about the universe. Maybe we could answer all...
S2 E25: Ruth Behar, Author of Lucky Broken Girl
April 11, 2017 13:25 - 7 minutes - 1.7 MB"My book Lucky Broken Girl is based on a true story, something that really happened to me. Me and my family had just arrived to NY in the ‘60s from Cuba, fleeing communism and we were just getting settled, adapted, I was learning English, and we were adjusting with difficulties but we were adjusting to our new life, a new language, a new culture."
S2 E24: David George Haskell, Author of The Songs of Trees
April 11, 2017 13:24 - 6 minutes - 1.65 MB"There are many field guides for the songs of birds, the songs of crickets, there are no guides of the songs of trees. So I wanted to go sit and listen to all the incredible different sounds that emerge from trees that echo within their wood and to share some of that experience with readers and get beyond the experience and into the stories behind them."
S2 E23: Kory Stamper, Author of Word by Word
April 11, 2017 13:23 - 3 minutes - 792 KB"My book is about dictionaries and about the English language and the people who write dictionaries and about people who use the English language. I wrote the book out of my experiences as a lexicographer, which is a writer and editor of dictionaries and because the more you do lexicography, the more you find out about English, and English is an amazing language, even though it drives people up the proverbial wall."
S1 E22: Lena Dunham, Author of Is It Evil Not To Be Sure
April 04, 2017 14:04 - 5 minutes - 1.38 MB"My little book is called Is It Evil Not to be Sure and it is a collection of remembrances, creative ideas and teensy diary entries from a year of my life in college. I didn’t know I was writing a book when it happened, it was just my way of staying connected to myself through a really challenging period in my life and when I went back and looked at it later, I felt like there was a collection there that was at least maybe make people laugh and possibly inspire women, other people to record t...
S1 E21: AJ Mendez Brooks, Author of Crazy Is My Superpower
April 04, 2017 13:43 - 6 minutes - 1.45 MB"My book Crazy Is My Superpower is essentially about female empowerment. I wrote my book because as a little kid I promised myself I would. Anytime there was some sort of hardship in my life I sort of just told myself it was happening so that I could pass the lesson along one day. And as I got older I noticed that it kinda became essential that someone started speaking out on these topics I didn’t think I’d be brave enough to speak out on my own.”
S1 E20: Ann Lamott, Author of Hallelujah Anyway
April 04, 2017 13:41 - 3 minutes - 942 KB"My book is about mercy as the answer to almost all questions and problems and the way home to peace and to getting to become the people we were born to be. I was inspired because I felt this country and world are starving to death for truth and laughter and a reminder that kindness and grace that last, all evidence of the contrary."
S2 E19: Peter Gethers, Author of My Mother's Kitchen
April 04, 2017 13:40 - 4 minutes - 1.13 MB"My book is about food and family, and how food either does or sometimes doesn’t hold families and friends together. At the center of the book is my mom who really led an extraordinarily and interesting and passionate and inspiring life. She was connected to food her entire life, her family owned a famous restaurant on the LES of NY called Ratner’s…”
S2 E18: Marty Appel, Author of Casey Stengel
March 28, 2017 16:38 - 4 minutes - 1010 KB"My book is about the life of Charles Dillon Casey Stengel, one of the legendary names in baseball history. He was even selected by major league baseball network as the greatest character in the history of baseball. I wrote the book because it had been 33 years since a major biography had been done about him and the coming of the internet has provided a lot more information that was previously known."
S2 E17: Blake Bauer, Author of You Were Not Born To Suffer
March 21, 2017 12:38 - 7 minutes - 1.82 MB"My book You Were Not Born to Suffer is really about how to love yourself unconditionally and practically. After years of suffering, studying, and searching I discovered logically how most forms of disease and depression were caused by us never learning how to love ourselves and what that actually means."
S2 E16: Bruce Feiler, Author of The First Love Story
March 21, 2017 12:38 - 10 minutes - 2.51 MB“The book began about 4-5 years ago; I was traveling with my young daughters to Rome to tag along with my wife on a business trip. And I’m a father, I have young girls and I kinda live my life surrounded by women and I write a lot about relationships and I write a column in NYT on contemporary families.”