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 E86: Dana James, Author of The Archetype Diet
June 04, 2018 19:10 - 2 minutes - 2.77 MB"I wrote this book because I saw so many women struggling with what it is that they thought they were supposed to eat, and things weren’t going the way they expected it to." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/548326/the-archetype-diet/
S3 E85: Stephanie Rosenbloom, Author of Alone Time
June 04, 2018 19:07 - 3 minutes - 5.04 MB"I wrote my book because from as far back as I can remember, I treasured my alone time. And I love to travel, so I set out to answer the question: What might the benefits of being alone and traveling alone be, if any?" Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/534829/alone-time/
S3 E84: Violet Ramis Stiel, Author of Ghostbuster's Daughter
June 04, 2018 19:06 - 2 minutes - 3.92 MB"My book is about myself and my father, Harold Ramis. It’s about our relationship together, and him, and sort of just the story of our life. I wrote it after he died because I just didn’t want to forget anything about him. I needed to have something to represent and capture him for myself, for my family, my children, and for everyone that knew and loved him." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/557045/ghostbusters-daughter/
S3 E83: Pamela Druckerman, Author of There Are No Grownups
May 29, 2018 16:39 - 4 minutes - 6.1 MB"My personal journey inspired the book. By turning 40 myself, I had suddenly entered this age that no one could define for me. For the first time I had to sort of define it for myself." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/317649/there-are-no-grown-ups/
S3 E82: Aaron Mahnke, Author of The World Of Lore: Wicked Mortals
May 29, 2018 16:36 - 3 minutes - 5.37 MB"This book is the second part of a three-book series that is taking the stories told through my podcast called LORE as well as stories that aren’t public on the podcast, and presenting them in an organized, collated, curated sense. The first book was about monstrous creatures, about things, and this book, being called WICKED MORTALS, is about all of those dastardly and tricky human beings who have done unspeakable things." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/563771/the-wo...
S3 E81: Laura Vanderkam, Author of Off The Clock
May 29, 2018 16:35 - 5 minutes - 7.92 MB"I knew I wanted to write another book about time management, and really the phrase “off the clock” popped into my head while I was running in Maine one morning. I had gone there for a long weekend trip with my husband, and it was one of those strange experiences where in the morning I suddenly realized I had nothing I had to do that day, which is kind of a rare thing in my life. I took off to run and as I was running along, that phrase, “I am off the clock” popped into my head. And so I want...
S3 E80: Jennifer Dulski, Author of Purposeful
May 21, 2018 18:16 - 3 minutes - 3.25 MB"The book is about how each of us have the power to create movements and walks you through the steps of how to do that, as told through the real stories of people and sometimes surprising people who have already done it." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/544572/purposeful/
S3 E79: D. B. John, Author of Star Of The North
May 21, 2018 18:14 - 4 minutes - 6.6 MB"My novel Star of the North is a thriller set in North Korea, American and China. It’s about three characters, all unconnected, whose lives cross in unusual and unexpected ways." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/566367/star-of-the-north/
S3 E78: Marc and Angel Chernoff, Authors of Getting Back To Happy
May 21, 2018 18:12 - 6 minutes - 8.7 MB"Getting Back to Happy is really the journey of the lessons we learned from losing two loved ones back to back to illness and suicide and then losing Angel’s breadwinning job in the downturn of the economy. Certainly, there’s people who have it worse but everyone internalizes pain and depression and grief in different ways. It was a very low point in our lives." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/565695/getting-back-to-happy/
S3 E77: Kimberly Ann Johnson, Author of The Fourth Trimester
May 21, 2018 18:10 - 6 minutes - 8.4 MB"What planted the seed for me to write this book was my own postpartum healing experience. As I was in my own recovery process, I recognized that I was having individual considerations but I could also tell that what I was going through was a collective and archetypal experience." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/546620/the-fourth-trimester/
S3 E76: Dave Zirin, Author of Jim Brown
May 18, 2018 19:13 - 3 minutes - 5.38 MB"I wrote my book because I really felt like Jim Brown is a complicated figure, and we don’t write enough about complicated people. He is not perfect, he is not evil, he is not an angel. I think that in itself provides lessons that are incredibly rich for us today. We don’t do much good in this world when we put our heroes so high up on a pedestal that we can’t even reach them." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/317613/jim-brown/
S3 E75: Roger Bennett & Michael Davies, Authors of Men in Blazers Present Encyclopedia Blazertannica
May 18, 2018 18:28 - 5 minutes - 7.28 MBThe Men in Blazers are two English-born, soccer-obsessed broadcasters who have savored the dizzying growth of the game along with millions of Americans, as if it was a rollicking, sporting telenovela playing out in real life. This is their behind-the-scenes interview discussing the recording of Men in Blazers Present Encyclopedia Blazertannica. Learn more about Encyclopedia Blazertannica: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/252515/men-in-blazers-present-encyclopedia-blazertannica/
S3 E74: Mark Adams, Author of Tip Of The Iceberg
May 15, 2018 17:44 - 3 minutes - 4.46 MB"The seed for this book was actually a vacation I took to Seattle a few years ago when I stopped in Pioneer Square. There was a giant totem pole there and there was a ranger wearing a smoky bear hat. He told me that in 1899, there had been a brief fad of stealing totem poles from Alaska." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/539111/tip-of-the-iceberg/
S3 E73: MIchael Pollan, Author of How To Change Your Mind
May 15, 2018 17:41 - 7 minutes - 10.7 MB"This subject is something of a departure for me. I think a lot of people associate me with books about food and agriculture or maybe gardening. But if you go back far enough there’s a strain of interest or continuity that perhaps explains it. I think my real subject as a writer is the human engagement with nature, with other species in nature." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/529343/how-to-change-your-mind/
S3 E72: Eliza Kennedy, Author of Do This For Me
May 15, 2018 17:39 - 4 minutes - 5.72 MB"I started out wanting to write a book about how a marriage could survive infidelity. I had this idea of creating this character who was a very powerful woman, who had everything in her life under control, who then had to confront this massive, unexpected problem. Then I was going to show how she got through it. The interesting thing what happened is that she had other ideas. As I wrote the book, I got father and farther away from what I thought it was going to be about." Learn more: http://...
S3 E71: Austin Channing Brown, Author of I'm Still Here
May 15, 2018 17:37 - 2 minutes - 4.08 MB"My book is the story of my life told from the perspective of race. It’s about my own racial journey and understanding who I am and who America is." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/555849/im-still-here/
S3 E70: Mayim Bialik, Author of Boying Up
May 08, 2018 16:19 - 2 minutes - 3.81 MB"What planted the seed for BOYING UP was GIRLING UP, which I wrote to explain the process of becoming a woman from a girl. And there was a lot of interest from people I spoke to who liked GIRLING UP who wondered if I could do the equivalent for boys." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/567379/boying-up/
S3 E69: Jeanne Bliss, Author of Would You Do That To Your Mother?
May 08, 2018 16:18 - 4 minutes - 6.31 MB"I’ve been doing this work for a long time, many of you know, over 35 years, and this is my fourth book. What I really think of as a gift to the people doing customer experience work, leaders around the world, people on the front lines, and I wanted to really create a simplified approach to how to improve customers’ lives." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/556171/would-you-do-that-to-your-mother/
S3 E68: Ashley Eckstein, Author of It's Your Universe
May 08, 2018 16:16 - 5 minutes - 8.18 MB"The inspiration for my book was actually a conversation I was having with the Disney book group. I was working with them to promote the book AHSOKA, which I did the audiobook for and helped promote since I do the voice of Ahsoka Tano in Star Wars. And we were brainstorming what more we could do together, and somebody asked me if I’d be interested in telling my story of how I started her universe and how I became the voice of Ahsoka. I said, 'You know, I don't really feel like I’ve lived enou...
S3 E67: Mark And Jay Duplass, Authors of Like Brothers
May 08, 2018 16:13 - 6 minutes - 9.6 MB"We didn’t think we were ever gonna write books. Pamela at Ballantine said “Would you guys wanna write a book?” and we were like, “How much?" "Who’s gonna read that?” She had all these ideas and then all of a sudden we were like, wait a minute...maybe, maybe we do have something to say. Would people read it?" Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/535098/like-brothers/
S3 E66: James And Deborah Fallows, Authors of Our Towns
May 08, 2018 15:56 - 7 minutes - 9.94 MB"I think there were two ideas behind this book. One of them is simply the joy of exploration. Before Deb and I began these travels around the country we’d been living for a number of years in China. And there we had a bias in favor of just going whenever we could–on trains or buses or horses or yaks–to see remote things. We had the opportunity to do that in the U.S. because of our long background with a small airplane, so we thought: let’s try it here. The other, as time went on, was to sort ...
S3 E65: Jan Chozen Bays, MD, Author of Mindful Eating
May 08, 2018 15:45 - 8 minutes - 12.3 MB"What planted the seed for this book was beginning to see children who were obese and beginning to see Type II Diabetes in children, which in the entirety of my training in pediatrics we had never seen before. And so I realized we had a very serious problem. Also what inspired me was doing mindful eating myself for decades and enjoying it so much, and then finding that when I did classes or workshops on mindful eating, people really enjoyed it a lot themselves. And also they had a lot of insi...
S3 E64: Richard Russo, Author of The Destiny Thief
May 08, 2018 15:42 - 9 minutes - 13.2 MB"This book wasn’t so much written as collected, in the sense that over the years (and some of these essays are fairly old, some of them go back a good decade or so), writers get the opportunity every now and then to give talks. Most of the time when you have a book out, people ask you to read from the book. Other times, people want what I guess is being referred to these days as valued added. You’ve written this book, or a bunch of books, but people want to know what’s going on inside you." ...
S3 E63: H. Jon Benjamin, Author of Failure Is An Option
May 01, 2018 16:56 - 3 minutes - 5.35 MB"FAILURE IS AN OPTION is the story of a Jewish man who’s failed most of his life. It’s actually personal stories tied together, from my early childhood all the way up until now, and about how in small ways I have failed all along." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/558430/failure-is-an-option/
S3 E62: Fred Kofman, Author of The Meaning Revolution
May 01, 2018 16:54 - 8 minutes - 11.1 MB"THE MEANING REVOLUTION is a book about the difficulties every company has to solve in order to operate effectively. This is a dilemma between individual accountability and collective cooperation. On the one hand, every company wants each one of its members to work as hard and as conscientiously as possible. But on the other hand, the company also wants each member to subordinate their own individual work to the collective needs of the organization as a whole." Learn more: http://www.penguin...
S3 E61: Melissa Broder, Author of The Pisces
May 01, 2018 16:51 - 4 minutes - 5.54 MB"I was inspired to write this book after I had just completed writing my last two books: SO SAD TODAY, which is a collection of essays, and LAST SEXT, which is a collection of poems...and I found myself still trying to parse what love is, what lust is, and fantasy from reality, so I was still obsessed with these topics." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/557707/the-pisces/
S3 E60: Grant Wahl, Author Masters Of Modern Soccer
May 01, 2018 16:49 - 4 minutes - 6.27 MB"The inspiration for this book was actually a classic baseball book by the political writer George Will, who became a sports writer for a time and wrote a book called MEN AT WORK: THE CRAFT OF BASEBALL. And I am very upfront saying that this is George Will’s idea for soccer, because his book was terrific." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/184701/masters-of-modern-soccer/
S3 E59: Allison Pataki, Author of Beauty In The Broken Places
May 01, 2018 16:47 - 6 minutes - 9.54 MB"What planted the seed for this book idea was that following Dave’s stroke, because I knew he couldn’t remember anything in his state of amnesia and I didn’t really count on myself to be able to remember everything about the ICU and rehab, I began writing him a series of letters. And the word document, I saved it just the first night as DearDave.doc because that was how the first letter started." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/554652/beauty-in-the-broken-places/
S3 E58: Alison Green, Author of Ask A Manager
May 01, 2018 16:45 - 4 minutes - 6.42 MB"My book ASK A MANAGER is about the difficult conversations you might need to have at work during your career and how to approach them, including the specific wording to use when you do. It focuses in particular on the awkward and kind of cringey conversations that people dread the most, things like what to say if you’re allergic to your boss’s perfume, or if you made a pretty serious mistake at work, or if you lost your cool and you snapped at a coworker." Learn more: http://www.penguinrand...
S3 E57: Rick Bragg, Author of The Best Cook In The World
April 24, 2018 14:22 - 7 minutes - 10.8 MB"This is what I guess some people would call a food memoir. THE BEST COOK IN THE WORLD came about because of a time when my mom was sick. I was in her kitchen in her cabin in the foothills of the Appalachians and it just struck me as how wrong it was—she was in the hospital, and the kitchen was cold and dark and empty, and it was just wrong. And it struck me then that there was no written record of her food. Not just recipes, but there was no written history, no memoir in even the most unoffi...
S3 E56: Rand Fishkin, Author of Lost And Founder
April 24, 2018 14:19 - 3 minutes - 4.76 MB"The seed for this book was my experience building this startup and how painful that process was, and how much I didn’t want anyone else to have to go through the exact same pain. Or at least if they did go through it, they would know that they could have avoided it by listening to this book." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/547217/lost-and-founder/
S3 E55: Daisy Khan, Author of Born With Wings
April 24, 2018 14:17 - 7 minutes - 10 MB"What planted the seed for this book was literally when I was a little girl, and my father gave me a pair of boxing gloves, and he taught me how to defend myself. I was the third of three daughters and this is the world I came into. And you’ll hear all about my boxing-glove story in the audiobook." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/228438/born-with-wings/
S3 E54: Jonah Goldberg, Author of Suicide Of The West
April 24, 2018 14:13 - 5 minutes - 7.27 MB"My book SUICIDE OF THE WEST is about how capitalism, democracy, modernity itself is unnatural and accidental. We stumbled into almost everything we value about the civilization we live in and because we stumbled into it, we tend to take it for granted. When you take something for granted that is a kind of ingratitude. So my argument sort of traces where Western civilization comes from, where democracy and capitalism come from, and how we are losing it." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandom...
S3 E53: Nico Tortorella, Author of all of it is you.
April 17, 2018 17:47 - 8 minutes - 11.7 MB"I found out I was writing a poetry book at the end of last year and I had all of 45 days to put it together. And I wrote this entire book while I was traveling to Peru to go do an Ayahuasca immersion with some shamans in the middle of the jungle and I've never had to work on something so diligently before. Every single day. If I missed one day I would have been off track. I kind of fell into a vortex with this book, this poetry vortex." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/boo...
S3 E52: Lucy Jones, Author of The Big Ones
April 17, 2018 17:43 - 2 minutes - 3.84 MB"This is a story of natural disasters through human history, from Pompeii to Hurricane Katrina to the Japanese Great Tsunami, the stories of natural disasters, so that we can see how these disasters affect us both physically and socially." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/554995/the-big-ones/
S3 E51: Stuart Ablon, Author of Changeable
April 17, 2018 17:41 - 5 minutes - 7.51 MB"What planted the seed for this book for me was an agent who came to me because he had benefited personally from our work and from our collaborative problem solving approach and it had a transformative effect upon him and his family. And he came to me and said he thought there was a much broader audience for my work." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/540671/changeable/
S3 E50: Lawrence Wright, Author of God Save Texas
April 17, 2018 17:39 - 2 minutes - 3.81 MB"This book actually began when the editor of THE NEW YORKER, David Remnick, called me into his office and asked me to explain Texas because he can’t understand why I live here. And, to be honest, I’ve wondered about that myself. " Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/561612/god-save-texas/
S3 E49: Alex Wagner, Author of Futureface
April 17, 2018 17:36 - 3 minutes - 4.68 MB"I’ve worked as a journalist in politics for a number of years and the subject of immigration has always fascinated me, not simply because my family is a family of immigrants but also because of the fundamental questions that the issue of immigration raises: Who are we as a country? Who is an American? What does it mean to be an American? And how have those definitions changed overtime? So when I began this book I wanted to address those central questions through a personal lens and this is ...
S3 E48: Daniel Jose Older, Author of Star Wars: Last Shot
April 17, 2018 17:34 - 7 minutes - 10.6 MB"I first saw STAR WARS when I was tiny, I think I was three. RETURN OF THE JEDI was probably the first movie I saw at the movie theaters, and I saw it many times...I was in love. And I’m still in love. I’ve just loved that world my whole life." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/568276/last-shot-star-wars/
S3 E47: Gregory Pardlo, Author of Air Traffic
April 11, 2018 13:16 - 5 minutes - 7.21 MB"What planted the seed for this book was the Air traffic control strike of 1981. It was a turning point in my life and, obviously, it was a big turning point in my father’s life. And it was also a huge turning point in labor history, not only in America but around the world." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/549724/air-traffic/
S3 E46: Bob Burg And John David Mann, Authors of The Go-Giver Influencer
April 11, 2018 13:16 - 6 minutes - 9.4 MB"Our book is about influence. The question is: What is influence? On a very basic level, influence can be defined as the ability to move a person or persons to a desired action, usually within the context of a specific goal. Now that definition is legitimate and certainly works but I don’t believe it’s the substance of influence, which really is pull." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/314009/the-go-giver-influencer/
S3 E45: Jennifer Pharr Davis, Author of The Pursuit Of Endurance
April 11, 2018 13:13 - 7 minutes - 9.9 MB"My book is about endurance; specifically, it’s about this emerging sport known “fastest known times,” which are basically trail records on the super long trails like the Appalachian Trail and Pacific Crest Trail. But it also talks about the really amazing people who have set these records, and some of them are my friends and mentors. I wanted to talk about them and then also share my experience as a record setter and illustrate how it was so empowering for me to realize that there is no gend...
S3 E44: Suzy Fincham-Gray, Author of My Patients And Other Animals
April 11, 2018 13:12 - 3 minutes - 5 MB"I was inspired by my work as a veterinary internal medicine specialist. Although, if I'm honest, when I first started writing this book it was not going to be about my job as a vet. It was going to be about pretty much anything other than that. But once I started writing I realized that there was really only one story I wanted to tell, and that was the story of my patients and the things that they’ve taught me about life, and about medicine, and about being a veterinarian." Learn more: http...
S3 E43: Deena Kastor, Author of Let Your Mind Run
April 11, 2018 13:10 - 4 minutes - 6.02 MB"I wrote this book because, over the years, I saw how my perspectives, although molded and sculpted to warrant success, weren’t really the norm of athletes or most people. It’s a false misnomer that you have to have this angst or chip on your shoulder to succeed as an athlete, and science now supports that positivity and optimism are really the drivers of success." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/555798/let-your-mind-run/
S3 E42: Library Week Special Edition Episode
April 09, 2018 13:56 - 9 minutes - 13.1 MBListen to this special This is the Author compilation of Lidia Bastianich, Junot Diaz, Joey Coleman, Daniel José Older, Suzy Fincham-Gray, J. Stuart Ablon, Gregory Pardlo, and Sir Ken Robinson talk about how libraries have influenced their lives.
S3 E41: Joey Coleman, Author of Never Lose A Customer Again
April 03, 2018 19:24 - 4 minutes - 6.65 MB"The origin of this book came from a speech that I gave a few years ago about the importance of the first 100 days of the customer relationship. At the time, to be frank, I wasn’t sure whether it was a good idea or not. But I was asked to give a speech at an event where there was a contest, and the audience would vote on their favorite speech, and the winner would win a $10,000 prize that was a donation to the charity of their choice. Well, thankfully, the audience voted for my speech. And in...
S3 E40: Lidia Bastianich, Author of My American Dream
April 03, 2018 19:22 - 4 minutes - 6.16 MB"This book is actually my memoir. Being a chef, a restaurateur, and a cooking show host—I'm known for that. But the more I cooked, the more I wrote cookbooks...the more people wanted to know about me, my personal life. Because my trek, my coming to America, my being an immigrant, has an interesting story. And in today’s time I felt I wanted to share my story, my experience as an immigrant coming to America—the difficulties in doing so and the joys and the rewards that I reaped in coming to Am...
S3 E39: Matthew Boren, Author of Folded Notes From High School
April 03, 2018 19:20 - 13 minutes - 18.8 MB"I wrote the book and get to be in it. It’s very exciting. I casted myself as Christopher because I felt like it was a really fun departure for me as an actor. I love that Christopher is the kind of guy a piece of us wanted to be a little bit growing up, and kind of, still now. No worries in the world, and exudes this confidence that comes from, probably a six-pack, of both beer and the one on his stomach." ...
S3 E38: Sam Irby, Author of Meaty
April 03, 2018 19:09 - 5 minutes - 7.36 MB"My book is about being a young—well, relatively young—disgusting idiot who makes terrible choices, and wants to get revenge on anyone who ever dumped me." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/555854/meaty/
S3 E37: Sir Ken Robinson, Author of You, Your Child, And School
April 03, 2018 19:07 - 7 minutes - 10.3 MB"I’ve worked in education for a long time, and I’ve written quite a few books addressed to people as individuals and also to educators, but I’ve also had lots of conversation with parents. I am a parent. And I’m constantly being asked by parents about what’s going on in education, and what the right thing is to do for their children." Learn more: http://www.penguinrandomhouseaudio.com/book/315396/you-your-child-and-school/