Francine Levitov was a high school
English teacher and had a second career in law as a New York public
defense attorney before discovering audiobooks. Now in her third professional reincarnation, she is a former KLIATT audiobook reviewer and, along with Jean Palmer, a founding co-editor of SoundCommentary.com.
Tue, Dec 01, 2009
Uwem Akpan was born in southern Nigeria. He was ordained as a Jesuit priest in 2003 and received his MFA in creative writing from the University of Michigan in 2006. In 2007, he began a teaching assignment at a seminary in Harare, Zimbabwe.
Wed, Oct 15, 2008
Novelist Kidd draws upon his background as a graphic artist in this follow up to "The Cheese Monkeys," his first and very successful novel. He is well-known as the cover art designer of several superhero DC Comic collections. He lives in New York City.
Sat, Oct 25, 2008
Novelist Philip Roth has been an important American literary voice since his first book, "Goodbye, Columbus," was published to acclaim and controversy in 1959. Along with fine wine and cheese, nothing seems to improve with age as consistently as the artistic vision of Philip Roth. Multiple award-winning narrator Dick Hill enhances this novel with a flawless, fully-articulated, and sensitive performance.
Steve Dublanica waited his first table at age thirty-one. In 2004 the author started his wildly popular blog, www.WaiterRant.net, winning the 2006 “Best Writing in a Weblog” Bloggie Award. He is interviewed regularly by major media as the voice for many of the two million waiters in the United States. The Waiter lives in the New York metropolitan area.
Sat, Nov 29, 2008
Tobias Wolff is the author of seven previous books and the editor of The Vintage Book of American Short Stories. Among his honors are the PEN/Malamud Award and the Rea Award, both for excellence in the short story, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He lives in Northern California and teaches at Stanford University.
Mon, Dec 15, 2008
Dick Francis is the author of more than 30 mysteries set against a horse racing background. A three-time Edgar Award winner, he was named Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America in 1996. Felix Francis, a graduate of London University, is an accomplished outdoorsman, marksman, and pilot who has assisted with the research of many of his father’s novels
Wed, Dec 17, 2008
Cheryl Jarvis is a journalist and essayist and the author of The Marriage Sabbatical: The Journey That Brings You Home. She has written for The Wall Street Journal, the Chicago Tribune, Cosmopolitan, Redbook, and Reader’s Digest. A former television producer and magazine and newspaper editor, she has taught writing at the University of Southern California and at Washington University and Webster University in St. Louis
Wed, Dec 24, 2008
Joyce Carol Oates’ many awards include the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in short fiction. Her most recent novel is Blonde, about Marilyn Monroe.
Wed, Dec 24, 2008
MARC ACITO’s debut novel, How I Paid for College, won the Ken Kesey Award for the Novel and was also selected as an Editors’ Choice by the New York Times. Acito is a popular contributor to the New York Times and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. He lives in Portland, Oregon.
Dame Muriel Spark, born and educated in Edinburgh, published her spectacularly original first novel, The Comforters, in 1957. Among her twenty novels, it was The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (and its stage and screen adaptations) which made her internationally famous. She has also published several volumes of poetry, criticism, and stories, as well as a play, an autobiography, and three books for children. New Directions also publishes the following titles by Muriel Spark: The Abbess of Crewe, The Comforters, The Driver's Seat, Open to the Public: New & Collected Stories, and The Public Image.
Thu, Dec 25, 2008
Jessica Dorfman Jones is an editor and journalist. This is her first full length book.
Tue, Dec 30, 2008
LA Theatre Works has been producing classic and contemporary works as audio theatre since 1974. They first published McTeague in 1989 in a cassette edition that has long been out-of-print. LATW updated and re-released this classic in 2008.
Philippa Gregory is the New York Times bestselling author of several books, including The Other Boleyn Girl and The Boleyn Inheritance. A writer and broadcaster for radio and television, she lives in England.
John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania and died of cancer on January 27, 2009. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 has lived in Massachusetts. He was the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Highlights of his life, including photographs, a slideshow and a videotaped interview can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/books/28updike.html?ref=opinion
Fri, Jan 23, 2009
American novelist and playwright Booth Tarkington, (July 29, 1869 – May 19, 1946) won a Pulitzer Prize for Alice Adams in 1922.
Fri, Jan 23, 2009
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) was one of the most prolific writers of the modern theater. He invented the modern comedy of ideas, expounding on social and political problems with a razor-sharp tongue. He won the 1925 Nobel Prize for literature.
Fri, Jan 23, 2009
Sir John Clifford Mortimer, who died on January 16, 2009, was a British playwright, novelist, bon vivant, and former practicing barrister. His works include twelve collections of Rumpole stories, the Rumpole plays, for which he received the British Academy Writer of the Year Award, and the adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. He also wrote three acclaimed volumes of autobiography. He is pictured here with bewigged actor Leo McKern, who immortalized the role on television.
Sat, Feb 21, 2009
Both Blackstone Audiobook and BBC Audiobooks America have released unabridged editions of Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. Blackstone's is performed by Martin Jarvis and a full cast and was translated by J.U. Nicholson. BBC Audiobooks America's features Bill Wallis and a full cast and was translated by Burton Raffel. Both have been reviewed together for purposes of comparison.
Sat, Feb 21, 2009
Raffi Yessayan spent eleven years as an assistant district attorney in Boston. Within two years of becoming a prosecutor he was named to the Gang Unit, ultimately becoming its chief. He recently left the DA’s office to go into private practice. He and his wife live in Massachusetts. This is his first novel.
Sat, Feb 21, 2009
JUSTIN PEACOCK received an MFA from Columbia University and a law degree from Yale. Prior to attending law school, he worked as an online producer at the New York Times. His legal experience ranges from death-penalty defense to First Amendment cases. He lives in Brooklyn.
Sat, Feb 21, 2009
MERYL GORDON is a full-time magazine journalist who for the past fifteen years has been a contract writer for New York magazine. She has profiled such influential figures as Kofi Annan, Mike Bloomberg, and John Kerry, and such stars as Nicole Kidman, Susan Sarandon, and Maggie Gyllenhaal. She has written major features for the New York Times Magazine, Gourmet, Elle,Marie Claire, and More. Earlier in her career she covered the police and court beats in Cincinnati and Rochester, and then became an economics writer in Washington, D.C. A graduate of the University of Michigan, she lives in New York City with her husband, Walter Shapiro, who is the Washington bureau chief for Salon.com.
Mon, Mar 02, 2009
Ray Bradbury is America's foremost writer of science fiction and fantasy. Among his most popular adult books are Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Death is a Lonely Business. In addition, he has written several books for children, including Switch on the Night.
Thu, Mar 05, 2009
ELLA MARCH CHASE lives in Moline, Illinois.
Sun, Mar 08, 2009
Stephanie Hemphill took her cue from Plath in composing Your Own, Sylvia, writing a poem every day, journaling, and writing frequent letters to her mother (a common practice of Plath’s). She lives in Los Angeles, California.
Thu, Apr 30, 2009
Richard North Patterson is the author of thirteen bestselling and critically acclaimed novels. Formerly a trial lawyer, Patterson was the SEC's liaison to the Watergate special prosecutor and has served on the boards of several Washington advocacy groups. He lives in San Francisco and on Martha's Vineyard
Tue, Apr 28, 2009
ROBERT BLOCH (1917–1994) began writing short fiction in the 1930s and published his first short novel, The Scarf, in 1947. In 1959, the year Psycho was published, Bloch won the Hugo Award and began to write for television and film as well. His autobiography, Once around the Bloch, was his last major work.
Mon, May 25, 2009
Paul Zindel (1936-2003) was discovered in the mid-1960’s by Charlotte Zolotow, who had seen a television production of his Pulitzer Prize–winning play, The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man–in–the–Moon Marigolds and decided that Zindel must try his hand at young adult fiction. Mr. Zindel went on to become a pioneer in the genre as we know it today. His books for Harper Collins include The Doom Stone and Loch, both Recommended books for the Reluctant YA Reader (ALA), and the tragicomic memoir The Pigman & Me, which School Library Journal said in a starred review "allows readers a glimpse of Zindel's youth, gives them insight into some of his fictional characters, and provides many examples of universal experiences that will make them laugh and cry." The Pigman & Me was both a 1993 ALA Best Book for Young Adults and a 1993 ALA Notable Children's Book.
Tue, May 26, 2009
Karen Levine has won many awards for her work in radio, including two presigious Peabody Awards (Canada) - one for the documentary Children of the Holocaust. This book is based on Karen's CBC radio documentary, also called Hana's Suitcase, which appeared on The Sunday Edition (Canada)and which won the gold medal at the New York International Radio Festival.
Tue, May 26, 2009
Francine Levitov would like to thank Tim Ditlow of Brilliance Audiobooks for arranging her visit, as well as Lisa Cahn and Stephanie Wolfe for their patient and gracious responses to her questions.
Wed, Jul 01, 2009
William McGonnagall is one of the most frequently quoted poets in English. Imitation, however, is not always the sincerest form of flattery.
Sat, Aug 01, 2009
From his emergence as a 26-year old protagonist burdened with a disappointing marriage and career from which he learns he cannot run, to his unnecessarily early death 30 years later, Harry Angstrom is a small-town Everyman, through whose utterly normative eyes and reactions to the social and physical forces that shape him, we are able to inspect not only his life, but our own.
Thu, Oct 01, 2009
Kathy Reichs, like her character Temperance Brennan, is a forensic anthropologist, formerly for the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina and currently for the Laboratoire de sciences judiciaires et de m - decine l - gale for the province of Quebec. A professor in the department of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, she is one of only seventy-nine forensic anthropologists ever certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, is past Vice President of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, and serves on the National Police Services Advisory Board in Canada. Reichs's first book, D - ja Dead, catapulted her to fame when it became a New York Times bestseller and won the 1997 Ellis Award for Best First Novel. Her novel, Devil Bones, was a #1 New York Times bestseller.
Tue, Sep 01, 2009
The work of award-winning American dramatist David Hirson includes La Bete and Wrong Mountain.
Mon, Aug 31, 2009
Tom Stoppard's other work includes Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (Tony Award), Jumpers, Travesties (Tony Award), Night and Day, After Margritte, The Real Thing (Tony Award), Enter a Free Man, Hapgood, Arcadia (Evening Standard Award, The Oliver Award and the Critics Award), Dalliance and Undiscovered Country, Indian Ink (a stage adaptation of his own play, In the Native State) and The Invention of Love.
Tue, Sep 01, 2009
William Burroughs was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1914. Immensely influential among the Beat writers of the 1950s -- notably Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg -- he already had an underground reputation before the appearance of his first important book, Naked Lunch. Originally published by the daring and influential Olympia Press (the original publishers of Henry Miller) in France in 1959, it aroused great controversy on publication and was not available in the US until 1962 and in the UK until 1964. The book was adapted for film by David Cronenberg in 1991.
Tue, Sep 01, 2009
Francine Levitov admits to being just a little biased in favor of this book. From the day she first read it, in her rookie year in the Bronx criminal justice system, she has described it as the one book she most wished she could have written herself.
Thu, Oct 01, 2009
Dick Francis has written forty-one international bestsellers and is widely acclaimed as one of the world's finest thriller writers. His awards include the Crime Writer's Association's Cartier Diamond Dagger for his outstanding contribution to the crime genre, and an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Tufts University of Boston. In 1996 Dick Francis was made a Mystery Writers of America Grand Master for a lifetime's achievement and in 2000 he recieved a CBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours list.
Thu, Oct 01, 2009
Dan Brown is the author of numerous #1 bestselling novels, including the recent record-breaking The Lost Symbol, which had the biggest one-week sale in Random House history for a single title. His previous title, The Da Vinci Code, has sold more than 80 million copies worldwide, making it one of the bestselling novels of all time. In addition to numerous appearances on The Today Show, Mr. Brown was named one of the World's 100 Most Influential People by Time Magazine. He has appeared in the pages of Newsweek, Forbes, People, GQ, The New Yorker, and others. His novels are published in over 50 languages around the world.
Sun, Nov 01, 2009
Seth Grahame-Smith once took a class in English literature. He lives in Los Angeles. Jane Austen is the author of Sense and Sensibility, Persuasion, Mansfield Park, and other masterpieces of English literature.
Sun, Nov 01, 2009
RAY BRADBURY, one of the world's most popular science-fiction writers, has written more than five hundred short stories, novels, plays, and poems. He has won many awards, including the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America.
Sun, Nov 01, 2009
"Eight hundred and fifty-three horrifying things had happened to me by the time I was a teenager. That was when I met my Pigman, whose real name was Nonno Frankie." Winner of the Margaret A. Edwards Award; School LIbrary Journal Best Book of the Year; Horn Book Fanfare Honor List; New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age; and, A YALSA Best Book for Young Adults
Tue, Dec 01, 2009
M.C. Beaton lives in the Cotswolds with her husband. In addition to the Agatha Raisin series, she writes the Hamish Macbeth mystery series.
Tue, Dec 01, 2009
A Grand Master of horror and suspense, Richard Matheson has won the Hugo, the Edgar, the Spur, and the Writers Guild Awards, among others. He lives in Calabasas, California.
Tue, Dec 01, 2009
AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS is the New York Times bestselling author of A Wolf At The Table, Possible Side Effects, Magical Thinking, Dry, Running with Scissors, and Sellevision. He lives in New York City and Amherst, Massachusetts.
Tue, Dec 01, 2009
Nam Le was born in Vietnam, and raised in Australia. His work has appeared in Zoetrope, A Public Space, One Story, Conjunctions, and the Pushcart Prize and Best American Nonrequired Reading anthologies. Currently the fiction editor of the Harvard Review, he divides his time between Australia and the United States.
Fri, Jan 01, 2010
Multi-award-winning satirist Terry Pratchett is best known throughout the world for his immensely popular Discworld novels. Neil Gaiman is the author of many highly acclaimed and award-winning books for children and adults, including the New York Times bestseller Coraline. He is also the author of the picture books The Wolves in the Walls and The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish, both illustrated by Dave McKean, Blueberry Girl, illustrated by Charles Vess, and The Dangerous Alphabet, illustrated by Gris Grimly. Among his many awards are the World Fantasy Award, the Hugo Award, the Nebula Award, and the Bram Stoker Award. Originally from England, Gaiman now lives in the United States.
Fri, Jan 01, 2010
Jean-Baptiste Poquelin, 1622-1673, writing and acting under his stage name of Moliere, was a master of comic theatre whose influence remains strong even today.
Fri, Jan 01, 2010
Margaret Atwood has won many awards for her literary achievements. The Canadian author's works include poetry, children's books, drama non-fiction and many novels.
Fri, Jan 01, 2010
Best-selling author Pat Conroy was born in Atlanta, Georgia. This was the novel that gained him national attention.
Fri, Jan 01, 2010
Philippa Gregory is the New York Times bestselling author of several books, including The Other Boleyn Girl and The Boleyn Inheritance. A writer and broadcaster for radio and television, she lives in England. She welcomes visitors and messages at her website, www.philippagregory.com. Amazon.
Mon, Feb 01, 2010
Philip Roth entered the literary scene with his 1959 story collection, Goodbye, Columbus. When She Was Good is his second full-length novel, published in 1967.
Mon, Mar 01, 2010
Zadie Smith was born in northwest London in 1975. White Teeth, was the winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction, and the Commonweatlh Writers First Book Prize. She is currently living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Mon, Mar 01, 2010
Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer with The New Yorker magazine sine 1996, and all of the essays in What the Dog Saw first appeared in the pages of that magazine. He is the author of three other books, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference; Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking; and Outliers: The Story of Success, all of which were number one New York Times bestsellers.
Mon, Mar 01, 2010
Alan Ayckbourn is an Olivier, Tony, and Moliere Award-winning playwright, who has written over 74 plays. This one is his best known.
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