THE CODE BREAKER - WALTER ISAACSON with Suzanne Austin
Recorded November 5, 2021
Walter Isaacson, eminent biographer of Leonardo da Vinci, Einstein and Steve Jobs, discusses the story of how Nobel Prize winner Jennifer Doudna and her colleagues triumphed in the race to develop a tool to edit genes. In conversation with historian Suzanne Austin, College of Charleston Provost, he considers the moral implications of the revolutionary discovery that allows us to cure diseases but also to tamper with the human species.

LIFE’S EDGE - CARL ZIMMER with Elizabeth Meyer-Bernstein
Recorded November 5, 2021
The enigma of what it means to be alive has exercised humankind since time immemorial. New York Times bestselling author and columnist Carl Zimmer takes us on a spell-binding journey to the margins of life, from viruses to computer intelligence, seeking a definitive answer. He discusses his discoveries and the social dilemmas posed by the question with biologist Elizabeth Meyer-Bernstein, Dean of the College of Charleston Honors College.

THE PLOT - JEAN HANFF KORELITZ with Anne Blessing
Recorded November 5, 2021
The Plot, Jean Hanff Korelitz’s psychological suspense novel following the success of The Undoing, HBO’s adaptation of her bestseller You Should Have Known, focuses on a daring literary heist. A demoralized arts tutor’s theft of his deceased student’s compelling plot for a debut novel confers fame but instils terror of exposure. She discusses the book’s perfect literary festival theme with Anne Blessing, former College of Charleston English lecturer.

TRANSCENDENT KINGDOM - YAA GYASI with Kerri Forrest
Recorded November 6, 2021
Yaa Gyasi’s novel, Transcendent Kingdom, is a stunning follow-up to her award-winning debut Homegoing. Drawing on her Ghanaian background and her Alabama upbringing, she explores the power of science and faith to untangle her identity conflicts and to assuage the grief caused by her brother’s death resulting from OxyContin addiction. ‘ A book of blazing brilliance’ (The Washington Post). She discusses her quest to blend the mysteries of science and religion with Kerri Forrest, two-time Emmy award-winning journalist for NBC News.

CALL ME BY YOUR NAME - ANDRÉ ACIMAN and JAMES IVORY with Colleen Glenn
Recorded November 6, 2021
Legendary producer James Ivory and novelist André Aciman in conversation with College of Charleston Associate Professor, Colleen Glenn discussing the creative process of transforming a book (Aciman's Call Me By Your Name) into a film. The story, set in Italy, is a coming of age romantic drama. It received four nominations at the Academy Awards, winning for Best Adapted Screenplay.

THE RATLINE - PHILIPPE SANDS and NIKLAS FRANK with Richard Wolffe
Recorded November 7, 2021
Philippe Sands, author of the award-winning East West Street and The Ratline, which investigates the Nazi escape route to Peron’s Argentina, discusses the capacity of war criminal descendants to acknowledge the truth about their forebears with Niklas Frank, author of The Father, whose parent, Hitler’s legal adviser and Governor General of occupied Poland, was executed at Nuremberg. In conversation with Richard Wolffe, political journalist, they consider issues of revenge and forgiveness.

SOLID IVORY - JAMES IVORY with Bernard Cornwell
Recorded November 7, 2021
Prepare for a treat. The celebrated film-maker James Ivory’s irreverent and eloquent memoir, Solid Ivory, appears just in time for the Festival. Academy Award winner, partner of Ismail Merchant, director of, among others, A Room with a View, Howards End, Maurice, The Remains of the Day and Heat and Dust, his remarkable life cannot help but enthral. He will be in conversation with Bernard Cornwell author of the Sharpe series of novels.

THE CHARLESTON GAMBIT - STUART BENNETT with Walter Edgar
Recorded November 7, 2021
Stuart Bennett’s The Charleston Gambit provides a glimpse into the revolutionary war in South Carolina. Set in the 1780s and based on historic facts and real characters, it charts the unlikely romance between a young Irish Colonel and a female patriot. He discusses his research for the book and its Charleston background with Walter Edgar, historian and radio host of ‘Walter Edgar’s Journal’ and ‘South Carolina From A To Z’.

HOW I FOUND MY WRITING VOICE - ANDRÉ ACIMAN with Maura Hogan
Recorded November 7, 2021
André Aciman, multilingual American author and academic, born in Egypt, living in Italy and France during his adolescence, describes his journey as a writer: his influences from early childhood, his literary role models, his creative processes, aspirations and achievements. His novels include Call Me By Your Name, Find Me and Enigma Variations; he has also published short stories, essay collections and a memoir, Out of Egypt. In conversation with Maura Hogan, Arts Critic The Post and Courier.

THE LURE OF OBJECTS - EDMUND DE WAAL and TRISTRAM HUNT
Recorded November 9, 2021
How you tell stories about objects, who made them and who owned them, matters. Tristram Hunt, Director of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and author of The Radical Potter: The Life and Times of Josiah Wedgwood, and Edmund de Waal, artist and author of The Hare with Amber Eyes, The White Road and Letters to Camondo, explore their obsessions with ceramics and objects and how that has led to journeys into porcelain, abolitionism and the holocaust.

A SLICE OF LIFE - GEORGE SAUNDERS with Deborah Eisenberg
Recorded November 9, 2021
Novelist George Saunders, Booker Prize winner for Lincoln in the Bardo, is also an award-winning author of short stories. His current book, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, is based on the creative writing course on the 19th century Russian short story that he teaches. He shares thoughts with Deborah Eisenberg, virtuoso writer of astringent short fiction, on the inspiration provided by Russian practitioners - including Chekhov, Tolstoy, Turgenev and Gogol - of one of the oldest literary forms.

THE MAGICIAN - COLM TÓIBÍN with Geoffrey Harpham
Recorded November 10, 2021
Colm Tóibín, award-winning writer of Brooklyn (adapted for film) and The Master (about Henry James) has imagined himself into the heart and mind of the German Nobel Prize winning author Thomas Mann - creator of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain - who sought refuge in the United States before World War II. He discusses his lightly fictionalized account of Mann’s life and tumultuous times with Geoffrey Harpham, whose forthcoming book is Citizenship on Catfish Row.

TOLSTOY TOGETHER - YIYUN LI with Kirk Curnutt
Recorded November 10, 2021
At the beginning of the pandemic, novelist, short story writer and essayist Yiyun Li conceived a project to unite, console and inspire in challenging times: she invited readers around the world to join her in an 85-day on-line journey through Tolstoy’s War and Peace. She discusses this highly successful communal experience with Kirk Curnutt, Associate Professor of English at Troy University, who organized a mass reading of Scott Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise on the anniversary of its publication.

TENDERNESS - ALISON MACLEOD with Bill Goldstein
Recorded November 11, 2021
At a time of heated divisions about freedom of expression, Alison MacLeod’s novel Tenderness, D.H. Lawrence’s original title for Lady Chatterley’s Lover, could not be more timely. Through the story of Lawrence’s writing of his last novel and the subsequent obscenity trials in England and America (J. Edgar Hoover tried to remove the book from circulation), Alison MacLeod evokes the author’s final years and the eventual recognition of a literary masterpiece. In conversation with Bill Goldstein, author of The World Broke in Two.

BOOKER PRIZE CELEBRATION - NATHAN HARRIS, PATRICIA LOCKWOOD and MAGGIE SHIPSTEAD with Bill Goldstein
Recorded November 11, 2021
In collaboration with the Booker Prize, the leading literary award in the English-speaking world, we invite you to join some of the 2021 short and long-listed authors, Nathan Harris, Patricia Lockwood and Maggie Shipstead, in this special fiction event. Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle is an expansive novel about a female aviator; Patricia Lockwood’s no one is talking about this focuses on what happens when life is lived by interacting with a screen; Nathan Harris’ The Sweetness of Water is set in the dying days of the Civil War. Chaired by Bill Goldstein.

THE TRIAL OF THE CENTURY - ANNE SEBBA with Belinda Gergel
Recorded November 12, 2021
Seventy years after their execution in 1953, having been convicted of spying for the Soviet Union, the story of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg continues to reverberate. In her biography of Ethel Rosenberg, Anne Sebba’s mission is to extricate Ethel the woman, a 37 year-old mother, from the notorious Cold War story of betrayal, perfidy and, despite international pleas for clemency, capital punishment. In conversation with historian Belinda Gergel, they consider the trial and its contemporary relevance.

THE FREE WORLD - LOUIS MENAND with Geoffrey Harpham
Recorded November 12, 2021
Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Louis Menand’s new book ingeniously and entertainingly threads a path through the culture of the post-war years, showing how the experimental zest of popular arts became part of the West’s profile in the stand-off with the Soviet Union. A dazzling cast including Simone de Beauvoir, Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, Peggy Guggenheim, Andy Warhol, and Susan Sontag prove to have more in common than you’d guess. In conversation with Geoffrey Harpham, whose forthcoming book is Citizenship on Catfish Row.

WHAT WOMEN WANT - LISA TADDEO with Regina Marler
Recorded November 12, 2021
Long-standing journalist Lisa Taddeo spent eight years painstakingly following the fortunes of three disparate and far-flung American women, talking to them about sex and desire. The resulting book, Three Women, the publishing sensation of 2019, is currently being made into a TV series. She followed this with the publication of her debut novel, Animal: a gothic saga about the aftermath of trauma. She discusses the impact of her writing on readers with Regina Marler, author of Queer Beats.

BOOK BRUNCH - MENA MARK HANNA with Edward Hart
Recorded November 13, 2021
The new director of the renowned Spoleto Festival, Mena Mark Hanna, gives us a taste of the books that have inspired him over the years. An avid reader, whose previous role was Professor of Musicology and Composition at Barenboim-Said Akademie in Berlin, his selection is bound to be illuminating. Edward Hart, Dean of the College of Charleston School of the Arts, will discuss his choices.

JUSTICE RISING - PATRICIA SULLIVAN with Richard Gergel
Recorded November 13, 2021
History, race and politics converged in the 1960s in ways that indelibly changed America. In Justice Rising, a landmark reconsideration of Robert Kennedy’s life and legacy, Patricia Sullivan draws on government files, personal papers and oral interviews to reveal how he grasped the moment to emerge as a transformational leader. She discusses her re-evaluation of Robert Kennedy’s life and career with Federal Judge Richard Gergel, author of Unexampled Courage.

MATRIX - LAUREN GROFF with Regina Marler
Recorded November 13, 2021
A departure for the author of contemporary marriage story Fates and Furies, Lauren Groff’s Matrix is a tale of 12th-century nuns, inspired by the poet Marie de France, who as a teenager was unwillingly dispatched from the French court to become a prioress in a run-down English Abbey. This free imagining of the life of Marie de France is an engrossing tale of passion, creativity and power. Lauren Groff discusses her medieval female Utopia with Regina Marler, author of Bloomsbury Pie.

ALL THAT SHE CARRIED - TIYA MILES with Kameelah Martin
Recorded November 14, 2021
Tiya Miles’ All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley’s Sack, A Black Family Keepsake is a unique record of slavery. It charts the history of a rough cotton bag given by an enslaved woman to her daughter before their enforced separation. Her great-grand-daughter inherited the sack and embroidered it with a few poignant words evoking the family’s story of loss and love. In conversation with Kameelah Martin, Dean of the Graduate School and Professor of African American Studies and English at the College of Charleston, she discusses the significance of those resonant words.