204: The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray

July 27, 2021May 2, 2023 ~ circideas ~ 1 Comment

Steve chats with Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray, authors of The Personal Librarian, about their early childhood experiences in libraries, why they found Belle da Costa Greene’s story so compelling and relevant to our modern times, and why they’re writing soulmates.

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Marie Benedict is a lawyer with more than ten years’ experience as a litigator. A graduate of Boston College and the Boston University School of Law, she is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Only Woman in the Room, The Mystery of Mrs. Christie, Carnegie’s Maid, The Other Einstein, and Lady Clementine. All have been translated into multiple languages. She lives in Pittsburgh with her family.

Victoria Christopher Murray is an acclaimed author with more than one million books in print. She has written more than twenty novels, including Stand Your Ground, an NAACP Image Award Winner for Outstanding Fiction and a Library Journal Best Book of the Year. She holds an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business.

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Today’s show is brought to you by Syndetics Unbound, from ProQuest and LibraryThing. Syndetics Unbound helps public and academic libraries enrich their catalogs and discovery systems with high-interest elements, including cover images, summaries, author profiles, similar books, reviews, and more. Syndetics Unbound encourages serendipitous discovery and higher collection usage, and was recently awarded Platinum distinction in the LibraryWorks 2021 Modern Library Awards. To learn more about Syndetics Unbound, visit Syndetics.com. While there, be sure to visit their “News” tab to check out the Syndetics Unbound Blog for news and analysis, including a break-down of 2020’s most popular titles in public and academic libraries.

SHOW NOTES:

The Personal Librarian
Marie Benedict
Victoria Christopher Murray

202: Library Comic by Gene Ambaum and Willow Payne

June 29, 2021May 2, 2023 ~ circideas ~ 1 Comment

Steve chats with Gene Ambaum and Willow Payne, the writer and artist of Library Comic, about the transition from Unshelved to Library Comic, integrating spiders into the strip as much as possible, creative Kickstarter merch ideas, and Gene’s terrible taste in books and movies (according to Willow).

Gene Ambaum is a library guy who lives in the Pacific Northwest. In his spare time he reads and dreams of having more spare time. He co-created and wrote Unshelved.

Willow Payne is a Florida-based artist who has worked with Gene on Unshelved Book Club comics and their as-yet incomplete epic Barbarian Girl: The Burning Blade of the Badlands. She graduated from The Center for Cartooning Studies in 2014 and will inevitably take over the comics world. Her favorite authors include Neil Gaiman, Douglas Adams, and Philip Pullman. She took over as the artist for Library Comic in June of 2019 with strip 581.

SHOW NOTES:

Subscribe (FREE!) to the Circulating Ideas newsletter!
Library Comic
Barbarian Girl
Fiends of the Library
Bookstabber podcast

198: How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

April 6, 2021May 2, 2023 ~ circideas ~ Leave a comment

Steve chats with Imbolo Mbue, author of How Beautiful We Were and Behold the Dreamers, about how a library display helped inspire her to start writing, the characters and themes she tackles in her work, writing as catharsis, and what it’s like to get a phone call from Oprah.

IMBOLO MBUE is the author of the New York Times bestseller Behold the Dreamers, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was an Oprah’s Book Club selection. The novel has been translated into eleven languages, adapted into an opera and a stage play, and optioned for a miniseries.

Her new novel, How Beautiful We Were, was published in March 2021.

A native of Limbe, Cameroon, and a graduate of Rutgers and Columbia Universities, Mbue lives in New York.

189: Esther Safran Foer

August 4, 2020May 1, 2023 ~ circideas ~ Leave a comment

Steve chats with Esther Safran Foer, the author of I Want You to Know We’re Still Here, about releasing a book during a pandemic, her time at Sixth & I, the exploration of her past leading to the writing of her memoir, and whether she sought writing advice from her sons.

Esther Safran Foer was the CEO of Sixth & I, a center for arts, ideas, and religion. She lives in Washington, D.C., with her husband, Bert. They are the parents of Franklin, Jonathan, and Joshua, and the grandparents of six.

SHOW NOTES:

I Want You to Know We’re Still Here
Interview with Jonathan Safran Foer
Interview with Franklin Foer
Yizkor Books at NYPL
Library of Congress digital map collection
Sixth & I

181: Susan Elia MacNeal

April 28, 2020May 2, 2023 ~ circideas ~ Leave a comment

Steve chats with Susan Elia MacNeal, New York Times bestselling author of the Maggie Hope series; the newest book in the series The King’s Justice is out now. Susan discusses how libraries inspired her career, how the Maggie Hope series came to be, and why she writes historical fiction.

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Susan Elia MacNeal is the New York Times bestselling author of the Maggie Hope mysteries. MacNeal won the Barry Award and has been nominated for the Edgar, Macavity, Agatha, Left Coast Crime, Dilys, and ITW Thriller awards. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband and son.

SHOW NOTES:

Susan Elia MacNeal – Books

180: David Jarmul

April 21, 2020May 2, 2023 ~ circideas ~ 4 Comments

Steve chats with David Jarmul, author of Not Exactly Retired: A Life-Changing Journey on the Road and in the Peace Corps, about his life in and out of the Peace Corps, including his time working in a library in Moldova.

David Jarmul is the author of Not Exactly Retired: A Life-Changing Journey on the Road and in the Peace Corps. A writer and world traveler whose blog has been read in more than 100 countries, he was previously the head of news and communications at Duke University for many years. He also held senior communications positions at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the National Academy of Sciences. An honors graduate of Brown University and past president of the D.C. Science Writers Association, he has worked as an editor for an international development organization, a writer for the Voice of America and a reporter for a business newspaper. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Nepal, where he met his wife, Champa, and with her in Moldova, Eastern Europe, where he worked at a public library, helping it to modernize its operations with limited resources. He and Champa live in Durham, N.C.

SHOW NOTES:

Not Exactly Retired: A Life-Changing Journey on the Road and in the Peace Corps

177: PLA 2020

March 24, 2020May 2, 2023 ~ circideas ~ Leave a comment

Recorded at the Public Library Association 2020 conference, Steve chats with Sourcebooks authors Ashley Blooms, Emily Levesque, and Caroline B. Cooney about their new books and their interactions with – and love of – libraries. Then, Steve catches up with Megan Emery of the Healing Library and Becky Spratford of RA for All and RA for All: Horror.

SHOW NOTES:

Sourcebooks
Every Bone a Prayer
The Last Stargazers
Before She Was Helen

The Healing Library
NCompass Live: The Healing Library: Responding to Trauma in Your Community Through Nontraditional Lending – Recorded Online Session

RA for All
RA for All: Horror
Summer Scares 2020
Becky’s PLA notes

175: Gail Carriger

February 25, 2020May 2, 2023 ~ circideas ~ 1 Comment

Guest host Heather Moorefield-Lang chats with author Gail Carriger, about how she uses libraries and books for research, writing the Parasol Protectorate series, dressing well for author signing lines, and her reading recommendations.

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Gail Carriger has multiple NYT bestsellers and over a million books in print in dozens of different languages. She writes comedies of manners mixed with urban fantasy (and sexy queer joy as G. L. Carriger). Her best known books include the Parasol Protectorate and Finishing School series. She was once an archaeologist and is fond of shoes, octopuses, and tea.

Heather Moorefield-Lang is an assistant professor for the Department of Library and Information Science at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has long been interested in how technologies can enhance instruction in libraries and classrooms. Her current research focuses on makerspaces in libraries and she had the honor of being nominated for the White House Champion of Change for Making in 2016.

SHOW NOTES:

Gail Carriger’s site
The Heroine’s Journey: For Writers, Readers, and Pop Culture Dilettantes

Gail’s reading recommendations:
The House on the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune
The Afterward by E. K. Johnson
Jupiter Storm by Marti Dumas

161: Grady Hendrix and Becky Spratford

July 9, 2019May 4, 2023 ~ circideas ~ Leave a comment

Steve chats with bestselling horror author Grady Hendrix and Readers’ Advisory Specialist Becky Spratford about how Grady grew up with libraries, the legitimacy of genre fiction, lessons learned from Stephen King, and the Summer Scares program.

Grady Hendrix is a best selling author whose novels include Horrorstör, My Best Friend’s Exorcism – which he describes as “basically Beaches meets The Exorcist” — and most recently, We Sold Our Souls. He’s also the author of the Bram Stoker Award winning, Paperbacks from Hell, a history of the horror paperback boom of the ’70s and ’80s, and Mohawk, a horror movie about the War of 1812.

Becky Spratford is a Readers’ Advisory Specialist in northern, IL. She trains library workers all over the world on how to help leisure readers in the public library. Becky runs the popular and critically acclaimed RA training site RA for All and its evil twin, RA for All: Horror. She is a regular contributor to Booklist, EBSCO’s NoveList database, and Library Journal. Becky is the author of The Readers’ Advisory Guide to Horror, 2nd edition [ALA Editions, 2012] and is currently at work on the 3rd Edition. She is a proud member of the Horror Writers Association, whose membership recently elected her Secretary. You can connect with Becky on Twitter @RAforAll.

SHOW NOTES:

Summer Scares FAQ / Resource List
Ladies of the Fright

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114: David Weinberger

August 8, 2017April 5, 2023 ~ circideas ~ Leave a comment

Steve chats with David Weinberger, a senior researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society and a former co-director of Harvard’s Library Innovation Lab.

Read the transcript.

From the earliest days of the Web, David Weinberger, Ph.D., has been a pioneering thought-leader about the Internet’s effect on our lives, our businesses, and most of all on our ideas. He has contributed in a remarkably wide range of fields, from marketing to libraries to politics to journalism, and more. And he has contributed in a remarkably wide range of ways, as the author of books that have made a difference; a writer for journals from Wired, Scientific American, and Harvard Business Review to TV Guide; an acclaimed keynote speaker around the world; a strategic marketing VP and consultant; a teacher; an Internet advisor to presidential campaigns; an early social networking entrepreneur; the co-director of a groundbreaking library innovation lab; a researcher at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, at the Harvard Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics, and Public Policy and at the US State Department as a Franklin Fellow; and always a passionate advocate for an open Internet. Dr. Weinberger’s doctorate is in philosophy from the University of Toronto.

SHOW NOTES:

David’s website
Digital Public Library of America
Harvard Library Innovation Lab
perma.cc
Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society
Jason Griffey | Jason’s previous appearances on Circ Ideas

Circulating Ideas is produced with support from the University of South Carolina School of Library and Information Science and listeners like you. Find out how you can help here.