Does the smell of a new book make you happy? Grab your favorite public radio tote bag and join NPR journalists, voices and staffers at the 16th annual Library of Congress National Book Festival on Saturday, September 24, 2016. Our hosts, journalists and even our Vice President of News will lead book chats with writers in a wide range of genres.
Find details about these events in the schedule below.
NPR at the National Book Festival
Category: Fiction
Winston Groom and Colson Whitehead with NPR's Audie Cornish
11:40AM
Audie Cornish sits down with Colson Whitehead and Winston Groom. Whitehead's latest novel is The Underground Railroad. With his latest book, El Paso, Groom returns to writing fiction for the first time in over a decade.
Richard Russo with NPR's Lynn Neary
1:50PM
Lynn Neary interviews Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, short story writer, screenwriter and teacher. The sequel to Nobody's Fool, his new novel, Everybody's Fool, returns to North Bath, New York and Sully, whose cardiologist has just estimated that he only has a year or two left.
Charlie Jane Anders with NPR's Barrie Hardymon
4:20PM
Listen to Barrie Hardymon speak with Charlie Jane Anders, novelist and former founding editor of io9.com. Anders' novels include award-winning Six Months, Three Days and her latest, All the Birds in the Sky, about two childhood friends—one with magical powers and the other a genius inventor—working to save the world.
Category: Teens
Edwidge Danticat with NPR's Michael Oreskes
10AM
Michael Oreskes chats with Edwidge Danticat. She was nominated for a National Book Award, and won a Pushcart Short Story Prize as well as many fiction awards from The Caribbean Writer, Seventeen and Essence magazines. Her most recent book is the young adult novel Untwine.
Category: Science
James Gleick with NPR's Joe Palca
2PM
See Joe Palca talk with James Gleick, best-selling author and historian of science. Gleick's latest book, Time Travel, explores the subversive origins of time travel, its evolution in literature and science, and its influence on our understanding of time itself.
Category: Children
Sharon Robinson with NPR's Susan Stamberg
10AM
NPR founding mother Susan Stamberg interviews Sharon Robinson. In Robinson's new book, The Hero Two Doors Down: Based on the True Story of Friendship Between a Boy and a Baseball Legend, eight-year-old Steve discovers that his new next door neighbor is his baseball hero Jackie Robinson.
Category: International
Roberto Canessa with NPR's Ted Robbins
2:15PM
Ted Robbins chats with Robert Canessa, one of the 16 survivors of the Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, which crashed in the Andes on October 13, 1972, when he was a 19-year-old medical student. His recent biography, I Had to Survive: How a Plane Crash in the Andes Inspired My Calling to Save Lives, tells the story of his struggle to survive and overcome adversity to become a pediatric cardiologist.
Alberto Ruy Sánchez with NPR's Luis Clemens
7:15PM
Listen to Luis Clemens interview Alberto Ruy Sánchez, writer of fiction, nonfiction, poetry and essays from Mexico City. The majority of his fiction works including his latest, Poetics of Wonder: Passage to Mogador, are set in Mogador, the ancient Arabic city now known as Essaouira and located on the Atlantic coast of Morocco.
Category: Contemporary Life
Anne-Marie Slaughter with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly
1:15PM
Mary Louise Kelly chats with Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and CEO of New America. She has written or edited seven books, including her latest, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family.
Susan Jacoby with NPR's Tom Gjelten
6:15PM
Tom Gjelten talks with Susan Jacoby. Her new book, Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion challenges the conventional narrative of conversion as a purely spiritual journey and explores the cultural, economic and political forces driving religious conversion in the Western world.
Category: History & Biography
Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf with NPR's Melissa Block
7PM
Melissa Block talks with Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter S. Onuf. Gordon-Reed is a professor of law and history at Harvard University and she received the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in history for her book The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family. Onuf is the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation professor emeritus at the University of Virginia. His recent book, written in collaboration with Annette Gordon-Reed, Most Blessed of the Patriarchs: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination, uses careful analysis, painstaking research and vivid prose to develop a revealing character study which dispels many clichés and creates a portrait of Jefferson as he might have painted himself.
Category: Teens, Graphic Novels
Gene Luen Yang with NPR's Petra Mayer
2:30PM
Petra Mayer interviews National Ambassador for Young People's Literature Gene Luen Yang, writer of both graphic novels and comics. His most recent work is the second in his Secret Coders series, Secret Coders: Paths and Portals, and combines adventure and mystery with logic puzzles and basic programming instruction.
More than 120 authors, illustrators and poets will be gathered at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center this weekend for a full day of Q&A sessions, special programs and family friendly activities. Additional details are available in the National Book Festival App (available in iOS and Android), where you can build your own custom, public radio-infused itinerary.
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