Join us for a conversation with ROGER MCNAMEE, the noted tech venture capitalist, early mentor to Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook investor, who went from being a founding supporter of the world’s biggest and most profitable social media company to becoming one of its most influential critics. There is nothing the charismatic McNamee won’t discuss about Facebook's business model and practices, including his own adventures at the birth of Big Tech.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode, internationally beloved author ISABEL ALLENDE, sits down virtually with her good friend, PBS/NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown, to discuss her latest novel “A LONG PETAL OF THE SEA.” Along the way, she brings us closer to the upheavals of the Spanish Civil War; Chile during Pinochet’s military dictatorship; the stories of refugees known and imagined; and, of course, the art of fiction. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with Ayad Akhtar, the new president of PEN America and author of Homeland Elegies, about the uncanny experience of writing his latest novel. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with SUSAN ORLEAN, longtime New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author of The Library Book and The Orchid Thief, about libraries and memory, about the eccentric nature of curiosity, and about the journalistic surprises and personal satisfactions of finally writing her own story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In his sixth novel, The Red Daughter, novelist (and regular Beyond the Page host, JOHN BURNHAM SCHWARTZ imaginatively inhabits the life of Svetlana Alliluyeva (1926 – 2011), the only daughter of Joseph Stalin, who in his three decades as the tyrannical ruler of the Soviet Union was responsible for the deaths of far more than twenty million people. At the height of the Cold War, Svetlana became the most important Soviet citizen ever to defect to the West, arriving in New York to throngs of reporters and a nation hungry to hear her story. By her side was a young lawyer sent by the CIA to smuggle her into America. That lawyer was John Burnham Schwartz’s father. In this episode of Beyond the Page, moving between excerpts from his talk at the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference and a conversation with New Yorker Staff Writer Larissa MaFarqhuhar, Schwartz recreates for us the story of an extraordinary, troubled woman’s search for a new life and a place to belong. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 2002, the late civil rights champion Roger Wilkins gave one of the most memorable talks ever given at the Writers’ Conference. Roger’s great grandfather was a slave. Two generations later, Roger’s uncle, Roy Wilkins, became the legendary leader of the NAACP for over two decades. Three generations removed from the Mississippi slave fields, Roger Wilkins played pivotal roles in the civil rights advancements of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, and later, as author, columnist, and professor, became a powerful voice of advocacy and hope for Black people in America. In the wake of the police killing of George Floyd and other black Americans, and in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, the words of Roger Wilkins, who died in 2017 at the age of 85, have never sounded more relevant, or vital, to the conversation about what kind of great nation America was meant to be, and must still become.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the country reeled under the weight of one shock after another—first the pandemic, then levels of mass unemployment not seen since the Great Depression, and most recently an unprecedented wave of protests against racism and police brutality—the June issue of The Atlantic magazine ran a cover story with the provocative title, “We Are Living in a Failed State.” The author was George Packer, one of the preeminent long-form journalists writing in the US today. His last three books—The Assassins Gate about the invasion of Iraq, The Unwinding about the economic and social transformation of America since the 1970s and Our Man, a biography of the larger than life American diplomat, Richard Holbrooke—each in its own unique way, tried to provide a window into the big challenges America has faced, both abroad and at home, over the last twenty-five years. In this episode, George talks with Liaquat Ahamed, a board member of the Sun Valley Writers Conference about where we are as a country, how we got here, and how a writer of non-fiction like him is able, using techniques drawn from the great novelists, “to wrap his arms around America.” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What happens, what emotional threads get pulled when halfway around the globe a father gets sick from Covid? In an evocative personal essay for The New Yorker, My Father's Voice from Paris, novelist Alexander Maksik faces those questions and all the attendant thoughts and feelings provoked by them. Living in Maui with his wife, the novelist Madhuri Vijay, and his 6-month-old daughter Ela, Maksik's only contact with his father was through the phone. He listened as his father grew weaker knowing he could not go to him. It is both a story for our time and a timeless one about a son's love for a father. In this episode of Beyond the Page, Xander talks with Anne Taylor Fleming, associate director of the Sun Valley Writers' Conference, about the essay, about fatherhood and about Paris, the city both father and son know intimately.           Alexander Maksik is the author of the novels You Deserve Nothing, A Marker to Measure Drift, which was a 2013 New York Times Book Review Notable Book, and Shelter in Place. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the spring of 2016, author DANI SHAPIRO received the stunning news through a genealogy website that her father was not her biological father.  Her memoir, Inheritance, captures her urgent quest to unlock the story of her own identity, a story that had been scrupulously hidden from her for more than fifty years. It caused her to rethink everything she knew about herself, her roots, her family, the ground underneath her. In this episode of Beyond the Page, she talks with physician and author Abraham Verghese about living in a time in which science and technology are uncovering long-held secrets and about the capacities of the human heart to contend with the consequences of what we discover. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In 1996, (a 66-year-old) retired New York City public school teacher named Frank McCourt published his first book, a memoir about his brutally impoverished Irish Catholic childhood in the slums of Limerick. If ever there was a “rags-to-riches” story in publishing, Angela’s Ashes was it: The book would go on to receive the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award, sell more than four million copies in hardcover alone, and become a film directed by Alan Parker. At the age of 66, Frank emerged almost overnight as one of the most celebrated authors in America. But if you knew Frank, you knew two things, at least: First, he never took anything at face value, including, and perhaps especially, his own extraordinary, late-blooming success. And second, for all the joy and gratitude he took from his unexpected good fortune, he refused to ever completely shed his (the) core of (coal-dark) anger that remained from (his childhood of poverty) growing up in terrible poverty. That he was able to so often turn that anger into unforgettable humor was just one of the many reasons why he was such a gifted writer. As he himself tells us, however, before becoming that writer, he somehow had to learn what he still needed to know. And in order to do that, he first had to become teacher. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices