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Russell Banks is a prolific novelist who is never afraid to tackle tough, controversial issues in his writing. His 1985 novel Cloudsplitter was about the possibilities for anarchy and his Rule of the Bone featured drug dealing and paedophilia. Banks is president of the ‘Cities of Refuge North America’ and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work has been translated into 20 languages and has received numerous international prizes and awards.

Banks says he became interested in the lives of convicted sex offenders after reading newspaper stories about their difficulties in finding a place to live once they leave prison. Offenders have to register with the authorities and neighbours have to be notified and they are usually banned within cities from living anywhere near children (a stipulation that, of course, drastically reduces their housing possibilities). In Miami, for example, where Banks’ latest novel is set, sex offenders are not allowed to live within 2,500 of anywhere that children may congregate. The result is that many end up under a Miami causeway, a place known to Banks and which serves as the backdrop of the novel.

Here KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks with Banks about this newest work, Lost Memory of Skin. 

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Claudia Cragg talks here with Professor Immanuel Wallerstein who first became interested in world affairs as a teenager in New York City when he was particularly interested in the anti-colonial movement in India at the time. He attended Columbia University, where he received a B.A. in 1951, an M.A. in 1954 and a Ph.D. degree in 1959, and subsequently taught until 1971, when he became professor of sociology at McGill University. As of 1976, he served as distinguished professor of sociology at Binghamton University (SUNY) until his retirement in 1999, and as head of the Fernand Braudel Center for the Study of Economies, Historical Systems and Civilizations until 2005. Wallerstein held several positions as visiting professor at universities worldwide, was awarded multiple honorary degrees, intermittently served as Directeur d’études associé at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and was president of the International Sociological Association between 1994 and 1998. During the 1990s, he chaired the Gulbenkian Commission on the Restructuring of the Social Sciences. The object of the commission was to indicate a direction for social scientific inquiry for the next 50 years. In 2000 he joined the Yale Sociology department as Senior Research Scholar. In 2003 he received the Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association.

Apart from countless academic papers, Professor Wallerstein's published work includes:-

The Modern World System (with many updates) Academic Press 

The Capitalist World Economy (1979) Cambridge University Press

Historical Capitalism With Capitalist Civilization (1996) W. W. Norton & Co. 

Geopolitics and Geoculture: Essays on the Changing World System (1991) Cambridge University Press

The Essential Wallerstein (2000) New Press

The End of the World as We Know It: Social Sciences for the 21st Century (1999) Univ of Minnesota Press

The Decline of American Power (2003) New Press

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Author Francine Prose talks with Claudia Cragg her latest novel set in the aftermath of  9/11. My New American Life offers a vivid, darkly humorous, bitingly real portrait of a particular moment in history, when a nation's dreams and ideals gave way to a culture of cynicism, lies, and fear. Beneath its high comic surface, the novel is a more serious consideration of immigration, of what it was like to live through the Bush-Cheney years, and of what it means to be an American.

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Tahmima Anam  (born 1975) is a Londoner and a Bangladeshi writer and novelist. Her first novel, A Golden Age, was published by John Murray in 2007 and was the Best First Book winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize. Anam comes from an illustrious literary family in Bangladesh. Her father Mahfuz Anam is the editor and publisher of The Daily Star (Bangladesh), Bangladesh's most prominent English-language newspaper. Her grandfather Abul Mansur Ahmed was a renowned satirist and politician whose works in Bengali remain popular to this day

Anam was born in Dhaka, Bangladesh but she grew up in Paris, New York City, and Bangkok, largely due to her father’s career with the Unicef. After studying for her undergraduate degree at Mount Holyoke College she turned to anthropology earning a PhD from Harvard.

She was inspired to write her first novel (2007) “A Golden Age”, she says, by her parents who were freedom fighters during the Bangladesh Liberation War. For that work, she stayed in Bangladesh for two years and interviewed hundreds of war fighters. She talks here with KGNU’s Claudia Cragg about her second novel ‘A Good Muslim’, the second in what Anam says is now to be a trilogy.

The framing narrative of Eric Poole’s memoir Where’s My Wand? One's Boy's Triumph Over Alienation and Shag Carpeting, is that of a young boy who hasn’t yet figured out that he’s gay. To survive, he becomes obsessed with TV pop culture (particularly with 'Bewitched's Endora' suffers from his parents’ neuroses, and believes he has magical powers that enable him to survive the traumas of growing up. KGNU's Claudia Cragg speaks with him here about his journey. 

If you have enjoyed this interview, please consider making a donation to KGNU Denver/Boulder public radio which makes this programming possible.

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Here KGNU’s Claudia Cragg meets poet and legendary feminist author of the 1970s ‘Fear of Flying’ for a lunchtime interview in New York to discuss Jong’s opus as a whole and an anthology she has just edited ‘Sugar in My Bowl’. The lively ambience provided excellent cover for a frank discussion of, among other topics, Jong’s invention of the ‘Zipless “Banana' (well, they had to say that since the FCC does not of course allow ****.) The interview itself, though, is not explicit.

In "Sugar in My Bowl", Erica Jong and a host of prominent female voices answer the question, What do women want? in essays that explore our fascination with sex and the realm of female desire - what it is, what sparks it, and what satisfies it.

The revelations are as varied as the writers. Daphne Merkin celebrates beautiful male bodies. Jennifer Weiner explores sex and death. Min Jin Lee pairs sex and racism. And Gail Collins offers an amusing take on the anti-sexuality of a Catholic education. Here, too, are the voices of a younger generation who reveal attitudes far more reserved than their liberated mothers. From wild nights to the innocence of inexperienced youth, "Sugar in My Bowl" explores women's sexuality with daring and candor, challenging us to examine ourselves and our own desires.

As Jong writes, 'The truth is-sex is life-no more, no less. As many of these stories demonstrate. It is the life force. If we attempt to wall it off in a special category of its own, we make it dirty. By itself, it is far from obscene. It is just a part of life-the part that continues it and makes it bloom.

Contributors include: Karen Abbott; Anne Roiphe; Jessica Winter; Jann Turner; Julie Klam; Susan Kinsolving; Susie Bright; Fay Weldon; Linda Gray Sexton; Elisa Albert; Barbara Victor; Daphne Merkin; Marisa Marchetto; Min Jin Lee; Honor Moore; Jennifer Weiner; Gail Collins; Liz Smith; Naomi Wolf; Rebecca Walker; Jean Hanff Korelitz; Eve Ensler; Meghan O'Rourke, and Rosemary Daniell.

Erica Jong’s Personal Website.

In this interview, Claudia Cragg speaks with Jim Geary who, in October 1981, formed the first support group in the world for people with AIDS and served as The Shanti Project’s executive director in San Francisco for seven years. He developed the agency into an internationally acclaimed model of AIDS services.

Now he has recently released his memoir Delicate Courage which tells the story of his revolutionizing AIDS care and his "poignant crossing from joy to grief" as his lover faces his own AIDS diagnosis. Geary’s memoir concludes with journal entries he kept following his lover’s passing which are interwoven with "after-death" communications he believes he has shared with his now deceased partner of 20 years. 

The conversation begins with Geary’s recollection of his early activism to protest The Briggs Initiative and the emotional onslaught of the assassinations in San Francisco of Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone which coincided with the Jonestown "massacre" in which many San Francisco residents took their own lives. [See also, Sean Penn's 'Milk'].

You can read more about Geary at www.delicatecourage.com

Ann Patchett has dazzled readers with her award-winning books, including The Magician's Assistant and the New York Times bestselling Bel Canto. She speaks here with Claudia Cragg about her latest novel, State of Wonder, a provocative and ambitious narrative set deep in the Amazon jungle.

Patchett writes of Marina Singh who gave up a career as a doctor after botching an emergency delivery as an intern, opting instead for the more orderly world of research for a pharmaceutical company. When office colleague Anders Eckman, sent to the Amazon to check on the work of a field team, is reported dead, Marina is asked by her company's CEO to complete Anders' task and to locate his body. What Marina finds in the sweltering, insect-infested jungles of the Amazon shakes her to her core. The team is headed by esteemed scientist Annick Swenson, the woman who oversaw Marina's residency and who is now intent on keeping the team's progress on a miracle drug completely under wraps. 

Marina's jungle odyssey includes exotic encounters with cannibals and snakes, a knotty ethical dilemma about the basic tenets of scientific research, and joyous interactions with the exuberant people of the Lakashi tribe, who live on the compound. In fluid and remarkably atmospheric prose, Patchett captures not only the sights and sounds of the chaotic jungle environment but also the struggle and sacrifice of dedicated scientists. 

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Claudia Cragg speaks in this interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin, The New York Times’s chief mergers and acquisitions reporter and columnist whose book ‘Too Big To Fail” just aired in a televised version on Home Box Office.  Particularly topical here, is the discussion of Christine Lagarde (the French Minister of Economic Affairs, Finance and Indusry) who, following the scandalous demise of Dominique Strauss-Kahn may be in line to replace him as the IMF chief. 

Mr. Sorkin is also the editor of Deal Book, an online daily financial report he started in 2001. In addition, Sorkin is an assistant editor of business and finance news, helping guide and shape the paper’s coverage.

Sorkin, who has appeared on NBC’s “Today” show and on “Charlie Rose” on PBS, is a frequent guest host of CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” He won a Gerald Loeb Award, one of the highest honors in business journalism, in 2004 for breaking news. He also won a Society of American Business Editors and Writers Award for breaking news in 2005 and again in 2006. In 2007, the World Economic Forum named him a Young Global Leader. In 2008 and 2009, Vanity Fair named him to its “Next Establishment” list. He was also named to the Directorship 100, a list of the most influential people on the nation’s board of directors. He is a term member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Friday, March 25th of this year was the 100th anniversary of the infamous Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York that killed 146 young female workers.  This tragedy propelled reforms in the labor conditions of these sweatshops with laws enacted to protect workers. However, sweatshops even for legal immigrants are not necessarily a thing of the past as Jean Kwok relays in her memoir largely based on her life 'Girl In Translation' which has just come out in paperback.

Jean Kwok immigrated from Hong Kong to Brooklyn when she was five and worked in a Chinatown clothing factory for much of her childhood. She won early admission to Harvard, where she worked as many as four jobs at a time, and graduated with honors in English and American literature, before going on to earn an MFA in fiction at Columbia.

Her debut novel Girl in Translation (Riverhead, 2010) became a New York Times bestseller. It has been published in 15 countries and chosen as the winner of an American Library Association Alex Award, a John Gardner Fiction Book Award finalist, a Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers Pick, an Orange New Writers' title, an Indie Next Pick, a Quality Paperback Book Club New Voices Award nominee and the winner of Best Cultural Book in Book Bloggers Appreciation Week 2010. It was featured in The New York Times, USA Today, Entertainment Weekly, Vogue and O, The Oprah Magazine, among others. The novel was a Blue Ribbon Pick for numerous book clubs, including Book of the Month, Doubleday and Literary Guild. Jean lives in Leiden, in the Netherlands. with her husband and two sons. She talks here with KGNU's Claudia Cragg.