Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing's brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page will curate and distill the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that ...
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In this episode, recorded live at the 2024 Sun Valley Writers' Conference, novelist Kristin Hannah talks to Jenny Emery Davidson, the executive director of The Community Library in Ketchum, Idaho, about her #1 New York Times bestselling novel The Women. In The Women, Hannah (known for previous bestselling historical novels such as The Nightingale, …
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In a time of loneliness and isolation, social rupture and alienation, what will it take to mend our broken hearts and rebuild our society? In this episode, one of Ameriica’s leading rabbis, and the author of the book The Amen Effect, Sharon Brous makes the case that it is through honoring our most basic human instinct – the yearning for real connec…
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The author of a seminal book on Putin, All The Kremlin’s Men, and the founding editor-in-chief of what was Russia’s most truth-telling opposition news channel TV Rain, Mikhail Zygar is a journalistic hero to many in Russia. Now living and writing in the U.S. after fleeing persecution by Putin, Zygar continues to cover the most troubling stories of …
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In this episode, recorded live at the 2023 Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, New Yorker Staff Writer Patrick Radden Keefe, who has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award to the Orwell Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award for his meticulously reported, hypnotically engaging work on the many ways people behave badly, tells …
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In bestselling author Curtis Sittenfeld’s much-loved new novel, she explores—with her typically keen observations and trademark ability to bring complex women to life on the page—the neurosis-inducing and heart-fluttering wonder of love,while slyly dissecting the social rituals of romance and gender relations in the modern age. Sittenfeld sits down…
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In this episode of Beyond the Page, recorded live at the 2023 conference, poet and memoirist Javier Zamora talks to legendary bookseller Mitchell Kaplan about his memoir Solito, which chronicles his experiences traveling from El Salvador to the United States, by himself, when he was 9 years old. Javier Zamora writes, and speaks, like someone who be…
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Recorded at the closing of the 2023 Sun Valley Writers' Conference, Pulitzer Prize-winning humor writer (and one of the funniest people alive) Dave Barry talks about his latest novel Swamp Story, using it mainly as a springboard to talk about his crazy home state of Florida, and from there, about some of the problems facing our nation in general, a…
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Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist Andrea Elliot sits down with another Pulitzer winner, novelist and playwright Ayad Akhtar, at the 2023 Writers’ Conference to talk about Elliot’s book, Invisible Child: Poverty, Survival, and Hope in an American City. The subject of the book is a Black girl in New York City named Dasani, whose story …
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On this episode, author and physician Abraham Verghese – who received the 2023 Sun Valley Writers’ Conference WRITER IN THE WORLD prize – brings us intimately and poetically into the heart of his remarkable, inspiring journey from his childhood in Ethiopia to his experiences as a young doctor in America during the AIDS epidemic, to his beginnings a…
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In this episode, three of our most cogent and influential writers on global affairs and history – Anne Applebaum, Robert Kagan, and Evan Osnos – discuss the geopolitical ramifications of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the ongoing battle between democracy and authoritarianism, Vladimir Putin’s endgame, China’s power plays, and the future of the …
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Beyond the Page host John Burnham Schwartz talks with New Yorker staff writer Tad Friend, a longtime contributor to the magazine’s Letter from California and the author of two funny, poignant family memoirs, Cheerful Money and In the Early Times. In a notable testament to Friend’s curiosity, range, and talent, over the years his work has been chose…
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In this episode of Beyond the Page, SVWC Literary Director John Burnham Schwartz and writer Eric Schwartzel go Hollywood. Schwartzel covers the film industry in The Wall Street Journal's Los Angeles bureau and his first book “Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy,” detailed the growing influence of China on the …
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In this episode of Beyond the Page, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with editor and Canadian publishing titan Louise Dennys about her extraordinary career working side by side with writers including Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan… to name just a few. Dennys talks about how she got started, what it’s l…
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In this episode of Beyond the Page, Anne Taylor Fleming talks with award-winning food writer Aleksandra Crapanzano about her delightful and accessible new cookbook GATEAU: The Surprising Simplicity of French Cakes. The author shares her memories of being a child in Paris and talks about her dual passions for cooking and writing. Aleksandra Crapanza…
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Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing’s brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the …
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continue reading
In this episode of Beyond the Page, BEN RHODES, Barack Obama’s former Deputy National Security Advisor, sits down at the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright AYAD AKHTAR for a deeply informed conversation about the state of the world we are living in today, with the rise of authoritarian leaders and eth…
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In this episode of Beyond the Page, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with Rebecca Donner, winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography for “All the Frequent Troubles of our Days.” The story of Donner's great-great aunt, Mildred Harnack, who as a young midwestern grad student moved to Berlin and became one of the leaders of th…
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When artists and athletes age, what happens to their work? Does it ripen or rot? As our bodies decay, how – and why – do we keep going? In this episode, John Burnham Schwartz sits down with the ever-original and wittily ironic GEOFF DYER to discuss the author's own encounter with late middle age against the backdrop of the last days and last works …
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In this episode of Beyond the Page, we offer something fun and different, a lively conversation between SVWC Literary Director John Burnham Schwartz and Associate Director Anne Taylor Fleming about the upcoming 2022 conference. As the chief programmers, the longtime colleagues and friends will talk about some of the magical writers who are coming, …
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On this episode, John Burnham Schwartz talks with SUSAN ORLEAN, whose New Yorker articles across the last 30 years, along with books such as The Orchard Thief, The Library Book, her biography of the movie star dog Rin Tin Tin, and her latest collection of pieces, On Animals, have made her one of our most beloved and distinctive writers. Learn more …
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Is Thomas Jefferson to be deplored as a slave-owner who had a family with a young woman he owned or is he to be celebrated as one of the country's most essential and gifted founders? Or, should he be both--condemned and revered? That is the question Annette Gordon-Reed, the brilliant Harvard law professor, historian, and author of the Pulitzer priz…
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In this episode of Beyond the Page, John Burnham Schwartz speaks with author TOBIAS WOLFF, renowned for his classic memoirs and short stories, for an intimate, wide-ranging conversation about life, literature, craft, and the never- ending mysteries and revelations that come from spending one’s time inhabiting the minds of others. Tobias Wolff was b…
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In this episode, John Burnham Schwartz speaks with Noah Feldman, Harvard Law professor and renowned Constitutional scholar, whose groundbreaking new book, The Broken Constitution: Lincoln, Slavery, and the Refounding of America, takes us inside one of the more surprising realities of American History: in abolishing slavery and preserving our union,…
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In this episode of Beyond the Page, acclaimed novelist, journalist, and Marine Corps veteran ELLIOT ACKERMAN talks to former CBS News Vice President and Washington Bureau Chief Christopher Isham about the United States military’s calamitous withdrawal from Afghanistan and what comes after. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoi…
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Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing's brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the …
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continue reading
In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with Pulitzer Prize-winning authors MARK STEVENS and ANNALYN SWAN about their landmark biography Francis Bacon: Revelations. MARK STEVENS is the former art critic of New York magazine. He has been the art critic for The New Republic and Newsweek and has also written for The New Yo…
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In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, human rights activist, and Pulitzer Prize-winning author SAMANTHA POWER – interviewed in the lead-up to her pending US Senate confirmation vote to be President Biden’s new administrator of USAID – discusses her distinctly American journey from immigrant to wa…
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In this episode, the host of American Public Media’s award-winning radio show The Splendid Table shares with us a few unforgettable food stories from his childhood, along with some of his current thoughts about the social experience of food during these pandemic times, the struggles and future of restaurants, and how certain tastes become identity …
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On today's episode of Beyond the Page, John Burnham Schwartz speaks with David Eagleman, who not only teaches neuroscience at Stanford University, but is also CEO and co-founder of New Century, a company that develops devices for sensory substitution. Eagleman is the author most recently of Live Wired: The Inside Story of the Ever Changing Brain, a…
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On Christmas morning, 2020, the writer BARRY LOPEZ died in Eugene, Oregon, surrounded by his family, after a long battle with prostate cancer. Widely honored as one of our greatest writers about the natural world – in non-fiction classics such as “Of Wolves and Men,” “Arctic Dreams,” and “Horizon” – for half a century Barry traveled the globe – Hig…
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In this episode of BEYOND THE PAGE, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with novelist and classicist MADELINE MILLER, author of THE SONG OF ACHILLES and CIRCE, about why Homer’s wisdom has never been more relevant, and why she decided to finally give a witch who changes men into pigs the starring role in her own drama. Learn more about your ad choices…
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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 abo…
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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…
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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由Sun Valley Writers’ Conference
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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 stor…
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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. …
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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 …
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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 …
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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…
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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…
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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 Nat…
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In one way or another, from the moment she left Haiti to settle in Brooklyn, New York, at age 12, Edwidge Danticat has been writing stories (prize-winning novels, memoirs, and essays) about the experience and effects of immigration. In conversation with Jeffrey Brown of the PBS NewsHour, she will talk about the ways that first seismic journey in he…
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When New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu addressed the people of his city in May, 2017 about his decision to take down four Confederate monuments, including the statue of Robert E. Lee, he struck a nerve throughout the nation – his brave and inspirational speech has now been heard by millions. As he described that experience in his powerful memoir In …
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Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing's brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks fr…
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continue reading
No playwright has challenged our perceptions of Muslims in America as boldly, and with such dramatic vigor, as has AYAD AKHTAR, who won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for Disgraced, the most produced play of the 2015-2016 season. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices由Sun Valley Writers’ Conference
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Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers' Conference. In this episode, we hear from the award-winning novelist Min Jin Lee. Speech, memory, and the power to tell one's story -- for Lee, these are not abstract, philosophical ideas. They are doorways leading her back to the process by which after great struggle she was able to f…
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Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers' Conference. In this episode, we hear from the great Israeli novelist David Grossman, widely regarded as part of the collective liberal conscience of Israel, about his masterpiece To the End of the Land. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices…
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Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers' Conference. In a world obsessed with success, Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist ANTHONY DOERR has maintained an abiding belief in, and a creative need for, the bracing tonic of failure. In a talk filled with humor and hard-won wisdom, he discusses how being willing to risk failing at stu…
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