Books

This week on The Reading Life, we talk with Paul Willis, executive director of the Saints and Sinners Literary Festival, and mystery novelist Greg Herren, one of the festival speakers. We visit with actress turned short story writer Diane Ladd, whose new collection is "A Bad Afternoon for a Piece of Cake," and we check in with a merry band of book givers on World Book Night.

This week on The Reading Life: Poet Megan Burns, whose new book is Sound and Basin, and University of New Orleans Creative Writing Workshop director Rick Barton, who’s celebrating the 20th anniversary of his novel Black and White on the Rocks.

We'll also talk with writer/philanthropist Randy Fertel, founder of The Ron Ridenhour Prizes, and Seth Rosenfeld, who received the book prize this year for Subversives: The FBI's War on Student Radicals and Reagan's Rise to Power.

This week on The Reading Life, Susan will be talking with Jean Morgan Meaux, whose new book is In Pursuit of Alaska: An Anthology of Traveler's Tales, 1879-1909.

This week on The Reading Life, Susan talks with Augusten Burroughs, author of Running with Scissors and This Is How: How to Survive what You Think You Can't, and Erin Greenwald of the Historic New Orleans Collection, editor of A Company Man: The Remarkable French-Atlantic Voyage of a Clerk for the Company of the Indies, A Memoir by Marc-Antoine Caillot, describes the lost and found history of a fascinating manuscript.