Authors Between the Covers: What It Takes to Write Your Heart Out

Gretchen Rubin was clerking for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor when she realized that what she really wanted to be was a writer. Since then, she has written several books, including the best-selling “Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill,” and her uber-popular “The Happiness Project: Or, why I spent a year trying to sing in the morning, clean my closets, fight right, read Aristotle, and generally have more fun.” Best-selling author Dan Pink said of the book, “ThisClick here to listen to the podcast!

LSD? Ecstasy? Really? Yes, insists Tom Shroder, author of “Acid Test.” In his new book, he makes a convincing argument and encourages us to open our minds to the fact that lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) can heal. The former Washington Post Magazine editor Tom Shroder was a 21-year-old college journalist, when the idea started percolating. He had noticed an article about a charismatic hippie with a pet wolf who was building a house in the woods. His name was RickClick here to listen to the podcast!

Jim Barnes is a book editor and director of the IPPY Awards, shorthand for the Independent Publisher Book Awards. He has been involved with the program since 1997. What are the IPPY’s and why have hundreds of self-published authors applied to win the coveted medallion? We’ll learn all about it in this podcast, plus: Jim gives us the skinny on the independent book publishing world. He shares facts and figures on this growth industry, as well as the down sideClick here to listen to the podcast!

Journalist and author Meg Cox has been earning her living as a writer since graduating from Northwestern University in 1975. She was hired as a staff writer by the Wall Street Journal in 1977, at age 24, and worked at the WSJ in Chicago and New York for 17 years. Her beats included financial futures, agriculture, the business of the arts, and publishing. Since the birth of her son, Max, in 1994, Meg has written for many national magazines —Click here to listen to the podcast!

From a fatal car crash and the death of a parent, to the drama of comforting a sick child and coping with infidelity, life’s greatest emotional challenges play out in the pages of Caroline Leavitt’s books. These scenarios are the stuff of nightmares. But Leavitt’s engaging writing style, character development, and ability to write a book you can’t put down, make this title a must-read. “I’m always obsessed with what pulls people together, and what tugs them apart, particularly families,”Click here to listen to the podcast!

Do you want to get more of what you want, improve your relationships, and enjoy life’s deeper rewards? That’s the ambitious goal that Harvard lecturer Erica Ariel Fox achieves in her new book, Winning From Within: A breakthrough method for leading, living, and lasting change, “The goal of the book is to provide a map for understanding your inner world and a method for sorting yourself out,” explains Fox, who notes the principles of the book were developed from herClick here to listen to the podcast!

“The Art Forger” turned Author B.A. Shapiro into an overnight success—more than two decades after she started writing books. A fantastic story centers on the infamous art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—still the largest unsolved art theft in history—one of the stolen Degas paintings is delivered to the Boston studio of a young artist. The main character, Claire Roth, has entered into a Faustian bargain with a powerful gallery owner by agreeing to forge the Degas in exchangeClick here to listen to the podcast!

Bestselling author Po Bronson is author of six books including his latest “Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing,” which he co-authored with fellow bestselling author Ashley Merryman. Their first book, “NurtureShock, upends what you might think of as good parenting. In this new book, the authors touch on an equally sensitive nerve—the science of competition. Chock full of prodigious research and keen analysis, they answer questions including: What are the differences between a winning and losing performance? WhyClick here to listen to the podcast!

All across the globe, small children spontaneously speak of previous lives, beg to be taken “home,” pine for mothers and husbands and mistresses from another life, and know things that there seems to be no normal way for them to know. For 37 years, Dr. Ian Stevenson traveled the world from Lebanon to suburban Virginia, investigating and documenting more than two thousand of these cases of past-life memory. Tom Shroder is the only journalist who has had the privilege ofClick here to listen to the podcast!