Charles Ruas with Klaus Kertess who has been a major influence on the NY art scene in his capacity as a dealer, curator and critic making him an astute commentator on the subject. His writings on artists are in a collection called See, Written.

Shachtman discusses his 2011 work, The Life And Thoughts of Eric Hoffer, the iconoclast famed in his day as the Longshoreman philosopher who defined the term "True Believer" analyzing the similarities between the extreme right and the extreme left.

Poet Eileen Myles reads passages from and discusses her autobiographical novel, Inferno, a vivid and brilliant recreation of the gritty days in the Greenwich Village of the sixties, and the tempering through fire to forge her identity as a poet.

Host Charles Ruas speaks with Wang Ping about her recent collection of poetry The Magic Whip. Here the writer and scholar confesses how she discovered the power of Chinese characters - by studying Ezra Pound and translating for Allen Ginsberg.