David Evanier, as a novelist and a biographer, is fascinated by quintessential New York's world within worlds. His obsession with the flowering of Italian American singers has resulted in 2011's All the Things You Are, the Life of Tony Bennett.

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.

Leave it to the writers to make sense of this election! Listen as Carol Brightman, Laura Flanders and Anne Waldman make mincemeat of every reigning political notion while cracking the coded language we use to communicate hot-button ideas.

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.

It's never too early or late in the day to get ready for dinner! Listen close as host Charles Ruas speaks with author Lawrence Osborne about his tasty new book, The Accidental Connoisseur: An Irreverent Journey Through the Wine World.