Madison BookBeat

Stu Levitan, Andrew Thomas, Sara Batkie, David Ahrens, Lisa Malawski
  • 5.0 (5)
  • Books
  • Updated Bimonthly

Madison BookBeat highlights local Wisconsin authors and authors coming to Madison for book events. It airs every Monday afternoon at 1pm on WORT FM.

  1. 3d ago

    Chloe Benjamin on writing into the unknown

    On this episode of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie talks with author Chloe Benjamin about her new novel, Understory. At the end of the world, biologist Laurel Salter is hiding from everything she’s ever known. For ten hours a day, six days per week, she works as a dishwasher at McMurdo Station, an isolated research base in Antarctica. She tells no one that before she arrived, she was a renowned young scientist with a promising career, a husband, and a family. But even in this remote outpost, Laurel can’t outrun her past. When a strange light appears across the ice—and draws a group of physicists to McMurdo—her former husband, Eli, won’t be far behind. Laurel is captivated by the Arc: its surreal glow; the way it seems almost alive. And though Eli is reluctant to test her wildest theory, Laurel is convinced that the Arc leads down a rabbit hole, and into a world they can barely imagine. Can she persuade him to risk everything to fix the burden that hangs between them—to turn back the clock and live their story a second time? The book is now available from Putnam. Chloe Benjamin is the author of The Immortalists, a New York Times bestseller, and The Anatomy of Dreams. A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, LibraryReads favorite, and #1 Indie Next pick, The Immortalists was named a best book of 2018 by NPR, The Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, and others. The Anatomy of Dreams received the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award and was long listed for the 2014 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Originally from San Francisco, CA, Benjamin is a graduate of Vassar College and the M.F.A. in fiction at the University of Wisconsin. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages. She lives with her husband and two Maine Coon cats in the San Francisco Bay Area. Chloe will be appearing at the Central Branch of the Madison Public Library on Wednesday, September 9th.

  2. Jul 13

    Tara Mulder on what ancient birth stories can teach us

    On this episode of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie is joined by UW classics professor and author Tara Mulder to discuss her new book, A Womb of One's Own, now available from University of California Press. In the well-trod history of the Roman Empire, a pivotal moment has long gone unnoticed: It was in ancient Rome that medical men first set their sights on childbirth, the traditional domain of female midwives. Taking us to the dawn of Western obstetrics, A Womb of One's Own offers a feminist account of how, against a long tradition of midwifery, male doctors began claiming authority in reproductive matters, with an emphasis on theoretical rather than practical knowledge. Their intrusion paved the way for the later criminalization of midwives and the cloaking of childbirth in secrecy and shame. Yet communities of Roman women continued to help each other through the journey from preconception to postpartum, guided by their own experience and the expertise of midwives. Tara Mulder recovers stories of ancient women living and resisting as they sought autonomy over their bodies and their health. Recounting their experiences in vivid, intimate detail, she reveals how old our modern conflicts about birth truly are. Tara Mulder specializes in medicine, sex, and gender in antiquity, focusing particularly on the history of reproduction. She has published articles on the history and reception of reproduction, midwifery, abortion, gender and sexuality, and herbalism. Her academic trade monograph, A Womb of One’s Own: Childbirth in Ancient Rome tells a composite birth story, made up of the experiences of multiple (mostly) women. Other current projects include editing A Cultural History of Pregnancy and Childbirth in the Ancient World for Bloomsbury, and producing a translation of Metrodora’s Conditions of the Womb, a Byzantine medical text written by a woman. She is an assistant professor in the Classical and Ancient Near Eastern Studies department at UW Madison. As the daughter of a homebirth midwife, she has assisted in over two dozen births.

  3. Jun 30

    Dennis McNally, "The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties."

    McNally transcript Stu Levitan welcomes historian, author and music publicist Dennis McNally, whose new book is The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties. And while it’s mainly about San Francisco, with a bit of New York and London thrown in, it does feature several individuals and events pertaining directly to Madison. So that’s why you get to hear about it here. Dennis’s first book was include Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation and America, an outgrowth of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst; then came  A Long Strange Trip: The Inside Story of the Grateful Dead, which he wrote after serving many years as the band’s publicist; and in 2015 the award-winning On Highway 61: Music, Race and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom, tracking American music from minstrelsy to Bob Dylan. He also edited Jerry on Jerry, transcripts of conversations he had over the years with Jerry Garcia. Here’s our conversation about The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties.

  4. Jun 8

    Poet Lisa Fishman on the potential of space on a page

    On this episode of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie is joined by author Lisa Fishman to talk about her deubt novel, Write Back Now! Acclaimed poet Lisa Fishman’s debut novel tracks a peripatetic 1970s childhood and the uprooted friendship between girls who stay connected by mail, until they don’t. It opens in a borrowed house in wintry Nova Scotia, where the adult narrator faces the first-ever border closure between her two countries. Framed by these long-separated experiences, the novel keeps almost-beginning again as the narrator tries to figure out where she will be next by figuring out where she has been previously. Along the way, a dead horse, a lost crop, a miscarriage, an extra-tropical cyclone with hurricane-force winds, and more friendships between women emerge. Write Back Now! explores the tensions between experience and loss, imagination and memory, the real and the secretly real. It is now available from Guernica Editions. Lisa Fishman is the author of the story collection World Naked Bike Ride, short-listed for the ReLit Award for Short Fiction. Her fiction has appeared in The Fairy Tale Review, The Rupture, Guesthouse, Flash Boulevard, and Jerry Jazz Musician. A nominee for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and a Pushcart Prize, Fishman has published eight poetry books, including One Big Time; 24 Pages & other poems; Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition; The Happiness Experiment; and Dear, Read. Her poetry is anthologized in Best American Experimental Poetry, The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral Poetry, The Ecopoetry Anthology, and Fence Books’ Not for Mothers Only. With origins in both Montreal and the Detroit area, Fishman is a dual citizen who divides her time between Wisconsin and Eastern Canada. Write Back Now! is her first novel. You can learn more about Lisa on her page at Wave Books

  5. May 18

    Nancy Kathman, "Love, Cuba, Goats and Music"

    Stu Levitan welcomes Nancy Kathman, for a conversation about her engaging new memoir, “Love, Cuba, Goats and Music,” about her life cutting sugarcane in Cuba, co-founding the Southwest Dairy Goat Cooperative and exploring world music with the late Bob Queen, founder of so many of the hallmark east side music festivals.

  6. May 11

    Sahar Mustafah on writing about heritage in a time of genocide

    On this episode of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie is joined by author Sahar Mustafah to talk about her new novel, The Slightest Green. In the middle of dinner one evening, Intisar Jaber receives a phone call that will upend her quiet life in Chicago: her father is dying and she must go to Palestine to pay her final respects. But Intisar hasn't seen or heard from Hafez for nearly two decades, ever since he abandoned her and her mother to join the resistance. After a fateful mission, Hafez was thrown into the notorious Gahana Prison to serve a life sentence—permanently removed from her life. As soon as Intisar arrives in his village of Bayt al-Hawa, she discovers what it means to be a stranger in her ancestral land, the inheritance of loss, and the high price of freedom. Meanwhile, Hafez’s mother Sundus battles to save the home that she built with her husband from thieving hands. Will Intisar, her estranged granddaughter, help Sundus fight to reclaim it? Can they close the gaping distance between them before it’s too late? The daughter of immigrants, Sahar Mustafah explores her Palestinian heritage in her writing. She earned her MFA in Fiction from Columbia College where she was a Follett Graduate Scholar. Her debut novel, The Beauty of Your Face, was named a The New York Times Book Review Notable Books of 2020 and one of Marie Claire Magazine’s 2020 Best Fiction by Women. It was a Finalist for the 2021 Palestine Book Award, long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel Award, and chosen for the Los Angeles Times “United We Read.” Her recent fiction is featured in Stories from the Center of the World: New Middle East Fiction and The View from Gaza published in The Massachusetts Review. She was awarded a 2023 Jack Hazard Fellowship from New Literary Project and an Illinois Arts Council Grant. Mustafah writes and teaches outside of Chicago. Sahar will be in town to discuss The Slightest Green at A Room of One’s Own on May 17th.

  7. May 5

    Jeff Oloizia's "Writing Forward" Wisconsin Literary Podcast

    Jeff Oloizia was our guest on Book Beat with John Quinlan discussing his new weekly WI Literary Podcast "Writing Forward," which debuted on May 6th. We learned about the purpose of the cutting edge podcast, and about the man behind it. The Brookfield native and 2007 UW alum left Wisconsin post-graduation, not necessarily expecting to return, settling into "an itinerant existence" in exotic places like Japan, San Francisco and New York as a journalist, and eventually earning a professorship as part of graduate studies in Wilmington, North Carolina. (This included a stint as an editor at the New York Times.) As reported in this week's Cap Times, he once thought he had leave Madison to live a life of literature. “It felt important to leave and go to the places where I thought writers were,” Oloizia said. After more than a dozen years interviewing famous people in these exotic locales, he returned home to Madison in 2020 to write extraordinary stories about the Wisconsin everyman as a prolific contributor to publications like Madison Magazine. And this week, he creates a literary podcast interviewing Wisconsin authors walking a similar path back to their own roots here. A fascinating show about a fascinating guy. New editions of "Writing Forward" are available each week wherever podcasts are available. For more on Jeff, his podcast, and the overall scope of his work, visit his website at www.jeffoloizia.com .   Photo courtesy of Jeff Oloizia

  8. Apr 27

    Dean Robbins, Books For Kids

    Stu Levitan welcomes author and editor Dean Robbins, for a discussion about his career writing illustrated books for children – 13 of them at last count, inspirational stories about such role models as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., polio-eradicator Dr. Jonas Salk, NASA computer scientist Margaret Hamilton, the young Pakistani Noble Laureate Malala Yousafzai, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, suffrage leader Alice Paul, human rights activists Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass, astronaut Alan Beam , and more.  Dean’s books have been favorably reviewed in the New York Times and Daily News, USA Today, the Smithsonian Air & Space magazine, Publisher’s Weekly, Forbes magazine, along with the Madison, Milwaukee and Wisconsin statewide media.     Steady BookBeat listeners will recall Dean’s appearance last July for a conversation about his first book for adult readers, Wisconsin Idols: 100 Heroes Who Changed the State, the World, And Me, from the Wisconsin Historical Society Press. Longtime Madisonians may remember Dean as the arts editor for Isthmus from 1991 to 2008, when he succeeded Marc Eisen as editor. Dean moved to the UW in 2014 as Communications Director for the Division of Continuing Studies and since 2019 has been editor of the alumni magazine On Wisconsin. It was a pleasure to welcome him back to Madison BookBeat.

See All (87)

Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
5 Ratings

About

Madison BookBeat highlights local Wisconsin authors and authors coming to Madison for book events. It airs every Monday afternoon at 1pm on WORT FM.

Information

  • Creator
    Stu Levitan, Andrew Thomas, Sara Batkie, David Ahrens, Lisa Malawski
  • Years Active
    2020 - 2026
  • Episodes
    87
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2025 Madison BookBeat
  • Show Website
    Madison BookBeat