Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference

Abraham Verghese, author and physician, shares his inspiring journey from Ethiopia to becoming a writer and doctor. Topics include the power of literature in shaping identity, analyzing medical clues from patients' nails, encountering HIV-infected patients, and finding inspiration and transcendence in writing.

In this episode, three of our most cogent and influential writers on global affairs and history – Anne Applebaum, Robert Kagan, and Evan Osnos – discuss the geopolitical ramifications of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the ongoing battle between democracy and authoritarianism, Vladimir Putin’s endgame, China’s power plays, and the future of the Western alliance, among other urgent questions.Anne Applebaum is a staff writer for The Atlantic and a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, the author of such books as RED FAMINE: STALIN’S WAR ON UKRAINE; GULAG: A HISTORY; and, most recently, TWILIGHT OF DEMOCRACY: THE SEDUCTIVE LURE OF AUTHORITARIANSIM.Robert Kagan is a senior fellow at Brookings, a contributing columnist at the Washington Post, and the author, most recently, of THE GHOST AT THE FEAST: AMERICA AND THE COLLAPSE OF WORLD ORDER, 1900-1941.Evan Osnos is a New Yorker staff writer, and the author of WILDLAND: THE MAKING OF AMERICA’S FURY as well as the National Book Award-winning AGE OF AMBITION: CHASING FORTUNE, TRUTH AND FAITH IN THE NEW CHINA. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Beyond the Page host John Burnham Schwartz talks with New Yorker staff writer Tad Friend, a longtime contributor to the magazine’s Letter from California and the author of two funny, poignant family memoirs, Cheerful Money and In the Early Times. In a notable testament to Friend’s curiosity, range, and talent, over the years his work has been chosen for “The Best American Travel Writing,” “The Best American Sports Writing,” “The Best American Crime Reporting,” and “The Best Technology Writing” – not to mention the James Beard award for feature writing he won in 2020. In this episode, a recent piece of Friend’s in the magazine about “a conservation N.G.O. that infiltrates wildlife-trafficking rings to bring them down” becomes a conversational prism for a larger discussion about the writer’s methodology and philosophy of long-form journalism. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, SVWC Literary Director John Burnham Schwartz and writer Eric Schwartzel go Hollywood. Schwartzel covers the film industry in The Wall Street Journal's Los Angeles bureau and his first book “Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy,” detailed the growing influence of China on the American entertainment industry. John and Eric discuss Hollywood’s exestensial crisis, the China problem, and some important wars: culture wars, streaming wars, and Star Wars.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with editor and Canadian publishing titan Louise Dennys about her extraordinary career working side by side with writers including Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan… to name just a few. Dennys talks about how she got started, what it’s like to nurture and promote some of the strongest literary voices of a generation, and the importance of freedom of expression, now more than ever. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, Anne Taylor Fleming talks with award-winning food writer Aleksandra Crapanzano about her delightful and accessible new cookbook GATEAU: The Surprising Simplicity of French Cakes. The author shares her memories of being a child in Paris and talks about her dual passions for cooking and writing.  Aleksandra Crapanzano is a James Beard-winning writer and dessert columnist for The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of The London Cookbook and Eat. Cook. LA., and her work has been widely anthologized, most notably in Best American Food Writing. She has been a frequent contributor to Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Food52, Saveur, Town & Country, Elle, The Daily Beast, Departures, Travel + Leisure, and The New York Times Magazine. She has years of experience in the film world, consults in the food space, and serves on several boards with a focus on sustainability. Aleksandra grew up in New York and Paris, received her BA from Harvard and her MFA from NYU, where she has also taught writing. She is married to the writer John Burnham Schwartz, and they live in New York with their son, Garrick, and Bouvier des Flandres, Griffin. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing’s brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun Valley is known for.In this episode of Beyond teh Page, John Burnham Schwartz talks with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan about her novel The Candy House—a sequel, of sorts, to 2010’s A Visit From the Goon Squad—which riffs brilliantly on memory, authenticity and the allure of new technology, and about what she learned about fiction writing from her son’s love of baseball statistics.Jennifer Egan is the author of six previous books of fiction: Manhattan Beach, winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Keep; the story collection Emerald City; Look at Me, a National Book Award Finalist; and The Invisible Circus. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, McSweeney’s, and The New York Times Magazine. Her website is JenniferEgan.com. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, BEN RHODES, Barack Obama’s former Deputy National Security Advisor, sits down at the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright AYAD AKHTAR for a deeply informed conversation about the state of the world we are living in today, with the rise of authoritarian leaders and ethno-nationalism and the flood of disinformation enabling them — and what responsibility America must take for these threats to freedom across the globe. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this episode of Beyond the Page, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with Rebecca Donner, winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography for “All the Frequent Troubles of our Days.” The story of Donner's great-great aunt, Mildred Harnack, who as a young midwestern grad student moved to Berlin and became one of the leaders of the largest underground resistance group to Hitler in the 1930s and 40s, All the Frequent Troubles is both an intimate portrait of a courageous young woman and also the story of how a charismatic demagogue captured a country. Donner shares Mildred's story and also talks about the dogged scholarly research that helped her piece together her aunt's amazing life. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When artists and athletes age, what happens to their work? Does it ripen or rot? As our bodies decay, how – and why – do we keep going? In this episode, John Burnham Schwartz sits down with the ever-original and wittily ironic GEOFF DYER to discuss the author's own encounter with late middle age against the backdrop of the last days and last works of writers, painters, footballers, musicians, and tennis stars who’ve mattered to him throughout his life.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices