Showing results by author "Susan Orlean" in All Categories

After moving to Los Angeles, Susan Orlean became fascinated by a mysterious local crime that has gone unsolved since it was carried out on the morning of 29th April 1986: who set fire to the Los Angeles Public Library, ultimately destroying more than 400,000 books, and perhaps even more perplexing, why? With her characteristic humour, insight and compassion, Orlean uses this terrible event as a lens through which to tell the story of all libraries—their history, their meaning and their uncertain future as they adapt and redefine themselves in a digital world.

In Susan Orlean's mesmerizing true story of beauty and obsession is John Laroche, a renegade plant dealer and sharply handsome guy, in spite of the fact that he is missing his front teeth and has the posture of al dente spaghetti. In 1994, Laroche and three Seminole Indians were arrested with rare orchids they had stolen from a wild swamp in south Florida that is filled with some of the world's most extraordinary plants and trees. Laroche had planned to clone the orchids and then sell them for a small fortune to impassioned collectors.

"How we interact with animals has preoccupied philosophers, poets and naturalists for ages," writes Susan Orlean. Since the age of six, when Orlean wrote and illustrated a book called Herbert the Near-Sighted Pigeon, she's been drawn to stories about how we live with animals, and how they abide by us. Now, in On Animals, she examines animal-human relationships through the compelling tales she has written over the course of her celebrated career.

One of art's purest challenges is to translate a human being into words. The New Yorker magazine has met this challenge more often and more successfully than any other modern American journal. Starting with its light fantastic evocations of the glamorous and the idiosyncratic in the '20s and continuing to the present, with complex pictures of such contemporaries as Marlon Brando and Richard Pryor, The New Yorker's Profiles have presented readers with a vast and brilliant portrait gallery.

Susan Orlean has a full-on phobia of flying - an epic inconvenience for an author on a national book tour. With her trademark curiosity, she decides to rewire her thinking through hypnosis. Along the way, Susan discovers a lot about the unconscious mind, suggestibility, Mesmer, Freud, today’s cutting-edge treatments, and the dulling power of a sonorous voice. Most of all, she learns what it takes to close her eyes, open them again at thirty thousand feet, and finally be able to exhale. And you can too.

The life and times of a girl who has always loved animals, or how I went from dreaming about Rin Tin Tin to having dogs, cats, chickens, fish, cattle, turkeys, and guinea fowl, with guest appearances by horses, lions, and canaries.

My Kind of Place takes listeners on a series of remarkable journeys in a uniquely witty and sophisticated travel audiobook. In this irresistible collectino of adventures far and near, Susan Orlean coducts a tour of the world via its subcultures, from the heart of the African music scene in Paris to the World Taxidermy Championships in Springfield, Illinois, and even into her own apartment, where she imagines a very famous houseguest taking advantage of her hospitality.

Writer Susan Orlean (The Orchid Thief, The New Yorker) and actor Sarah Thyre (Strangers with Candy, Late Night w/ Conan O'Brien) co-host CRYBABIES, a deeply funny, often intimate, and surprisingly moving podcast about the things that make us cry. Each episode features guests of every creative stripe - writers, actors, musicians, comedians - who discuss the music, books, movies, television, and other cultural cues that make them weepy. These candid conversations with your favorite artists make CRYBABIES an original, must-listen podcast. Looking for the archives? All episodes older than 6 months...

Kwabena Oppong, who is the king and supreme ruler of the African Ashanti tribespeople living in the United States of America, has a throne in his living room. The American Ashanti king is elected every two years from the ranks of an Ashanti social and cultural organization called the Asanteman Association of the United States of America, Inc. The first stateside king, Kwadwo Tuffuor, was a plumber. The second, Kusi Appouh, repaired air-conditioners and refrigerators. Kwabena Oppong is the third king; he drives a cab.

He is old enough to begin imagining that he will someday get married, but at 10 he is still convinced that the best thing about being married will be that he will be allowed to sleep in his clothes. His father once observed that living with Colin was like living with a Martian who had done some reading on American culture. As it happens, Colin is not especially sad or worried about the prospect of growing up, although he sometimes frets over whether he should be called a kid or a grown-up; he has settled on the word kid-up.