Julia Corcoran

A few of the Lopate Show staff's favorite interviews of the year.

Some Lopate Show staff members and contributors share our favorite books of the year.

The season for beach reading might be drawing to a close, but if you're looking for a good book to read, here are some recommendations from producers and contributors of the Lopate Show.

This year, the Leonard Lopate Show spoke with many of the actors, directors, and writers of films nominated for Oscars in 2013. The Academy Awards are being held Sunday, February 24.

The 2012 National Book Award winners were announced today, and both have been on the show to talk about their books! Louise Erdrich won for her novel The Round House, and Katherine Boo won for her masterful portrait of life in the slums of Mumbai, India, Behind the Beautiful Forevers.

And R. A. Dickey, Mets' knuckleballer won the Cy Young Award as the best pitcher in the National League.

When asked how the candidates intend to address the issue of unequal pay for women in the workplace in the debate Tuesday night,  President Obama referred to the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which was the first bill he signed into law when he took office. Mr. Obama said: "It's named after this amazing woman who had been doing the same job as a man for years, found out that she was getting paid less, and the Supreme Court said that she couldn't bring suit because she should have found about it earlier, whereas she had no way of finding out about it. So we fixed that."

Lilly Ledbetter told her story on the Leonard Lopate Show in March, and you can listen to to that interview here!

The 2012 National Book Award nominees were announced this week, and many of the finalists in the fiction and nonfiction categories have been on the Lopate Show to talk about their work. We love great conversations about great books! Listen to those interviews:

Fiction

Junot Diaz on This is How You Lose Her

Louise Erdrich on The Round House

Ben Fountain on Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

Kevin Powers on The Yellow Birds 

Nonfiction

Katherine Boo on Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Robert Caro on The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Passage of Power

Nada Bakri on her late husband Anthony Shadid's memoir House of Stone. Anthony Shadid died while covering the conflict in Syria in February 2012.

Writer Junot Diaz, whose 2007 novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and whose most recent book is This Is How You Lose Her, was awarded a MacArthur "genius" grant. You can listen to Leonard's conversations with him about both of those books.

Listen: Junot Diaz's This Is How You Lose Her, September 11, 2012

Listen: The Wondrous Debut Novel of Junot Diaz, October 1, 2007

Junot Diaz on Studio 360 February 25, 2011, live in the Greene Space

After Wyclef Jean's interview with Leonard, in which he said he wanted to sample Leonard on his next album, he sat down at the piano in WNYC's green room and played a song.

Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of Network, a Catholic social justice organization, addressed the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday. She was one of the Nuns on the Bus, and she spoke with guest host Julie Burstein in August about her advocacy work for the poor and why she was critical of Paul Ryan's budget. At the convention she didn't expressly endorse President Barack Obama, but she did speak out against the Romney-Ryan budget, saying it would hurt struggling families.

Writer David Rakoff died Thursday at the age of 47. His humorous essays examined a wide range of subjects, from his annoyance at first-world problems to undertaking a 21-day fast to his own bout with cancer. His most recent essay collection,  Half Empty, won the 2011 Thurber Prize for American Humor. He was a frequent contributor to This American Life, and the author of the essay collections Don’t Get Too Comfortable and Fraud. He responded to our Guest Picks question “What’s one thing you are a fan of that people might not expect?” with “As someone often seen as hating everything and being immune to pleasure, which isn’t true, I love everything (except sports). I’m just scared of it.” He was on the Leonard Lopate Show a number of times, and was always a generous guest. You can listen to those interviews below.

Seventeen-year-old boxer Claressa Shields won a gold medal in the Olympics Thursday. It’s the first time women have competed in boxing in the Olympics, and it has been her goal to box in London since 2009. Shields was on the Leonard Lopate Show in February, along with her coach Jason Crutchfield and former pro fighter Christy Halbert, and you can listen to that interview here.

Shields and the other women who competed for a chance to fight in the 2012 Olympics were the subject of a radio documentary produced by WNYC’s Marianne McCune. Go For It: Life Lessons From Girl Boxers.

Robert Hughes brought great gusto and eloquence to the craft of art criticism.  The native Australian could be scathing in his opinions, saying the art world had "finally turned into a kind of entropic, institutionalized parody of its old self.”  He just died August 6, at the age of 74. You can hear his interview with Leonard from 2006, when he described his life before, and after, a traumatic car crash in 1999, from which he’d never quite recovered.

Industrial hygienist and environmental health expert Monona Rossol was here last week to talk about the safety concerns about fire retardants. We got a lot of comments and questions during that segment, and Monona has responded with answers.

On March 27 filmmakers Nina Rosenblum and Daniel Allentuck were on the show to talk about their documentary  “Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League’s New York.” Their film is opening in New York tonight at the Quad Cinema, and the filmmakers are doing a Q&A at the 7:00 screening.

Listen to the interview here!

Some choice quotations about bicycles, art, and tattoo care heard on this week's show.

A collection of the amazing, profound and funny things we heard on the Lopate Show this week.

Topher Grace really enjoyed making out with Scarlett Johansson in the movie “In Good Company.”

There's going to be a lot of action (drilling for oil, mining, shipping, melting ice) in the Arctic very soon.

Humans have been making cheese for 4,000 years.

This story about Guatemala is amazing. (You should also check out This America Life's episode about it.)

It’s better to get your vitamins from eating a well-balanced diet than to get them from supplements.

When the Pulitzer Prize winners were announced in April, many people were surprised that no fiction award was given this year. The publishing industry is understandably irritated by this decision—or indecision. Sig Gissler, the administrator of the Pulitzers for Columbia University, explained that a three-person jury chooses three finalists out of hundreds of books, then sends the finalists to the Pulitzer board, which, this year, was unable to determine a winner. The finalists were Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!, Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, and David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, published after the author’s death.

Susan Larson, a Pulitzer fiction juror, spoke with NPR’s Lynn Neary about the board’s not picking a winner.

Novelist and bookstore owner Anne Patchett wrote an Op-Ed in the New York Times about her disappointment. 

The New York Times asked eight experts to weigh in on who they thought deserved the award this year.

Weigh in: What novels do you think should have won this year? Leave a comment below to let us know!