The great poet, essayist, novelist, memoirist and TV host Clive James joins the show to talk about poetry, mortality, TV, Cultural Amnesia, Australia, his literary legacy and how his showbiz career helped and hurt it, and a lot more.

Prue Shaw joins the show to talk about Reading Dante: From Here to Eternity. We talk about our favorite parts of the Dante's Commedia, the poem's transformation for her over the decades, Dante's challenge of expressing the inexpressible (especially in Paradiso), the fate of Jews in Dante's afterworld, and the reasons why we all -- poets and non-poets, believers and non-believers -- should be reading Dante.

Witold Rybczynski discusses his newest book, How Architecture Works: A Humanist's Toolkit, and talks about that humanist approach to buildings, the problems with Brutalist architecture, the importance of having a canon of great buildings, the ways that digital technology are changing the practice of architecture, why there's no such thing as a 'theory of architecture', the reasons Philadelphia has such marvelous buildings, what it means to 'review' a building, why the 'Starchitect' phenomenon doesn't make for better buildings, and whether it's possible to improve the appearance of malls

Walter Kirn joins the show to talk about his latest book, Blood Will Out: The True Story of a Murder, a Mystery, and a Masquerade, all about his relationship to fraudster/murderer Clark Rockefeller. And then it gets complicated.

Renowned literary translator Anthea Bell joins the show to talk about getting her start in foreign languages, the schisms in the world of literary translation, the most challenging authors she's worked on, the one language she'd love to learn, and translating everything from Asterix to Zweig!