On this week’s Bookwork, Michael Silverblatt talks to Robert Alter about his book, The Book of Psalms: A Translation with Commentary.

From the Bookwork site: “Biblical scholar Robert Alter faces a barrage of questions: What are psalms? Who wrote them? If they are prayers, why does he consider them poems? If they are poems, why are they so repetitive? If repetition is crucial to psalms, how does it go beyond the rhythms of ancient Hebrew to address God and achieve solace?”

You can listen to the interview here.

On this morning’s Diane Rehm Show, Rehm talks to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich about the phrase she coined, “well-behaved women seldom make history,” which is also the title of Ulrich’s new book. Rehm and Ulrich discuss “how different groups have tried to appropriate it, and why certain women make history and why some get left behind.”

“I felt like it just happened,” said Ulrich about where the phrase came from. “I was working on an article on Puritan funeral sermons, called Virtuous Women Found, and I was trying to give these virtuous women a history. I was thinking about women that fit the sterotypes of the 17th century… went to church even when it snowed, never spoke up, did the right things… the stereotypical kind of thing that were celebrated in those sermons, and what i say is when people who really hold up the world–literally–are celebrated they are idealized into anynomity. They have no history beacuse they have no individuality, they just become icons. And a lot of my work has been devoted to break through those stereotypes and find real women.”

Rehm also talks to Ulrich about changes at Harvard regarding the role women now play at the university. Ulrich is the 300th Anniversary University Professor at Harvard and the author of the Pulitzer-prize winning A Midwife’s Tale.

You can listen to the interview at WAMU’s Web site.

Sultry meets sassy as Nigella Lawson drops by the Rachael Ray Show. In addition to chatting it up with the $40-a-day-meals-in-30-minutes host, Lawson, the author of Nigella Express: 130 Recipes for Good Food, Fast, shares some Thanksgiving recipes (butternut squash with pecans and blue cheese, and blackberry crisp) with, of course, a British twist.

You can catch the segment here, as well as an online exclusive backstage clip of Lawson talking about her book and a flambe incident.

It used to be that all you’d see on Lifetime were movies based on Danielle Steele books and Golden Girls reruns, but the cable network will be airing an adaptation of Kim Edwards’ The Memory Keeper’s Daughter. Variety reported that, in addition to Dermot Mulroney and Emily Watson, the made-for-TV film will star Gretchen Mol. Directed by Tuesdays With Morrie’s Mick Jackson, Mol’s character gives birth to twins, but is told one had Down syndrome and died during birth (the child was secretly raised by another woman). Mol is currently starring in 3:10 to Yuma. Memory is expected to hit our TVs in March.

Although the book has been out for a while, Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass is getting some publicity again, thanks to the upcoming film based on the book (yes, it was a book first). While we were shopping for some books over at Barnes and Noble’s online store, we noticed the company has posted a video of a recent in-store event, where Pullman talked about how he started writing the book and the filming of the film in England.

You can watch the video here.

Think the U.S. Constitution needs a rewrite to reflect modern times? So does Larry Sabato. The author of A More Perfect Constitution: 23 Proposals to Revitalize Our Constitution and Make America a Fairer Country, sat down with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer Show this morning on an election day. Sabato is the founder and director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. You can listen to the interview below, where he talks about topics such as amending the electoral college to reflect the popular vote and eliminate electors.

You can listen to the interview below.

If you missed last Saturday’s Good Food program on KCRW, then you missed a bunch of new interviews with cookbook authors. But being that it’s public radio, you can listen to the archive here.

First up is Fergus Henderson. The chef at London’s St. John restaurant is famous for creating fantastic, luxurious dishes using every part of an animal, like pigs’ feet and beef bone marrow, which, for many Americans, are parts you throw out. But savvy diners know that these are some of the best delicacies available, and Henderson offers such recipes in his new book, Beyond Nose to Tail. The chef talks to Evan Kleiman about his first commercial product, Unctuous Potential, a jelly made of pigs’ feet.

Playwright Eduardo Machado, one of the early Cuban exiles, recalls the dishes he knew in Tastes Like Cuba. Machado uses Cuban cuisine as a connection to his native country and family. One of Machado’s favorite food is coffee. “It’s the thing that made us feel the most Cuban when I was growing up,” says Machado. “I started drinking coffee when I was four years old, and I’d have coffee with raw milk brought in from my grandmother’s farm every morning, and they would boil it and put salt on it.”

In America’s Best Lost Recipes, Chris Kimball, founder/editor of Cook’s Illustrated and the host of America’s Test Kitchen on PBS, features 300 classic American recipes that were reader submitted (over 2,800 of them). And Patty Pinner talks pies in her book, Sweety Pies.

You can find all these interviews here.

This week on KCRW’s Bookworm, Michael Silverblatt talks with Veronica Gonzalez about her debut novel, Twin Time: Or How Death Befell Me. This modern fantasy follows Mona, who was “raised in northeast LA by her widowed immigrant father, a baker, [and grew up] believing her mother died minutes after her birth, and her twin brother was simply given away. Stifled by unnamable doubts as a child, when her father dies, Mona sets off on a quest to discover her long-lost twin brother. The journey takes her into the labyrinth of her own fabulations about her parents’ lives, and a dreamy Mexico City that exists only as cultural imagination. In the process she encounters a band of Nordic men, her Chinese double, a lascivious giant, and a tribe of feral children.”

“I found it fascinating because in a certain way, it’s a novel that almost can’t be written,” says Silverblatt. “This is a character who knows nothing factual about her existence. In fact, the reader knows more than she does. Therefore, this book becomes hard to narrate.” Gonzalez explained that she went about by writing the middle of the book first. “But I love the ambiguity of fiction. It was difficult to write, and I had to do a lot of revising to make things make sense.” says Gonzalez. “I’m much more interested in a diffused narrative.”

You can listen to the interview here.

Handsome, charming, and amusing Norwegian chef Andreas Viestad discussed his new book, Where Flavor Was Born, recently with Evan Kleiman on KCRW’s Good Food. Host of New Scandinavian Cooking on PBS and author of Kitchen of Light, Viestad combines Norwegian recipes with Provencal cooking. But in his new book, Viestad traces how the world came together through the spice trade and the Indian Ocean, and how many of the foods we eat got their flavor. Viestad regales us with an interesting story of a Frenchman who steals small trees and seeds of cloves and nutmeg to grow on Mauritius, at the risk of losing his life.

Listen to the interview here. You can find out more about Viestad here.

Ed Sikov talked with guest host Susan Page on the Diane Rehm Show about his biography, Dark Victory: The Life of Bette Davis. In addition to chronicling her rise in Hollywood, the book explores her upbringing, relationships, and studio battles.

From Sikov’s Web site: “Dark Victory is a twenty-first-century rethinking of this titanic actress, whose centenary will be in 2008. Treating her films at least as acutely as she herself did–and often more admiringly–Dark Victory traces Davis’s rise to stardom at Warner Bros., her powerful drive to wrangle and oppose, her bitter disappointments and sporadic moments of public triumph, her four failed marriages, and her strategies for continuing her career in the face of age and changing popular tastes. It covers Davis’s films on an equal footing with her personal life because she believed in her work and her work was terrific. Dark Victory takes that belief as a starting point. She wasn’t just a star but a gifted artist who changed the face of acting. This book respects her talent.”

You can listen to the interview here.