The Avid Reader Show

About The Avid Reader Show

The Avid Reader is a podcast for book lovers. Tune in for interviews, recommendations, and insider news from Sam Hankin, host and owner of independent bookstore Wellington Square Bookshop - www.wellingtonsquarebooks.com

Publisher

Samuel Hankin

Category

arts · fiction · leisure

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

2 Dec 2010

Latest episode

24 Jun 2026

Latest episodes

5 of 786 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   24 Jun 2026TRANSCRIPT

   Episode 788: Keza MacDonald - Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play

   Keza MacDonald, video games journalist, interviews industry experts about Nintendo's game-changing history and cultural impact, revealing the innovative solutions behind its creative triumphs.

2. 

   30 Apr 2026TRANSCRIPT

   Episode 787: Ancient Algorithms - Katrine ØGaard Jensen

   In Ancient Algorithms, Katrine gaard Jensen mistranslates, rewrites, and remixes her award-winning translations of Danish Ursula Andkj r Olsen's poetry based on a series of self-imposed rules and rituals in collaboration with poets Sawako Nakayasu, Aditi Machado, CAConrad, Baba Badji, Paul Cunningham, and Ursula Andkj r Olsen herself. Envisioned as a shared debut, this collection of collaborative poems is equal parts exercise and exorcism, a haunting of literary influences that repositions translation as the very act of writing--exploring what it means for something to be an original, a translation, a poem.Katrine Øgaard Jensen is a Danish poet and translator based in New York. She is a recipient of several fellowships and awards, including the National Translation Award in Poetry, the Kenyon Review's Peter Taylor Fellowship, and the Danish Arts Foundation's Young Artistic Elite Fellowship. Her translations include Third-Millennium Heart (Action Books 2017), Outgoing Vessel (Action Books 2021), and My Jewel Box (Action Books 2022) by Ursula Andkjær Olsen, as well as To The Most Beautiful by Mette Moestrup (co-im-press 2024). Since 2016, she has taught Creative Writing and Literary Translation at Columbia University, where she served as Acting Director of Literary Translation at Columbia (LTAC) from 2019-2020.Buy the book from Wellington Square Bookshop - https://wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9781956046434

3. 

   29 Apr 2026TRANSCRIPT

   Episode 786: Elegy in Blue - Mark Helprin

   Told in an exceptional literary voice, mixing comedy and tragedy, Elegy in Blue is a hymn to New York, memory, loyalty, and love.High in a subsidized studio apartment, the unnamed 82-year-old narrator of Elegy in Blue looks out across the rooftops of Brooklyn all the way to the sea.His distinguished career on Wall Street is in ruins, his mansion in Brooklyn Heights has been burned to the ground, and most of all, his father, his son, and his wife—the stunningly beautiful and equally kind Clare—have been taken from him, one by one, over the decades, by war and an act of violence.Now his “allegiance is to his ghosts.” He’s almost lost to memory, reflection, and a purposeful letting go of life. But when violence threatens to destroy another family, he takes drastic action in hope of restoring a portion of justice to the world.Can he fashion his life into an elegy, one that heals a broken heart and relieves the sting of death?Mark Helprin is the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of Paris in the Present Tense, Winter’s Tale, In Sunlight and in Shadow, A Soldier of the Great War, Freddy and Fredericka, The Pacific, Swan Lake, Ellis Island, Memoir from Antproof Case, and numerous other works.Buy the book from Wellington Square Bookshop - https://wellingtonsquarebooks.com/book/9781419786082

Inside a recent episode

Episode 788: Keza MacDonald - Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play

Published 24 Jun 2026 · Transcript excerpt

[…] I was a very bookish kid. I learned to read very young, and I spent my whole childhood reading things like The Chronicles of Narnia, getting very absorbed in fantasy worlds. And my route into video games wasn't playing in the arcades, it was playing adventure games like Zelda and like Mario. And what I found there was something that fed my imagination. to the same extent as the fantasy stories that I was obsessed with at that age fed my imagination. I would put the game down and then go away and think about it, draw things about it, write stuff about it. It really feeds you creatively in a way that I think was very underappreciated at the time. […]

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

3.6 / 5

43 ratings

Spotify

3.7 / 5

15 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 57 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

78

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

89

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Guest appearances

Books guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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