Host Suzanne LaGrande interviews local author Jessica Maxwell about her spiritual memoir, Roll Around Heaven. A travel and nature magazine writer with an allergy to religion, Jessica meets a pig farmer who turns out to be a spiritual teacher and launches her on spiritual journey which includes seeing auras, banishing evil spirits with Buddhist Lamas, sharing Celtic Revelations on the isle of Iona, and learning an abiding respect for all paths to God.

For more information about Jessica Maxwell's book Roll Around Heaven, visit her website: http://rollaroundheaven.com

Host Jim Schumock speaks with T.C. Boyle about his thirteenth novel, When the Killing's Done, which takes up some of the environmental themes of earlier novels such as A Friend of the Earth and The Tortilla Curtain, and stories like “Carnal Knowledge,” “Top of the Food Chain,” “Tooth and Claw.” It is set in the past decade on the California Channel Islands, where a rather testy turf war was fought between animal rights activists and the biologists of the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy over the elimination of non-native species of plants and animals, and this provided the inspiration for the book. Boyle says that the novel "is a series of dramatic confrontations between those who say nay and those who say yea, but, as readers will I hope discover, such distinctions become increasingly more complex and ethically challenging. Just how precious is any given life — and who gets to decide?" 

Host Kathleen Stephenson speaks with Jason Felch, co-author with Ralph Frammolino, of "Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World's Richest Museum." Felch talks about the illegal trade of looted antiquities and how some at the Getty Museum worked with networks of criminals to obtain illicit treasures.

Science fiction and fantasy writer China Mieville has won nearly every award in the genre and has caught the attention of mainstream publications from the New York Times to the Guardian with the depth of his imagination and the height of his erudition. David Naimon interviews him about his new, much anticipated, book "Embassytown," a book Ursula Le Guin describes as follows: "Embassytown is a fully achieved work of art…Works on every level, providing compulsive narrative, splendid intellectual rigour and risk, moral sophistication, fine verbal fireworks and sideshows, and even the old-fashioned satisfaction of watching a protagonist become more of a person than she gave promise of being.”