Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing’s brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens.

Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun Valley is known for.

To listen to other talks from the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, subscribe now on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever else you find your podcasts!

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing’s brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens.

Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun Valley is known for.

In this episode, three of our most cogent and influential writers on global affairs and history – Anne Applebaum, Robert Kagan, and Evan Osnos – discuss the geopolitical ramifications of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, the ongoing battle between democracy and authoritarianism, Vladimir Putin’s endgame, China’s power plays, and the future of the Western alliance, among other urgent questions.

To listen to other talks from the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, subscribe now on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever else you find your podcasts!

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing’s brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens.

Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun Valley is known for.

Beyond the Page host John Burnham Schwartz talks with New Yorker staff writer Tad Friend, a longtime contributor to the magazine’s “Letter from California” and the author of two funny, poignant family memoirs, Cheerful Money and In the Early Times. In a notable testament to Friend’s curiosity, range, and talent, over the years his work has been chosen for The Best American Travel Writing, The Best American Sports Writing, The Best American Crime Reporting, and The Best Technology Writing – not to mention the James Beard award for feature writing he won in 2020. In this episode, a recent piece of Friend’s in the magazine about “a conservation N.G.O. that infiltrates wildlife-trafficking rings to bring them down” becomes a conversational prism for a larger discussion about the writer’s methodology and philosophy of long-form journalism.

To listen to other talks from the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, subscribe now on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever else you find your podcasts!

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing’s brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens.

Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun Valley is known for.

In this episode of Beyond the Page, SVWC Literary Director John Burnham Schwartz and writer Eric Schwartzel go Hollywood. Schwartzel covers the film industry in The Wall Street Journal‘s Los Angeles bureau and his first book Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy, detailed the growing influence of China on the American entertainment industry. John and Eric discuss Hollywood’s existential crisis, the China problem, and some important wars: culture wars, streaming wars, and Star Wars.

To listen to other talks from the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, subscribe now on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever else you find your podcasts!

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing’s brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens.

Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun Valley is known for.

In this episode of Beyond the Page, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with editor and Canadian publishing titan Louise Dennys about her extraordinary career working side by side with writers including Salman Rushdie, Michael Ondaatje, Kazuo Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan… to name just a few. Dennys talks about how she got started, what it’s like to nurture and promote some of the strongest literary voices of a generation, and the importance of freedom of expression, now more than ever.

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From the interview:

Louise Dennys: An editor and even a publisher are, by and large, not visible. And I think that’s absolutely right. But they’re also two very different tasks. The editor’s task is to work very closely with the writer to help them achieve what it is they want to achieve, if they want that help or need that help.

And a publisher’s job is to make public the book to find the widest possible readership for the book, for the writer, and to champion that book around the world. So a publisher has to be a great champion and learn how to be a great champion of an editor.

You know, being a very good editor has to find a way to have that conversation with the writer prior to the publication, and that conversation can be immeasurably important. Some writers less so for others, and it’s one task to do whatever one can with smarts and understanding, to try to match the ambition of the writer and to try to bring that ambition to its fullest understanding on the pages themselves, not just in terms of individual sentences, although that can be obviously a really important part of it through language, but also just to really understand the ambition of the writer and try to meet them in that place and thereby become another ear for them, another eye for them, and to love the work as much as they do.

I don’t believe any editor can be a good editor unless you’re passionate about the book you’re working on. As a publisher, I would take an editor off the work on the book if that passion wasn’t clear to the editor or to the writer, because there has to be that genuine belief in finding the best possible route to a great book, whether it’s poetry, whether it’s fiction, nonfiction. It’s the same in that sense.

To listen to more of Louise Dennys and other talks from the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, subscribe now on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever else you find your podcasts!

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Louise Dennys is Executive Publisher and Executive Vice-President of Penguin Random House Canada, but also a “hands-on writer’s editor,” working directly with many of Canada’s most renowned writers, including Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, and Yann Martel. Some particularly interesting facts about Louise are that she started her own publishing house at age 25 (amazing, right?), is the founding publisher of the Canadian arm of Knopf and Vintage, is a past president of PEN Canada, and is a recipient of the Order of Canada for her contribution to Canadian culture.

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing’s brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun Valley is known for.

In this episode of Beyond the Page, Anne Taylor Fleming talks with award-winning food writer Aleksandra Crapanzano about her delightful and accessible new cookbook GATEAU: The Surprising Simplicity of French Cakes. The author shares her memories of being a child in Paris and talks about her dual passions for cooking and writing.

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From the interview:

Aleksandra Crapanzano: A lot of people felt totally in love with baking over the pandemic. And then I think there was a point where we all reached a kind of maximum capacity with cooking and needed a little bit of a break. And now I feel that we’re kind of coming back and realizing, hey, we actually really do know how to feed ourselves well. And I think whether we’re approaching a recession or already in a recession, certainly with inflation, there is a desire to turn back and open up the pantry and realize, wow, I have the five ingredients needed to make something that actually is a treat. So that’s a kind of a reward at the end of the day.

To listen to more of Aleksandra Crapanzano and other talks from the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, subscribe now on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever else you find your podcasts!

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Aleksandra Crapanzano is a James Beard-winning writer and dessert columnist for The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of The London Cookbook and Eat. Cook. LA., and her work has been widely anthologized, most notably in Best American Food Writing. She has been a frequent contributor to Bon Appetit, Food & Wine, Food52, Saveur, Town & Country, Elle, The Daily Beast, Departures, Travel + Leisure, and The New York Times Magazine. She has years of experience in the film world, consults in the food space, and serves on several boards with a focus on sustainability. Aleksandra grew up in New York and Paris, received her BA from Harvard and her MFA from NYU, where she has also taught writing. She is married to the writer John Burnham Schwartz, and they live in New York with their son, Garrick, and Bouvier des Flandres, Griffin.

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing’s brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun Valley is known for.

In this episode of Beyond the Page, John Burnham Schwartz talks with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan about her novel The Candy House—a sequel, of sorts, to 2010’s A Visit From the Goon Squad—which riffs brilliantly on memory, authenticity and the allure of new technology, and about what she learned about fiction writing from her son’s love of baseball statistics.

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From the interview:

Jennifer Egan: I remember learning that DNA analysis, which is now so popular with 23 and Me and all of these [services] that so many people in North America have done this. I haven’t. And even if I had done it and not made my results public, which is the give-to-get model, if you want to find out if you have relatives out there, you have to let people know this, right? If you’re around that, I am represented in that DNA collective, even without directly participating because of the sheer mass of people who have done it. So in other words, there’s no way out for me.

I remember the moment of learning that and thinking, wow, that’s really strange. And that becomes really important in The Candy House, because exactly the same is true of the collective consciousness. Even if people don’t want to externalize their consciousness as much less share them to the collective, they are so fully represented in the memories of all the people who have had interactions with them that are shared that they can’t escape either. And so right from the beginning, my preoccupation with all of this felt like a slightly exaggerated form of what we already live with, and that’s always fun.

To listen to more of Jennifer Egan and other talks from the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, subscribe now on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever else you find your podcasts!

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Jennifer Egan is the author of six previous books of fiction: Manhattan Beach, winner of the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction; A Visit from the Goon Squad, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award; The Keep; the story collection Emerald City; Look at Me, a National Book Award Finalist; and The Invisible Circus. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Granta, McSweeney’s, and The New York Times Magazine. Her website is JenniferEgan.com.

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing’s brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun Valley is known for.

In this episode of Beyond the Page, Ben Rhodes, Barack Obama’s former Deputy National Security Advisor, sits down at the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference with Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and playwright Ayad Akhtar for a deeply informed conversation about the state of the world we are living in today, with the rise of authoritarian leaders and ethno-nationalism and the flood of disinformation enabling them—and what responsibility America must take for these threats to freedom across the globe.

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From the interview:

Ben Rhodes: History would tell us that, pretty soon in my lifetime, there will be some war between a nationalist America and a Russia-China axis. And that’s going to affect you, right? That’s not like I had to deprogram myself as an American, born in 1977, that I grew up in the most peaceful, prosperous, and stable environment in human history. That’s not the norm.

What is happening in Ukraine now is actually the norm of human history, and it happens pretty regularly a couple times a century usually, right? And you just try to hope that it’s not that destructive. And yes, you’re insulated and maybe you’ll be fine and maybe you’re right. And in the lower boil thing of policies I don’t like, in mass shootings that don’t hit me, and climate change that I’m smart enough not to have real estate in certain places, to some extent, I would like to think that America exists, in part because we have a bigger sense of our own self-interest within this country and around the world. And again, I think what gives me hope is I think that there’s a bankruptcy and a corruption to the alternative models right now.

In a way, communism was a stronger model because it wasn’t just tied to Vladimir Putin. It was a system that needed to regenerate. I think that today’s autocrats are so kleptocratic and self-interested that they may be less likely to bring about their own death, literally, and be at some point in the same way that liberal globalization has been discredited, they’re headed for a cliff of being discredited. And that’s why what I am hopeful about is coming out on the other end of that, in the same way that America coming out on the other end of a lot of things.

And the question is, can we make sure that this period of turbulence, that the plane doesn’t crash and we get to the clean air? And if we do, I think will be stronger for it. And if you look at every period of American history, we end up being stronger from the bad period that we go through.

To listen to more of Ben Rhodes and other talks from the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, subscribe now on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever else you find your podcasts!

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Ben Rhodes is the author of the New York Times bestseller The World as It Is, co-host of Pod Save the World, a contributor for NBC News and MSNBC, and an adviser to former president Barack Obama.

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing’s brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun Valley is known for.

In this episode, host John Burnham Schwartz talks with Rebecca Donner, winner of the 2022 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography for All the Frequent Troubles of our Days. The story of Donner’s great-great aunt, Mildred Harnack, who as a young midwestern grad student moved to Berlin and became one of the leaders of the largest underground resistance group to Hitler in the 1930s and 40s, All the Frequent Troubles is both an intimate portrait of a courageous young woman and also the story of how a charismatic demagogue captured a country. Donner shares Mildred’s story and also talks about the dogged scholarly research that helped her piece together her aunt’s amazing life.

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From the interview:

Rebecca Donner: Many people ask me, how long did it take you to write this book? And one way of answering that question is nearly all my life.

It was actually my grandmother who gave me the letters. But before that, when I was nine, my great-grandmother was taking my height in her kitchen. Mildred had spent her senior year of high school living in that in that house, so there was a mark on the wall that measured her height, along with other young members of the family. My great-grandmother put a ruler on my head and marked the pen on the wall. That’s when I saw the mark designating Mildred—it was a very faint line—and that is when I first heard Mildred’s name. I said, “Who’s that?” And she said, “That’s your great-great-aunt Mildred.” But she said it in a way that was brittle. I heard the rage in her voice. It’s complicated.

I don’t want to paint her all with one brushstroke. But she was tremendously aggrieved by the idea that her youngest sister was beheaded on Hitler’s order with a guillotine. It’s quite medieval. And mixed in with her feelings of paranoia about the US government tracking her and her husband down and punishing both of them as communists, because they were related to Mildred, who had been affiliated with a group that had performed espionage. … Mildred also performed espionage for the Americans. That’s one of the things that I that I go into in great detail in my book. So she was really participating in espionage for the Allies, but these distinctions were lost for many years.

So I’m nine years old. I got the sense of a complexity of emotions, of Mildred as a kind of spectral presence. And I also sensed that nobody wants to talk about it. … But then when I was 16, my grandmother Jane gave me these letters, and then she told me about a little boy whose name was Don, who, between the ages of 11 and 13, was Mildred’s courier in Berlin. His father was a diplomat at the US Embassy in Berlin. So I took that away, too. And then I just lived with this story for many years. I did try to write a short story about Mildred in college. It was my first attempt, and I wondered how I would approach this material. Then I was quite aware that I needed to put it away and pursue other writing projects. I had the sense that I did not want to write this story in any kind of conventional way. There was this term in biography, “a cradle-to-grave biography.” I did not want to write a cradle to grave biography.

To listen to more of Rebecca Doner and other talks from the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, subscribe now on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever else you find your podcasts!

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In 2022, Rebecca Donner was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was a 2018-19 Biography Fellow at the Leon Levy Center for Biography, is a two-time Yaddo Fellow, and has twice received fellowships from the Ucross Foundation. Her essays, reportage, and reviews have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times and Bookforum. All the Frequent Troubles of Our Days is Donner’s third book; she is also the author of two critically acclaimed works of fiction.

Welcome to Beyond the Page: The Best of the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. Over the past 25 years, SVWC has become the gold standard of American literary festivals, bringing together contemporary writing’s brightest stars for their view of the world through a literary lens. Every month, Beyond the Page curates and distills the best talks from the past quarter century at the Writers’ Conference, giving you a front row seat on the kind of knowledge, inspiration, laughter, and meaning that Sun Valley is known for.

When artists and athletes age, what happens to their work? Does it ripen or rot? As our bodies decay, how—and why—do we keep going? In this episode, John Burnham Schwartz sits down with the ever-original and wittily ironic Geoff Dyer to discuss the author’s own encounter with late middle age against the backdrop of the last days and last works of writers, painters, footballers, musicians, and tennis stars who’ve mattered to him throughout his life, with his latest book The Last Days of Roger Federer: And Other Endings.

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From the interview:

John Burnham Schwartz: You write, “After a stage in a man’s life, especially if a degree of eminence has been achieved, it is essential that he retains some residue of how he saw the world as a fourteen-year-old.” What’s that residue for you, do you think? And can you talk a little about how you remember seeing the world at fourteen?

Geoff Dyer: Yes. That’s a key part of the book for me. And I guess I could weirdly illustrate more in time in terms of my absolute horror of its opposite, which is that people, when they get into middle age and of people becoming grand or pompous or self-regarding, and that just fills me with such horror when I encounter it in other people. I feel I don’t want to boast, but I feel pretty confident saying, I know I don’t have any tendencies that way myself, thankfully.

In the case of Larkin and Kingsley Amis, I mean, they’re two real unreconstructed old reactionaries. But it’s funny. This manifests itself, especially in the letters, in this kind of real fourteen-year-old kind of smutty talk, which I must say I absolutely enjoy. And yes, it seems to be infinitely preferable to the opposite.

So I think I contrast something that Kingsley Amis says to Larkin. I love Camus so much, but that awful moment when he’s being interviewed for a French TV show and I think the engineer happens to be called Albert, so when the director says rather curtly, “Oy, Albert, can you move that light over there?” and Camus says, “No, no, say Monsieur Camus.” That’s a devastating moment for me, the way that Camus seems to have become intoxicated by his own eminence, which is particularly terrible given his background with a mother who’s illiterate

John Burnham Schwartz: So in a way, I wonder, by having such a strong notion from early on of what you want to avoid in a way the sort of the end point that you absolutely do not want to arrive at. It then in a way, it recalibrates your beginning a little bit and I would imagine sort of gets under a lot of the choices you do end up making both in life personally and then as a writer and how you want to write. And I wonder if some of that bubbled up as you were working on this book, which is such a stew of all these things.

Geoff Dyer: It’s not so much that it bubbles up, it’s more that it’s just there in my sort of DNA. It manifests itself, I like to think, most obviously in this question, which is so important, the voice or tone. I mean, every every writer has his or her own tone. But I think at this point in my writing life, I’m much more in touch with my own tone than I was, for example, in my late twenties when I was so under the influence of, say, John Berger.

And I feel that the things that constitute my tone. I think it would be that maybe it’s a very English thing, that combination of being both serious and funny at the same time, of being both very sincere and highly ironic. That kind of mixture I feel so sort of at home with. It’s not requiring any effort on my part, and it’s a source of great, great pleasure to me. And crucially, it’s enabling me to say exactly what I want to say in my own voice, as it were.

To listen to more of Geoff Dyer and other talks from the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, subscribe now on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever else you find your podcasts!

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Geoff Dyer is the award-winning author of many books, including Out of Sheer Rage, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, Zona, See/Saw, and the essay collection Otherwise Known as the Human Condition (winner of a National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism). A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Dyer lives in Los Angeles, where he is a writer in residence at the University of Southern California. His books have been translated into twenty-four languages.