Slate's Live at Politics and Prose

Bennet has represented Colorado in the U.S. Senate since 2009, earning a reputation as an independent thinker and a pragmatic centrist. In his closely observed analysis of today’s dysfunctional political landscape, he focuses on five key issues: the process for appointing judges, the recent tax cuts, the demise of the Iran nuclear agreement, the role of big money in politics, and immigration policies, examining each to illustrate exactly how and why partisan gridlock is undermining government. As he shows how much we’ve lost due to hyper-partisan politics, Bennet proposes specific ways we can re-establish a collaborative approach geared to helping all Americans rather than to benefiting one political party. https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9780802147813 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

Chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, Hulse has covered legislative and judicial events for more than three decades. His important new book is a deeply reported account of the struggle over the Supreme Court seat left vacant by Antonin Scalia’s death in February 2016. Drawing on exclusive interviews with key figures including Mitch McConnell, Harry Reid, Chuck Schumer, Trump campaign operatives, court activists, and legal scholars, Hulse traces the polarizing political battle that began with Senate Republicans’ refusal to grant a hearing to Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, and concluded with the confirmation in April 2017 of Trump’s candidate, Neil M. Gorsuch. Putting this episode in the larger context of governmental paralysis, Hulse traces the judicial wars of the last twenty year and charts the loss of bipartisan procedures across all three federal branches. Hulse is in conversation with Maureen Dowd, op-ed columnist for The New York Times .

Fifield, Beijing bureau chief for The Washington Pos t and former Seoul correspondent for the Financial Times, has visited North Korea a dozen times, becoming one of our most knowledgeable journalists on that cryptic nation. In her new book she draws on her experience and connections to penetrate the layers of myth and propaganda surrounding Kim Jong Un. Granted exclusive access to Kim’s inner circle—including the aunt and uncle who posed as his parents while he was growing up in Switzerland, members of the entourage that accompanied Dennis Rodman on his visits, and the Japanese sushi chef who pointed to Kim as the most likely successor to his father—Fifield gives a detailed and insightful portrait of one of the world’s most secretive dictators.

In his debut collection of stories, the creator and executive producer of the hit show BoJack Horseman— named by Thrillist magazine Netflix’s best original show ever—applies his distinctive dark humor to the mysteries of love.  Combining romance, whimsy, and sharp cultural commentary, Bob-Waksberg plunges into the world of lonely commuters looking for—and failing to find—connections; follows a couple whose wedding plans founder on their relatives’ argument over how many goats to sacrifice; and maps a woman’s history of romantic failure by the sites she visited with her exes. Quirky and surreal, these pieces are as wryly insightful as they are hilariously entertaining. https://www.politics-prose.com/book/9781524732011 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit

Like the stunning poems of his collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds , Vuong’s kaleidoscopic first novel speaks from the heart of multi-generational PTSD, charting the fate of a Vietnamese-American family struggling to settle into life in Hartford, Connecticut. Vuong frames his novel as a letter from Little Dog, a young gay writer, to his mother. The only one of his family fluent in English, Little Dog sees language as the key to belonging in America, and his determination to record all he knows of his relatives’ lives infuses his every word with life-or-death urgency. Along with stories of his mother and grandmother, he recounts his own coming-of-age as a gay man, becoming a moving elegy to his first lover—dead of an overdose at 22. Vuong is in conversation with Lawrence-Minh Bùi Davis, Curator of Asian Pacific American Studies at the Smithsonian.