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Madison BookBeat

Madison BookBeat

By: Stu Levitan Andrew Thomas Sara Batkie David Ahrens Lisa Malawski
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Madison BookBeat highlights local Wisconsin authors and authors coming to Madison for book events. It airs every Monday afternoon at 1pm on WORT FM.

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Episodes
  • Dennis McNally, "The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties."

    Dennis McNally, "The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties."
    Jun 30 2026
    McNally transcript Stu Levitan welcomes historian, author and music publicist Dennis McNally, whose new book is The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties. And while it’s mainly about San Francisco, with a bit of New York and London thrown in, it does feature several individuals and events pertaining directly to Madison. So that’s why you get to hear about it here. Dennis’s first book was include Desolate Angel: Jack Kerouac, the Beat Generation and America, an outgrowth of his doctoral dissertation at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst; then came A Long Strange Trip: The Inside Story of the Grateful Dead, which he wrote after serving many years as the band’s publicist; and in 2015 the award-winning On Highway 61: Music, Race and the Evolution of Cultural Freedom, tracking American music from minstrelsy to Bob Dylan. He also edited Jerry on Jerry, transcripts of conversations he had over the years with Jerry Garcia. Here’s our conversation about The Last Great Dream: How Bohemians Became Hippies and Created the Sixties.
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    1 hr and 21 mins
  • Poet Lisa Fishman on the potential of space on a page

    Poet Lisa Fishman on the potential of space on a page
    Jun 8 2026
    On this episode of Madison BookBeat, host Sara Batkie is joined by author Lisa Fishman to talk about her deubt novel, Write Back Now! Acclaimed poet Lisa Fishman’s debut novel tracks a peripatetic 1970s childhood and the uprooted friendship between girls who stay connected by mail, until they don’t. It opens in a borrowed house in wintry Nova Scotia, where the adult narrator faces the first-ever border closure between her two countries. Framed by these long-separated experiences, the novel keeps almost-beginning again as the narrator tries to figure out where she will be next by figuring out where she has been previously. Along the way, a dead horse, a lost crop, a miscarriage, an extra-tropical cyclone with hurricane-force winds, and more friendships between women emerge. Write Back Now! explores the tensions between experience and loss, imagination and memory, the real and the secretly real. It is now available from Guernica Editions. Lisa Fishman is the author of the story collection World Naked Bike Ride, short-listed for the ReLit Award for Short Fiction. Her fiction has appeared in The Fairy Tale Review, The Rupture, Guesthouse, Flash Boulevard, and Jerry Jazz Musician. A nominee for the PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize and a Pushcart Prize, Fishman has published eight poetry books, including One Big Time; 24 Pages & other poems; Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition; The Happiness Experiment; and Dear, Read. Her poetry is anthologized in Best American Experimental Poetry, The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral Poetry, The Ecopoetry Anthology, and Fence Books’ Not for Mothers Only. With origins in both Montreal and the Detroit area, Fishman is a dual citizen who divides her time between Wisconsin and Eastern Canada. Write Back Now! is her first novel. You can learn more about Lisa on her page at Wave Books
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    50 mins
  • Nancy Kathman, "Love, Cuba, Goats and Music"

    Nancy Kathman, "Love, Cuba, Goats and Music"
    May 18 2026
    Stu Levitan welcomes Nancy Kathman, for a conversation about her engaging new memoir, “Love, Cuba, Goats and Music,” about her life cutting sugarcane in Cuba, co-founding the Southwest Dairy Goat Cooperative and exploring world music with the late Bob Queen, founder of so many of the hallmark east side music festivals.
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    55 mins
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