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Mary Roach: LibraryThing Author Interview

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Mary Roach writes funny, yet deeply researched non-fiction books on topics such as cadavers (Stiff), the afterlife (Spook) and sex (Bonk). Mary has just published a new book about humans in space called Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void, which features her trips to American, Japanese and Russian space centers, interviews with current and retired astronauts, her own experience in zero gravity and the very particular problems of living outside the warm, comfortable embrace of Earth's gravity.

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Mary's previous books:

Media mentioned in the podcast:

Author: James Michener
Author: Dave Barry
Author: Bill Bryson
Website: Ig Nobel awards and the Annals of Improbable Research
Author: Carl Zimmer's Parasite Rex
TV show: Defying Gravity
Book: Riding Rockets by Mike Mullane
Book: Diary of a Cosmonaut by Valentine Lebedev (see where you can get this book)
Book: Moonwalking with Einstein by Joshua Foer
Book: Poorly Made in China by Paul Midler
Book: Little Bee by Chris Cleave
Book: The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Book: Being Wrong by Kathryn Schulz
Book: You Don't Look Like Anyone I Know by Heather Sellers, similar to The Liar's Club by Mary Karr
Book: Jonathan Franzen's Freedom and The Corrections
Book: The Aeneid

Mary Roach and I recorded this interview on August 25th. A transcript of the podcast is being crowd-sourced on our wiki.

—interview by Sonya Green

Books by Mary Roach

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers (5770 copies)

Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife (2167 copies)

Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex (2041 copies)

Packing for Mars (1227 copies)

The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2011 (63 copies)

(3 more)

Gulp: A Trip Down the Alimentary Canal (1 copies)

Cleaning Up Their Act (1 copies)

Was macht der Astronaut, wenn er mal muss?: Eine etwas andere Geschichte der Raumfahrt (1 copies)

Recent author interviews

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Natalie Dykstra (2012-03-21)

Taras Grescoe (2012-03-21)

Leah Price (2012-02-22)

Matthew Pearl (2012-02-22)

Jay Wexler (2012-01-20)

Susan Cain (2012-01-20)

Susan Goodman (2012-01-20)

Theodora Goss (2012-01-20)

Shalom Auslander (2012-01-10)

Jason Heller (2011-12-13)

Anthony Horowitz (2011-12-01)

Robert K. Massie (2011-11-22)

Dava Sobel (2011-11-21)

About author interviews

Each month we feature a few exclusive interviews with authors in our "State of the Thing" newsletter. Know an author who might want to be interviewed? Find out more.