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Today, the first episode of a new series on Memoir, starting with American fiction writer Mary Gordon. Gordon is famous for her novels about modern women in a Catholic environment. Now she has a more disturbing story called The Shadow Man: A Daughter's Search For Her Father, about her mercurial - and ultimately, unfathomable - father.

Series on Memoir, episode 2. In this episode, Eleanor talks with one of England's great literary critics, Sir Frank Kermode. An expert on the Bible, Shakespeare, and the classics, he talks about his memoir Not Entitled and about growing up on the Isle of Man in the 1920s and '30s.

Series on Memoir, episode 3. To wrap up the series on memoir, Eleanor Wachtel speaks with two American writers: Humourist Calvin Trillin reflects with affection and wit in Messages From My Father, and poet Mary Karr talks about growing up in a troubled Texas family in The Liars Club.

Today, the author that started the modern boom in travel writing, American Paul Theroux. Now he travels through his own life in his new, imaginary memoir called My Other Life.

This week, Eleanor Wachtel speaks with Oxford evolutionary biologist and zoologist Richard Dawkins. The author of The Selfish Gene and The Blind Watchmaker is Britain's answer to Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould. From sexy spiders, to fertile figs, Dawkins makes science comprehensible and fascinating.

Today on Writers & Company, Eleanor Wachtel talks with English writer Jim Crace. His unusual, award-winning novels have been translated into 14 languages. His latest book, Signals of Distress, is an elegant evocation of a remote corner of coastal England in the 1830s.

With four of her six novels in adaptation for the screen, Jane Austen was considered the "hottest screenwriter" of the 1995 (200 years after her death!). In this episode, Eleanor Wachtel talks with three "Jane-ites", Fay Weldon (Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen, 1984), Claire Tomalin (Jane Austen : a life, 1997), and Marilyn Butler (Jane Austen and the War of Ideas, 1988) on the popularity of Austen's work, and why it still resonates with the modern reader.

This week on Writers & Company, Eleanor speaks with Italian author and semiotician Umberto Eco. He's the author of the mediaeval detective story that became a runaway bestseller, The Name of the Rose.

Eleanor Wachtel interviews one of Ireland's finest Authors, Jennifer Johnston. She writes about familial relationships and unexpected friendships, set against the violence of Ireland.

Host Eleanor Wachtel interviews Jamaica Kincaid about her book, The Autobiography of My Mother.. Also, Grace Paley reading "Zagrowsky Tell's" from her collection Later the Same Day (at the Toronto International Festival of Authors).

Eleanor Wachtel talks with biographer Park Honan about his new biography on "the man from Stratford," William Shakespeare. Plus, Michael Waller reading a selection of Shakespeare's sonnets.

Eleanor Wachtel talks with Richard Holmes on his new biography about the poet Sameul Taylor Coleridge, considered one of England's greatest - and most extravagantly flawed - geniuses.

Host Eleanor Wachtel travels to Oliveto, Italy to interview the British novelist Dame Muriel Spark. They talk about her work and her life as an expat writer in Italy. Dame Muriel reads from her novel The Gentle Jewesses.

Dublin writer Roddy Doyle talks about politics and the fight for independence. His new novel, A Star Called Henry - described as a cross between Dickens, and Tarantino - is a re-visioning of the struggle for an Irish Republic and the events around the Easter Rising of 1916.

Eleanor Wachtel talks with American novelist and wilderness writer, Peter Matthiessen. From Nepal to the Florida Everglades, Matthiessen writes about paradises lost and the search for simplicity.