Dispatches from the Gilded Age is a collection of essays by Julia Reed, one of America’s greatest chroniclers.

In the middle of the night on March eleventh, 1980, the phone rang in Julia Reed’s Georgetown dorm. It was her boss at Newsweek, where she was an intern. He told her to get in her car and drive to her alma mater, the Madeira School. Her former headmistress, Jean Harris, had just shot Dr. Herman Tarnower, The Scarsdale Diet Doctor. Julia didn’t flinch. She dressed, drove to Madeira, got the story–and her first byline–and the new American Gilded Age was off and running.

The end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first was a time in which the high and the low bubbled furiously together and Julia was there with her sharp eye, keen wit, and uproariously clear-eyed way of seeing the world to chronicle this truly spectacular era. Dispatches from the Gilded Age is Julia at her best as she profiles Andre Leon Talley, Sister Helen Prejean, President George and Laura Bush, Madeleine Albright, and others. Listeners will travel to Africa and Cuba with Julia, dine at Le Bernardin, savor steaks at Doe’s Eat Place, consider the fashions of the day, get the recipes for her hot cheese olives and end up with the ride of their lives through Julia’s beloved South.

With a foreword by Roy Blount, Jr. and edited by Julia’s longtime assistant, Everett Bexley.

This program is read by the author.

South Toward Home is a wry and humorous audiobook about life and culture in the American South.

In thinking about her native land, Julia Reed quotes another Southern writer, Willie Morris, who said, “It’s the juxtapositions that get you down here.” These juxtapositions are, for Julia, the soul of the South and in her warmhearted and funny new audiobook, South Toward Home, she chronicles her adventures through the highs and the lows of Southern life–the Delta hot tamale festival, a masked ball, a rollicking party in a boat on a sand bar, scary Christian billboards, and the southern affection for the lowly possum. She writes about the southern penchant for making their own fun in every venue from a high-toned New Orleans dinner party to cocktail crawls on the streets of the French Quarter where to-go cups are de rigueur.

And with as much hilarity as possible, Julia shines her light on the South’s more embarrassing tendencies like dry counties and the politics of lust. As she puts it, “My fellow Southerners have brought me the greatest joy–on the page, over the airwaves, around the dinner table, at the bar or, hell, in the checkout line.” South Towards Home, with a foreword by Jon Meacham, is Julia Reed’s valentine to the place she loves best.