Fast, friendly book discovery with author access.
Totally Booked with Zibby pairs Zibby Owens with authors across fiction, memoir, humor, parenting, culture, and business. The conversations are polished but personal, often shaped by live bookstore events, returning guests, and a visible enthusiasm for the book at hand.
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Totally Booked with Zibby is a rapid, affectionate author-interview show centered on what is new, interesting, moving, or conversation-worthy in books. Zibby Owens is the constant presence, guiding each episode from an author introduction into a focused conversation about the guest's latest work. The show has a book-world vantage point. It often foregrounds the machinery around a title: publishing history, bookstore events, repeat appearances, live audiences, book-club selections, re-releases, and the path a manuscript took before reaching readers. It is also notably personal. Zibby often begins with her own immediate response to a book, then lets that enthusiasm open the door to craft, memory, career, family, or resilience. The pace is efficient. Introductions can carry a dense amount of context, from Wade Rouse writing under both Wade Rouse and Viola Shipman to Emma Gray publishing multiple novels with Zibby Publishing. The guest list spans commercial fiction, literary fiction, memoir, humor, parenting advice, cultural criticism, and business leadership. Jenny Lawson's episode brings comedy into hard subjects such as mental illness and chronic pain. Christina Geist's conversation frames a parent-to-child book as a graduation-season keepsake. Kat Rosenfield's appearance moves through fiction, essays, and cultural criticism. Allegra Goodman's book-club episode shifts the format by releasing a conversation from Zibby's Bookshop, with discussion of Jewish American family life, generations, holidays, and the architecture of a large fictional family. Live recordings add another layer. Episodes from Zibby's Bookshop, Bloomingdale's, and a New York City pop-up carry the feel of public literary programming rather than studio-only promotion. The show can be buoyant, almost breathless, when Zibby is excited about a book. It can also be practical, especially when guests discuss career resets, leadership, parenting, or how to keep creating during difficult seasons. The result is not a narrow craft podcast or a pure review show. It is a busy literary salon in audio form, organized around access, taste, and an eagerness to place writers in front of readers who might not have found them yet.
Made for: For readers who want a steady stream of author conversations, new-title context, and literary recommendations across fiction, memoir, humor, parenting, culture, and business. It especially suits listeners who like bookshop-event energy in a compact interview format.
What sets it apart: The show combines author access with Zibby Owens's overlapping perspective as bookstore owner, publisher, author, and podcaster. Its mix of live events, returning guests, book-club selections, and publishing context gives the conversations a strong literary-community feel.
In my daily show, I interview today’s latest, bestselling, buzziest, or underrated authors whose work I think is worth your time -- in 30 minutes or less. As a bookstore owner, publisher, author and (obviously) podcaster, I get a comprehensive look at everything that’s coming out and spend my time curating the best books so you don’t have to. Stay in the know, get insider insights, and connect with guests like I do. Every single day. With 2,000+ episodes to choose from, you'll never run out of book talk. For more information, go to zibbymedia.com and follow the show on Instagram at @totallybookedwithzibby. Please rate and review the show. And go buy the books!</p
Zibby Owens gets authors past the jacket copy, so you meet the life that made the book.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A focused family-novel discussion tying structure, Jewish life, and baking together.
Zibby Owens presents Allegra Goodman’s This Is Not About Us as a family novel built around generations of a Jewish American family, from grandparents to middle-aged children and young adult grandchildren.
Jenny Lawson turns creative survival and bookstore life into plainspoken advice.
Jenny Lawson's conversation on Zibby's show pairs creative persistence with the realities of living with mental illness and chronic pain. It also gives a grounded look at her bookstore in Texas, which she presents as more than a shop: a community hub with an online following, a…
A clear-eyed episode about publishing, authorship, and making creative ambition work inside real life.
Panio Gianopoulos's move from publishing into authorship gives the episode a grounded frame for creative risk, professional limits, and the stubborn question of what can actually be completed.
Great books, taken chapter by chapter, with delight
Book talk with room to wander.
This episode features authors Laura Brown and Kristina O'Neill discussing their book 'All the Cool Girls Get Fired' about overcoming job loss and professional setbacks.
This episode features an interview with Lew Frankfort, former CEO of Coach, discussing his journey from public service to building a global fashion brand and his insights on leadership.
Zibby Owens interviews author Jenna Blum about her novel 'Murder Your Darlings', discussing its themes related to the publishing industry and writing.
Zibby Owens interviews bestselling author Allison Pataki about her latest novel 'It Girl' in a live recording at Totally Booked Live.
Zibby Owens interviews Panio Gianopoulos, author of 'How to Get Into Our House and Where We Keep the Money' and co-founder of The Next Big Idea Club.
Zibby Owens interviews Jenny Lawson, author of 'How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay', on Totally Booked.
Zibby Owens interviews author Alyssa Sheinmel about her adult debut novel 'Such Sheltered Lives', which explores an exclusive rehab facility for wealthy individuals in Zurich.
Hank Philippi Ryan’s Mother Daughter, Sister Stranger uses two sisters’ survival of a plane crash to test family memory and happy endings.
Elizabeth Genuzzi discusses Sober Mom, a Memoir with Zibby Owens on alcoholism, motherhood, grief, and recovery through Alcoholics Anonymous.
Justin Halpern discusses his debut novel Get Lost, in which Lila returns to a Central Valley, California town after her missing mother prompts police to suspect her estranged father.
On Totally Booked, Zibby Owens interviews Michael Cunningham about Unsayable, which he describes as “a life in writing” rather than a conventional memoir.
Matthew Quick tells Zibby Owens that Dad, Love, Me became a memoir after his editor Jophie urged him to write about sobriety, his father, and Jungian analysis instead of another novel.
Bruce Holsinger describes Culpability, an Oprah's Book Club pick, as a story in which a family's car is in self-driving mode when a crash kills people in the oncoming vehicle.
Daniel Silva discusses Ransom, his 29th novel and 26th in the Gabriel Allon series, which begins when Gabriel agrees to find missing British socialite Alice Winter.
Zibby Owens interviews author Wade Rouse about his book 'That's What Friends Are For' and his writing career under his own name and the pseudonym Viola Shipman.
Zibby Owens interviews bestselling author Jenny Lawson about her new book 'How to Be Okay When Nothing is Okay,' discussing mental health, humor, and bookstore ownership.
Zibby Owens interviews author Christina Geist about her book 'Before You Fly Away, Life Lessons from Home,' which started as a graduation gift for her daughter and offers parenting advice.
Zibby Owens interviews author Emma Grey about her latest novel 'Start at the End' and their publishing collaboration through Zibby Publishing.
Zibby Owens interviews author Kat Rosenfield about her novel How to Survive in the Woods and discusses the nature of personal essays and performative writing.
Allegra Goodman explains that This Is Not About Us follows three generations of the Rubenstein family, whose name came from Arthur Rubenstein and her mother's piano recordings.