Fresh Air Weekend: Regina Spektor, Victor LaValle

Fresh Air Weekend highlights some of the best interviews and reviews from past weeks, and new program elements specially paced for weekends. Our weekend show emphasizes interviews with writers, filmmakers, actors, and musicians, and often includes excerpts from live in-studio concerts. This week:

Regina Spektor: On Growing Up A 'Soviet Kid': The singer spent the first nine years of her life in the Soviet Union, where she and her family faced discrimination as Jews. She talks about Russia and her new album, What We Saw From the Cheap Seats.

Victor LaValle On Mental Illness, Monsters, Survival: In the author's latest novel, The Devil in Silver, a man is mistakenly committed to a mental hospital where a buffalo-headed monster stalks patients at night. LaValle tells Fresh Air why he picked monsters, about his family history of mental illness and how he had his own brush with psychological problems.

In 'The Brontes,' Details Of A Family's Strange World: Juliet Barker released a new edition of her landmark 1994 biography, The Brontes. Critic Maureen Corrigan says that even the 136 pages of footnotes are "thrilling," as readers are taken "deeper into the everyday realities" of the Brontes' "strange world."

You can listen to the original interviews here:

• Regina Spektor: On Growing Up A 'Soviet Kid'
• Victor LaValle On Mental Illness, Monsters, Survival
• In 'The Brontes,' Details Of A Family's Strange World

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