PAW BOOK CLUB
Welcome to PAW Book Club, where Princeton alumni and friends read a book together.
Here’s how it works: Four times a year, members read a book — written by a Princetonian — and send their questions to the Princeton Alumni Weekly. We ask the author their questions, record the interview, and post it as a podcast.
Current Read
Book and Dagger
Elyse Graham ’07
When World War II began, the U.S. found itself in desperate need of intelligence agents. The CIA’s precursor, the Office of Strategic Services, looked around and landed on academia — particularly humanities professors, and turned them into spies.
Graham, an English professor at Stony Brook University, tells the story of this unlikely cast of characters and how they leveraged their wits and skills to help win the war. Descriptions of Book and Dagger, which became a New York Times bestseller after it was published in 2025, call it gripping: “a tale that reveals the indelible power of the humanities to change the world.”
Send us your questions by Jan. 6, 2027!
Explore our past interviews
With ‘Mathey Girls,’ Melody Chu ’01 Reminds Us to Treasure Friendships
‘I purposely went in wanting to thank my friends and look at how valuable old friendships can be as we get older and as we hit things like tragedy’
Michael Kardos ’92 Finds the Funny in ‘Fun City Heist’
‘There’s a lot of things that are maddening about writing, but one of the things that I love maybe the most is when ideas just pop out of nowhere and…
Suleika Jaouad ’10 Navigates Illness and Life by Pen
‘There’s a kind of power when you dare to inhabit the first person with unvarnished vulnerability and honesty’
Todd Purdum ’82 Penned a Biography of Television Visionary Desi Arnaz
‘The biggest takeaway from Desi’s story for me is that talent in our country comes in all sorts of shapes and sizes, and sometimes in the most unlikely packages’
Lauren Ling Brown ’12 Sets a Thriller at a Princeton Eating Club
‘Some Princeton students have reached out saying that they really identified with the characters, especially multiracial young women, and that meant so much to me’
‘Sweet Fury’ by Sash Bischoff ’09
‘None of these characters are black and white. I wanted everything and everybody in this book to live in the gray area, because that felt like life to me’
‘By Any Other Name’ by Jodi Picoult ’87
‘I never set about to write this story because I wanted to take down Shakespeare. I did it because I love those plays, and I wanted to understand how they…
‘Intimacies’ by Katie Kitamura ’99
‘I don’t know that we can always be reduced to events that have happened in our past …. I’m very much interested in the way that characters behave in the…
Bianca Bosker ’08 on Cracking Open the Art World
‘How does an artwork go from being the germ of an idea in someone’s studio to this masterpiece that we obsess over in museums?’
‘Going Infinite’ by Michael Lewis ’82
“On the witness stand, [Sam Bankman-Fried] came across as more dishonest than I’ve ever experienced him in life.”
‘The Breakaway’ by Jennifer Weiner ’91
“Abortion is a topic that gets very polarized very, very quickly. And I think that one of the things that fiction can do is give us a level of remove…
Questions or Book recommendations?
Reach out to Liz Daugherty at ehulette@princeton.edu or Carlett Spike cspike@princeton.edu.
PAW In Print
October 2026
Holding on to Jewish life; Katy Anderson Keating ’08’s career in wine; Hollywood loves Princeton.