The featured writer for June’s “Story Time for Grownups” is Svetlana Alexievich, the first journalist to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (2015) since Winston Churchill in 1953. Her extended interviews with women veterans of the Second World War, soldiers from the Soviet Afghan War, victims of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear accident, children of war, and victims of the rash of suicides after the collapse of the Soviet Union all led up to her 2013 masterpiece, Secondhand Time: the Last of the Soviets. She talked to former generals, spies, torturers, grieving widows and mothers, and homeless people. She interviewed not just Russians, Belarusians, and Ukrainians, but Tajik aid workers, Azerbaijani refugees, Russians who married Chechen Muslims for love and were rejected by their families for it. People told her things they had never shared with anyone; many wept as they revealed their secrets.

Order a pint of beer, a pot of tea, soup, sandwich, or cookies while you experience the old-fashioned experience of listening to real-life stories read aloud. Browse the shelves for a book you might like to take home.

David has read aloud to listeners in libraries, coffee shops, Powell’s Books, Borders, and Umpqua Bank, on the streets of Portland, and for recordings for the blind. He has performed Gandalf, Bilbo, and Gollum with Willamette Radio Workshop; Sherlock Holmes on KBOO; and is a recurring character on the science-fiction podcasts “Exoplanetary” and “253 Mathilde.” He writes about books, films, travel, his forebears, and politics on his Patreon site.