Who is Fetlana Alaluyava and what became of her?

Rosemary Sullivan will join us to talk about her new biography, Stalin's daughter.

What is the mathematics of mathematics and what does it have to do with baking cookies?

Eugenia Chang will tell us about her new book, How to Bake Pie.

I've discovered all sorts of ways of explaining it by telling stories and especially by talking about food analogies.

What's Judd Apatow reading these days?

In a podcast first, we'll talk to the subject of this week's By the Book.

I'm always reading books to find out why my kids are either crying or yelling at me.

Alexander Altar will tell us what's going on in the publishing world.

Greg Coles has best cellar news and we'll let listeners weigh in by answering some of your questions for the editors here.

This is Inside the New York Times Book Review. I'm Pamela Paul.

Rosemary Sullivan joins us now.

She is the author of a new biography, Stalin's daughter, the extraordinary and tumultuous life of Svetlana Alaluyava.

Rosemary, thanks for joining us.

Thank you for asking me.

So what drew you to the subject of Stalin's daughter?

This is my fifth biography and actually three of the previous four had been about women.

When I read Svetlana's obituary in New York Times, it ended with a quotation from her in which she said no matter where I go to an island to Australia,

I will always be the political prisoner of my father's name and I thought,

my gosh, what an extraordinarily resonant phrase and how intelligent.

So I read her work. I did know of her defection in 1967.

I knew there had to be a lot of mysteries and then I contacted my brilliant editor, Claire Wachtell, in New York at HarperCollins.

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