When Paradise Fever came out in the fall of 1997, hopes were running high for it.

It was, after all, a memoir, and even contained a touch of that most sought-after ingredient: Trauma. I don’t kid myself though.

My childhood may have been on the turbulent side, but it was also an extremely fortunate one.One of the initial indicators that the book would do well was the below spot from Fresh Air with Terry Gross.

See the Fresh Air episode with Ptolemy here.

The single most lavish and complementary presentation of… well, me, came back in 2016 in the form of this interview with my friend Richard Smoley, of whose many books – most especially Inner Christianity – I am a longtime fan. The interview appeared in Australia’s much beloved magazine New Dawn, a publication that has never been afraid to ask hard questions about spiritual and paranormal topics, and occasionally even silly ones. The magazine keeps alive a certain spirit of enquiry that I associate with the seventies, an era often made fun of these days, but which we dismiss in its entirety at our peril. People were not afraid to be a bit silly back then, and it seems to me that if you’re too concerned about looking silly you’re not going to find out much about the world, which is if you’renot ready to be appear silly now and then, you’re never going to find out much about the world. For it, as it happens, is a not just silly but downright insane.

More from the magazine here.

The below video is an interview that Edward Grinnan, editor of Guideposts Magazine, conducted when The Divine Life of Animals came out in 2010. I don’t believe I’ve ever actually looked at it, and don’t plan to now.

But that doesn’t mean you can’t.

For those with the fortitude to listen to radio interviews, there are plenty of them out there, and while things come and go on the internet, I think a good handful of my talks with Coast-to-Coast host George Noory are available on the show’s website. George has been extremely generous in having me on over the years, and while I’ve always found those visit unnerving (because live radio is just unnerving), they’ve also always been a lot of fun.

Early in 2012, shortly after I had wrapped up work on The Modern Book of the Dead, I received a call from my then-agent about a potential ghost-writing project. My agent had been in contact with a former Harvard neurosurgeon named Eben Alexander, who wanted to tell the story of his seven-day near-death experience in a book… Read more