Sara Levine joins me to discuss her novel 'Treasure Island!!!' When a college graduate with a history of hapless jobs (ice cream scooper, gift wrapper, laziest ever part-time clerk at The Pet Library) reads Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island, she is dumbstruck by the timid design of her life. Convinced that Stevenson's book is cosmically intended for her, she redesigns her life according to its Core Values: boldness, resolution, independence, and horn-blowing. The New York Times rave...
Dec 23, 2024•31 min
Johannes Lichtman joins me to discuss his novel "Calling Ukraine." National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and author of Such Good Work Johannes Lichtman returns with a novel that is strikingly relevant to our times—about an American who takes a job in Ukraine in 2018, only to find that his struggle to understand the customs and culture is eclipsed by a romantic entanglement with deadly consequences.
Jul 21, 2023•36 min
Lauren Oliver joins me to discuss her novel 'Panic.' Heather never thought she would compete in Panic, a legendary game played by graduating seniors, where the stakes are high and the payoff is even higher. She’d never thought of herself as fearless, the kind of person who would fight to stand out. But when she finds something, and someone, to fight for, she will discover that she is braver than she ever thought. Dodge has never been afraid of Panic. His secret will fuel him, and get him all the...
Oct 20, 2022•32 min
Lincoln Michel joins me to discuss his novel 'The Body Scout.' In the future you can have any body you want—as long as you can afford it. But in a New York ravaged by climate change and repeat pandemics, Kobo is barely scraping by. He scouts the latest in gene-edited talent for Big Pharma-owned baseball teams, but his own cybernetics are a decade out of date and twin sister loan sharks are banging down his door. Things couldn't get much worse. Then his brother—Monsanto Mets slugger J.J. Zunz—is ...
Oct 24, 2021•34 min
Teddy Wayne joins me to discuss his novel 'Apartment.' In 1996, the unnamed narrator of Teddy Wayne’s Apartment is attending the MFA writing program at Columbia on his father’s dime and living in an illegal sublet of a rent-stabilized apartment. Feeling guilty about his good fortune, he offers his spare bedroom--rent-free--to Billy, a talented, charismatic classmate from the Midwest eking out a hand-to-mouth existence in Manhattan. The narrator’s rapport with Billy develops into the friendship h...
Oct 05, 2020•27 min
Carmen Maria Machado joins me to discuss her memoir 'In the Dream House.' 'In the Dream House' is Machado’s wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. That struggle gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative tr...
Nov 05, 2019•20 min
Ryan Chapman joins me to discuss his debut novel 'Riots I Have Known.' An unnamed Sri Lankan inmate has barricaded himself inside a prison computer lab in Dutchess County, New York. A riot rages outside, incited by a poem published in The Holding Pen, the house literary journal. This, our narrator’s final Editor’s Letter, is his confession. An official accounting of events, as they happened.
Jun 18, 2019•29 min
Namwali Serpell joins me to discuss her debut novel 'The Old Drift.' 1904. On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there is a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. In a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles the fates of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. This sets off a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families as they collide and conv...
May 15, 2019•37 min
Nathan Englander joins me to discuss his new novel 'Kaddish.com.' Larry is the secular son in a family of Orthodox Brooklyn Jews. When his father dies, it’s his responsibility to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months. To the horror and dismay of his sister, Larry refuses—imperiling the fate of his father’s soul. To appease her, Larry hatches an ingenious if cynical plan, hiring a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to recite the prayer and shep...
Apr 03, 2019•28 min
Sam Lipsyte joins Stephen to discuss his new novel 'Hark.' In an America convulsed by political upheaval, cultural discord, environmental collapse, and spiritual confusion, many folks are searching for peace, salvation, and—perhaps most immediately—just a little damn focus. Enter Hark Morner, an unwitting guru whose technique of “Mental Archery”—a combination of mindfulness, mythology, fake history, yoga, and, well, archery—is set to captivate the masses and raise him to near-messiah status....
Mar 12, 2019•23 min
Lauren Wilkinson joins Stephen to discuss her debut novel 'American Spy'. It’s 1986, the heart of the Cold War, and Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer with the FBI. She's brilliant, but she's also a young black woman working in an old boys' club. Her career has stalled out, she’s overlooked for every high-profile squad, and her days are filled with monotonous paperwork. So when she’s given the opportunity to join a shadowy task force aimed at undermining Thomas Sankara, the charismatic re...
Feb 26, 2019•25 min
Garth Greenwell joins Stephen to discuss his debut novel 'What Belongs to You. 'What Belongs to You' follows an American teacher who enters a public bathroom in Sofia, Bulgaria, where he meets the charismatic young hustler Mitko, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, drawn by hunger and loneliness and risk, and finds himself ensnared in a relationship in which lust leads to mutual predation, and tenderness can transform into violence. 'What Belongs t...
Feb 12, 2019•39 min
Ling Ma joins host Stephen Fishbach to discuss her debut novel 'Severance.' 'Severance' follows Candace Chen, a 20 something New Yorker who works as a production coordinator at a Bible manufacturer - when the end of the world hits. Shen Fever makes people repeat their daily routines, until they die. Candace must join a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. 'Severance' won the 2018 Kirkus Prize, was a New York Times notable book, and was named as a best book of 2018 at Elle, NP...
Feb 01, 2019•30 min
Teddy Wayne joins host Stephen Fishbach to discuss his novel 'Loner.' 'Loner' follows Harvard freshman David Federman, who becomes increasingly obsessed with his classmate Veronica. Published in September of 2016, 'Loner' now seems a prescient look at an angry, disaffected young man who demands more from his life. Loner was named a "Best Book of the Year" by NPR, Kirkus, New York post, and Bookish.
Jan 18, 2019•26 min
Jaclyn Gilbert joins host Stephen Fishbach to discuss her debut novel 'Late Air.' When Murray - a Yale college running coach - finds his star athlete crumpled and unresponsive during a routine practice on the campus golf course one morning, he is forced to reconcile with his repressed past and increasingly tenuous grip on life. Told from interlocking perspectives, 'Late Air' circles the story of a marriage shattered by a nameless tragedy.
Jan 04, 2019•32 min
Joshua Max Feldman joins host Stephen Fishbach to discuss his novel 'Start Without Me.' Joshua Max Feldman is a writer of fiction and theater. Start Without Me - his second novel - explores questions of love and choice, disappointment and hope in the lives of two strangers who meet by chance on Thanksgiving Day.
Dec 21, 2018•22 min
In the debut episode, author Jeff VanderMeer joins host Stephen Fishbach to discuss his novel 'Annihilation.' Jeff is the author dozens of novels, short stories, literary criticism, nonfiction, and basically anything else a person can write, including stellar tweets. He has been called "the Weird Thoreau" by the New Yorker. 'Annihilation ,' the first book of his Southern Reach trilogy, won the Nebula and Shirley Jackson awards, and was adapted into a movie by director Alex Garland....
Dec 04, 2018•31 min
