"I knew that after writing this sweeping family portrait that goes over about 40 years in the Bain family's history, that for my next novel, I wanted to write something that was very focused, that was quite propulsive, and quite edited in the scope and the time that we spend with the characters. And so, for me, it was about romance. It's about that love between these two young men." Douglas Stuart has charmed more than a million and a half readers with his National Booker Award and Booker Prize-...
Apr 16, 2022•47 min
"You know, beauty is such an interesting term. I think it's really important how vast and complex it is … we call people beautiful, I call my dog beautiful every day. I call food I eat beautiful, I call bitter, bitter coffee, beautiful, I call an idea beautiful. A mathematical concept can be beautiful, a sunset, the natural world, a performance, a song, certainly works of art, but … I've heard myself say, What a beautiful attempt, a failed attempt, but a beautiful or like a beautiful mistake, wh...
Apr 14, 2022•50 min
" True Biz is an ASL idiom. It doesn't have one direct translation into English, but a few of the things that it could mean: seriously, literally. Real talk is one that I think gets used a lot. No kidding . Like, if someone says like, No, you made that up , no true biz , you know, and I thought that it was a good title for the book, because it doesn't quite translate directly into English." We've been fans of Sara Nović since her page-turning, coming-of-age debut, Girl at War . Sara's back with ...
Apr 12, 2022•46 min
"I really wrote it for me, I didn't think anything would come about — I wanted something that could bring me a bit of joy, where Asian American characters could live their lives and do something as fun and ridiculous as robbing art museums across the world." Grace D. Li loves a caper flick, and now she's written Portrait of a Thief , a caper novel with a very fun Chinese American cast. Grace joins us on the show to talk about the true story that inspired her debut, the Chinese diaspora, calling ...
Apr 09, 2022•45 min
"In the end, all the good ideas and sort of fancy craft approaches get you absolutely nothing if there's no emotional content. That's what it is. I mean, fiction is about going inside other people's minds and consciousnesses and looking through their eyes and living their lives in a way and that's all about emotions." Jennifer Egan challenged the way many of us thought about how (but not why) we tell stories in A Visit from the Goon Squad —which went on to win the Pulitzer. She joins us on our 1...
Apr 07, 2022•54 min
"I love being immersed in the grand project of a novel. When I was a kid, I was drawn to books about secret worlds, like The Secret Garden , or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where you disappear to the back of a wardrobe…" How many times have you re-read Emily St. John Mandel's genre-blending novels Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel? Emily joins us on the show to talk about her latest novel Sea of Tranquility — our April 2022 Barnes & Noble Book Club pick — along with what she loves ...
Apr 05, 2022•44 min
"…Cynical as he is of the world that he encounters, he's also pretty cynical and critical of himself. And that manifests itself in that sense of humor that you're talking about not a light-hearted sense of humor, but a very cynical and dark sense of humor, a sense of the absurd." Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer and The Committed (now out in paperback), among other books, joins us on the show to riff on the return of his unnamed narrator, why he followed hi...
Apr 02, 2022•50 min
"As you might imagine, over the years, many people heard stories about my family. And they said, Hey, why don't you write a memoir ? I really wasn't very interested in writing a memoir as I perceived a memoir to be, so the idea of spending years working on a book about the issues in my immediate family, which I grew up with, and was intimately familiar with, it felt like I would be locked in a closet with that somehow. And then I became sort of interested in looking backward..." Maud Newton used...
Mar 31, 2022•46 min
"They're not all villains and all heroes, I think a lot of people are very morally gray…" The atmospheric and haunting Wild and Wicked Things is a beautifully written tale of queer love in an alternative post-WWI England that invokes the glittering world of Gatsby with a blend of blood magic and gothic mystique. Francesca May joins us on the show to talk about the appeal of The Great Gatsby, the power of community, the thin line between good and wicked, reinventing the ideals of class and privil...
Mar 29, 2022•44 min
"We should call no future unthinkable and no future unimaginable . We have to be willing to think about the hard things and ready ourselves for them, we also have to free ourselves from the limitations of the present so that we can find refuge in the future that we want." Futurist and game designer Jane McGonigal wants to help you change your brain with her new book, Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything — Even Things That Seem Impossible Today , and she joins us o...
Mar 24, 2022•39 min
"The original impulse to write a book for this age was knowing that this is a time of identity formation for me, curiosity about the outside world. And I guess I wanted to make an offering in that space … I just wanted to write a book with an Asian American protagonist. And I thought, how cool it would have been for me at that age to see that at the library . " Actor John Cho ( Searching , Better Luck Tomorrow , Star Trek , Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle ) steps into a new role, author, w...
Mar 22, 2022•37 min
"My book starts in my brain with me telling myself a story. And I choose not to write it down, as I'm thinking about it. Sometimes for months, sometimes even maybe for a couple of years. My feeling is that if I stop thinking about it, or stop daydreaming about the story, then it's died a natural death in my brain and shouldn't make it to the page." Nine strangers, one determined detective and plenty of devious ways to die; Peter Swanson's latest whodunnit, Nine Lives , is a creepy, entertaining ...
Mar 17, 2022•35 min
"And within that time, I realized that the story needed to be about regular citizens. But because so much had been written, I found myself needing a new way of telling the story, a story that was very public, that was on everybody's lips." In 2017, Robert Mugabe was deposed in coup, an act that novelist NoViolet Bulawayo never thought she would see in her lifetime. She joins us on the show to talk about her fantastic new novel, Glory , the distance she needed to write a novel about the fall of a...
Mar 15, 2022•35 min
"The thing that really sort of blew me away, one of the reasons why we have sort of the type of poetry that we have today and the type of literature that we have today — it bloomed and was, I think, seeded in some ways by Sylvia Plath and her experience." Lee Kravetz joins us on the show to talk about his unexpected and entertaining debut novel, The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. , part literary mystery, part portrait of an immensely talented young woman and her impact on the world around her. Le...
Mar 10, 2022•38 min
"The book's title comes from Josephine Baker's speech at the March on Washington … she was speaking to a crowd that was younger, and maybe did not know her from her heyday of performance. And she compels them to go and ask their parents and grandparents about her and the system, T hey'll tell you that I was a devil and they'll be right. I was a devil in other countries. And I was a little devil in America, too ." Hanif Abdurraqib — MacArthur genius grant recipient, National Book Award finalist ...
Mar 08, 2022•37 min
"…A big part of this book is to have a more whole picture of our history here. It is the last 30 years, 90s to now, but we do devote a big chunk of the before as well because we want to plant those roots and say This began a long time ago . Let's at least start this conversation where we acknowledge and have a more deep understanding of our history. It doesn't all end with this book either." Jeff Yang, Phil Yu, and Philip Wang join us on the show to talk about their fabulous, beautifully illustr...
Mar 03, 2022•50 min
"If you want to create art, and you want to create art the way you want to, and it's just for you, that's fine. But if you want to have a writing career, then my advice is..." Olivie Blake's dark academic fantasy debut, The Atlas Six , has a cult following for a reason (believe the hype!) and she joins us on the show to talk about her character-driven epic (and which of her characters appeared first), her writing process and what she's learned over time, her daydream playlists, what she's readin...
Mar 01, 2022•35 min
"I'm writing about group creativity, which is not something we often do … what's interesting to me is what happens in the friction between people's minds through conversations, through discussion, through the exchange of ideas, through debate, through sort of egging one another on … bringing about any idea that's going to sort of undermine the nature of reality as we know it." Gal Beckerman of The Atlantic joins us on the show to talk about his fascinating new book, The Quiet Before: On the Unex...
Feb 26, 2022•44 min
"I sketched out some of these pool scenes a long, long time ago, maybe 15 years ago, but just you know, a few paragraphs. And then I don't know, I put them in a drawer somewhere..." It's been 20 years since Julie Otsuka's sublime debut, When the Emperor was Divine , almost 10 since the collective voice of The Buddha in the Attic . Julie's third novel, The Swimmers , is just out, and she joins us on the show to talk about her elegant, witty and elegiac new book and its "soft beating heart," the j...
Feb 24, 2022•47 min
"It's a great question. And no one has ever asked me that question. I think it's taught me about how to construct the arc of a narrative." We've learned so much from Debbie Millman and her fabulous interviews on her long-running podcast Design Matters . Since 2005, Debbie's introduced us to incredible thinkers from a variety of disciplines, and now 55 of the more than 500 interviews she's done are collected in a beautiful (and provocative) new book, Why Design Matters . Debbie joins us on the sh...
Feb 22, 2022•42 min
"Believe me, there probably was not a day that went by where I didn't say to myself, What on earth am I doing? And why did I take this on? Early on in the process, I was talking with a Churchill expert over breakfast in Washington, DC, and he was basically asking me, Why on earth are you doing this? And my answer to him, which stuck throughout the whole project, is that it's all in the telling." The Splendid and the Vile spent most of 2020 and '21 on top of the bestseller charts, and it's just o...
Feb 19, 2022•39 min
"There's a reason why all our old stories are fantastical and mythological, and why our fairy tales are so old. Because I think there is something in these mythologies and these folklore stories that tell us something about ourselves. And we've always done it, we've always put it into fantastical to explain the real." Marlon James returns with Moon Witch, Spider King, the second installment of his Dark Star trilogy, and this time, Sogolon the witch is center stage. Marlon joins us on the show to...
Feb 17, 2022•48 min
"...It means the world to me to witness any kind of massive scale love of books." Sarah J. Maas knows how to build worlds that readers never want to leave. The second installment of her fiery (and spicy) Crescent City series, House of Sky and Breath , is just out and Sarah joins us on the show to riff on #booktok, fandom, the screen adaptation she's working on with Ron Moore, her love of Lord of the Rings and Jane Austen, her playlists, and more. Featured Books: House of Sky and Breath and House...
Feb 15, 2022•45 min
"I wrote The Sum of Us in the hopes that people would read it together, that people from all walks of life, different backgrounds, whether they're connected by something, a community, a school, a workplace, would pick it up and find for each person, a way into the story of America's troubled history with racism, and then a way out together." Trained as a lawyer, and an expert in economic and social policy, Heather McGhee also excels at getting Americans to tell their stories — and look for solut...
Feb 12, 2022•46 min
"You know, when I wrote the book, I sort of thought it would resonate with a fairly narrow… I was writing it for people who are more or less like me, you know, little girls who grew up in junkyards and didn't go to school, and then going to college and everything changed." Tara Westover's memoir was a massive hit with readers everywhere when it was first published; four years later, Educated is out in paperback, and Tara joins us on the show to talk about choices and boundaries, family and home,...
Feb 10, 2022•45 min
"The Nineties were the last decade that we're ever going to talk about as a decade…" Chuck Klosterman has been challenging how we think, see and hear since his first book, Fargo Rock City , in 2001 to 2016's But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past. He joins us on the show to talk about his new book, The Nineties , Gen X, the end of monoculture, the rise of independent moviemaking, The New Sincerity, Nevermind + Exile in Guyville and more. Featured Books: The N...
Feb 08, 2022•45 min
"And fiction is all about obstacles. It's all about misapprehension, misunderstanding, lack of information, lack of connection, and the problems that come up, arise out of those things." Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Chang-rae Lee's most recent novel, My Year Abroad , is now out in paperback and it's unlike anything he's written before. Chang-rae joins us on the show to talk about homecomings and hunger, the limitless imagination of a new generation of immigrants, his 20-year-old narrator and ...
Feb 05, 2022•36 min
"But I do feel like I was on a quest as a writer, for my work to get bigger. I just wanted it to contain a larger portion of the world than it started off with… I tried to make it large in its emotional scope, as well as in the amount of action that happens in it." Lan Samantha Chang did, in fact, have as much fun writing our February 2022 B&N Book Club pick, The Family Chao, as we had reading it. She joins us on the show to talk about her post-immigrant novel, the brothers Chao themselves a...
Feb 03, 2022•41 min
"It's about people following their passions, and it's about falling in love for the first time whether that love is romantic, or with a professional industry." Anatomy: A Love Story is everything Noble Blood's creator and host Dana Schwartz loves in a story: spooky and fast-paced with a dash of romance, a perfect mix for the BN YA Book Club, and our pick for February '22. Dana joins us on the show to talk about her love of story and her creative process, finding her voice, the books that inspire...
Feb 01, 2022•48 min
"If you aren't writing your story in America, your story is being written for you. And if you're not telling your story, your story is being told to you….I was able to create my own superhero origin story when I was 10 years old." Left-handed, lactose intolerant, wisecracking Wajahat Ali joins us on the show to talk about his first book, Go Back to Where You Came From , growing up brown and Muslim in the Bay Area, his parents' time in jail, trading his law degree for the writer's life, becoming ...
Jan 29, 2022•37 min
