"It's so painful to me to feel as though the very notion of objective truth or that journalism could be a vehicle for expressing a kind of objective truth is under assault today." Patrick Radden Keefe is one of the best longform journalists working today, and we'd follow his dogged reporting anywhere, from bestselling books like Say Nothing and Empire of Pain , to his work as a staff writer at The New Yorker , some of which is collected in his latest book, Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Kille...
Jun 28, 2022•46 min
"So much classic fantasy exists in this sort of timeless state where, you know, whatever fantasy world it's set in has kind of always existed....I've always been really interested in kind of disrupting that and kind of setting my books during periods of like, enormous change and upheaval, like, I'm really interested in the idea of a fantasy world that has not always been the same, because that's not how the world works, and kind of taking apart these things that are really taken for granted." Av...
Jun 25, 2022•42 min
"I sort of figured that, having been interested in science from as long as I can remember, I would be a PhD student, and make a career for myself and research. And it turned out that the one hitch with that plan was that I am catastrophically bad at doing actual research. I was the world's worst graduate student….So instead, I thought that I would find a different purpose and better joy in talking and writing about science, which is what I did. That nourishes my soul much more; I get to learn ab...
Jun 23, 2022•49 min
"I wanted to write something that was going to take me away, literally and metaphorically, literally take me away from sitting with my feelings about the present moment and take me to another place and this time where you couldn't travel at all. I barely left the neighborhood to play out some imagined incredible drama … I think escapism has its purpose, you know, and so does fiction in general, if we want to live in the biggest world possible, we need everybody's imagination to be there in the e...
Jun 21, 2022•41 min
"You know, Marlon James said something once, he said, if you're going to write about the enslaved, and you're not going to write about the resilience, and the brilliance, and the incredible ability to make a life in a brutal system, a life full of love and some joy, then he said, he's not interested in reading that book." Geraldine Brooks, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, March, is known for her moving historical novels. Her latest, Horse , is a stunning new novel that transports read...
Jun 18, 2022•47 min
"...A part of the point of the book was to not shy away from what we shy away from in real life. And one of the things we shy away from in real life is admitting for exactly how long we are a mess and don't know what we're doing." From her classic essay collections, including I Was Told There Would Be Cake through her last bestselling novel, The Clasp , Sloane Crosley keeps us entertained with her trademark wit, voice and gimlet eye. Her latest, the genre-busting new novel, Cult Classic , is gob...
Jun 16, 2022•48 min
"And when you give people the option to kind of live inside the head of a different character … if you're doing your job, and you make it a character that they can see themselves in and they can empathize with, and then you kind of throw these things at them. And then it just changes the way that people think about something." For the Throne is the stunning conclusion to the Wilderwood duology that invokes familiar fairy tales with sharp prose and epic world-building, and it's out now. Hannah jo...
Jun 14, 2022•42 min
"It was the people really, that convinced me that this was a story not just worth telling, but needed to be told, and needed to be told the right way, in a way that would actually be fun to read and engaging, that would reach broader than an academic audience that would reach deep into the community and say, you know, this is a story about ordinary people trying to get justice in a time and place in America where it's pretty hard to do that…" Wastelands: The True Story of Farm Country on Trial i...
Jun 11, 2022•39 min
"I really wanted to depict the ways that young Black girls are made adults by a culture that sees us as that. And I wanted to show the way that that pressure piles on and what it does to teenage Black girls, who are really often forgotten in our culture." Nightcrawling is a powerful story of family, grief and justice with an unforgettable teenage narrator (and equally unforgettable author), and it's out now. Leila Mottley joins us on the show to talk about writing her first novel at 14, sibling ...
Jun 09, 2022•44 min
"Tracy never went away. So yes, you can say I'm bringing her back, but the culture kept her in circulation in a way that was really interesting to me, and at times a little alienating. It's like you create a character and, suddenly, she's played brilliantly by Reese Witherspoon, and in a sense, that becomes the public's image of the character — and I love that performance as much as anybody. But then Tracy got picked up by political journalists and by the internet as a kind of shorthand for an o...
Jun 07, 2022•42 min
"I missed it so much. And definitely didn't get it or appreciate the specialness of it, or this particular beauty of it … until you have to show up at a party full of strangers. And answer that, where are you from question so many times. I'm not sure I would have written this book, if I didn't have to do that over and over and over again, in so many different places." That's Katie Runde, riffing on the Jersey Shore; it's more than just the setting for her debut novel, The Shore , it's a characte...
Jun 04, 2022•50 min
"I was very, very unintentionally smart in that I started it as a short story, I genuinely believed it was a short story, which was good, because if I hadn't sat down and said, I'm now going to write my first novel I'd probably still be working on it, but because it was a short story that got longer and became a long story, and then became a novella. And then like, Oh, I'm writing the book that I want in the world, both as a person and as an editor." David Levithan's Boy Meets Boy is one of the ...
Jun 02, 2022•44 min
"I didn't want it to be just a very overwhelming dark book. I mean, it has so much tragedy that I had to balance that I wanted to make it part of, you know, light and airy and fun and frothy and feminine to contrast with what's going to happen. I think there's power in that contrast ... I felt like it can't all be this very goth all the time, this very gothic world, the kind of fog-on-the-Moors kind of thing…" We were utterly thrilled by Sarai Walker's debut novel, Dietland —inspired in part by ...
May 31, 2022•45 min
"And I had to actually give up and say, Okay, maybe I'll go to the grave not having written a novel , and I don't have to carry around shame about that. I can just do the kind of writing that I'm maybe better at or that it is my calling to do, and the moment I stopped putting so much pressure on myself and stopped making it a big ego drama about me, that actually opened up space in my creative life for me to enter the hearts and minds of all these characters who were all keeping secrets from one...
May 28, 2022•52 min
"I'm always coming back to Chicasetta, in the same way that Ernest Gaines always comes back to Bayonne parish. And William Faulkner always comes back to that county that I cannot pronounce, your top or whatever it is, right. You know, in the same way that Louise Erdrich returns to the particular reservation, I'm always coming back to these characters." Finalist for the National Book Award, poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers has conjured an epic and indelible story of an American family with The Love S...
May 26, 2022•46 min
"I had a dream about them. I have like these really cinematic dreams. And I woke up from this one. And I was like, this is a fantastic, messy little story, this is a love triangle that I want to read about. I want to—as a reader, as a viewer—I want to see this play out. And the only way I could get it to play out was to you know, write it." Critically acclaimed author Akwaeke Emezi ( Freshwater , The Death of Vivek Oji , and Pet , among other novels) delivers a page-turning modern romance in the...
May 24, 2022•43 min
"…You have to have so much primary source material that you are drowning, you think you can never get through it all. That's the only way you get dialogue, you get all those details, you know, that really make you feel like you're there and kind of at you just like sinking into the story and forgetting everything else." We'll follow bestselling author Candice Millard anywhere at any time—her latest book, River of the Gods , takes us on the epic search for the head of the Nile River with Sir Rich...
May 21, 2022•41 min
"That was really what I wanted to get at. The relationships that you have with the people who you love so much, and who you're so close with that you don't have to talk to them all the time." All of Emma Straub's novels have big beating hearts, no matter who or what or where or when she's writing about. This Time Tomorrow is her "autobiographical time travel novel" and it's an absolute delight. Emma joins us on the show to talk about why she writes, giving herself permission to try something new...
May 19, 2022•44 min
"But then when I read that Raymond Carver said he didn't have the ability to write, you know, a full novel. He was a sprinter and I thought, Oh, maybe I could do it . Is there any such thing as a half a paragraph short story , because that was all I had the focus for. So, it took me a long, long time to write this book." Actress ( Cruel Intentions , Hellboy , Legally Blonde) , model, muse to Karl Lagerfeld, mom to a young son, subject of an indelible documentary ( Introducing, Selma Blair on dis...
May 17, 2022•39 min
"For me, part of the fun of coming-of-age novels, both reading and writing, is getting to have that adult perspective on these youthful moments and kind of allow you to make sense of them in a way you couldn't before; it can allow you to forgive yourself for some of the things maybe you did, it can allow you to laugh at some of the things that horrified you, and that can bring peace and joy and resolution." It's been a minute since Alison Espach's debut novel The Adults — she joins us on the sho...
May 14, 2022•40 min
"I was thinking about caretaking. And I was thinking about mothers because I lost my mom last year, but just the places that feel familiar and how they almost become characters in our heads. Like when I think about the house where I grew up, and I can remember it so specifically right down to the way like the closet smelled or when I think about all the time I spent in Cape Cod, the way the sand on the beach feels at low tide or the way the wind sounds when it's late at night." Bestselling autho...
May 12, 2022•43 min
"…It's like if Tim Burton decorated Versailles for Halloween…" Heather Walter's queer retelling of Sleeping Beauty kicked off with Malice , which we think of as more than just a remix to a familiar story—It's a complex, character-driven story with action, political intrigue, betrayal, and of course, a slow burn romance ... Heather's closing out her Malice duology with Misrule , and she joins us on the show to talk about good vs. evil, why readers love morally grey characters, the fun she has wri...
May 10, 2022•45 min
"For me, the novel form is the greatest expression because it has that room, that latitude to really explore for the full complexity of human existence and psychology and diversity, and there's no other single format that I think comes close, even with the amazing ways in which television drama has grown and become more complex and more satisfying, I still think that it's the novel form that did it first, and still does it best." Monica Ali made a splash with her Booker-nominated debut novel, Br...
May 07, 2022•40 min
"And the title, of course, has this double meaning, the financial meaning of trust, and let's call it, emotional meaning of trust … To what extent can I trust this voice and the book, to a large extent is questioning the contracts we enter into as readers." Hernan Diaz follows up his acclaimed debut novel, In the Distance (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), with Trust , a stunning book-about-a-book, an exploration of capital and greed and the making of myths. Hernan joins us on the show to talk...
May 05, 2022•41 min
"I grew up hearing The Ramayana over lunch. My grandma would tell me little bits and pieces to me and my younger sister, she would tell us little bits and pieces every day. And we would ask to hear the same stories over and over again." If you're a fan of imaginative retellings like Circe , Ariadne and The Witch's Heart , you don't want to miss Vaishnavi Patel's Kaikeyi . Vaishnavi joins us on the show to talk about the origins of her debut novel, her love of retellings and epic fantasy, what wr...
May 03, 2022•43 min
"And so then, I felt like that's when I had to go back to the beginning of telling my story of sort of rediscovering the young Viola, who definitely may have been traumatized, but was pure." Multi-award-winning actress Viola Davis has poured herself into the characters she portrays on the big screen and on stage. And, now, in her most deeply personal and inspiring role yet, as author, she has released her memoir, Finding Me — out now. Viola joins us on the show to talk about rediscovering the yo...
Apr 28, 2022•41 min
"And I think it's just overall her humanity and her recognition of what other people could accomplish. If you just say the right things, if you create the right chemistry, that really drove me to her. And she does—she has her own chemistry with everyone in the book." That's Bonnie Garmus talking about Elizabeth Zott, the unforgettable center of Bonnie's debut novel, Lessons in Chemistry . Bonnie joins us on the show to talk about her spectacular characters, never giving up (and the writing advic...
Apr 26, 2022•44 min
"I didn't want that more traditional kind of arc of childhood to a certain stance of wisdom or resignation or triumph. I wanted—partly because I felt with Negroland , and very much with this book—that ability to change persona, change my position, to acknowledge that one was performing at times, and that one played many, many roles … I wanted to be able to take in all of that, and a traditional memoir structure wasn't going to allow it." Margo Jefferson is one of our most astute and elegant cult...
Apr 23, 2022•44 min
"There's an intense pleasure in viewing the flaws of the people around you and saying, I'm not a part of that , even if maybe at the beginning you want to be or even maybe you still do, but you learn to come from where you stand. And that's part of what Jordan is doing. She's very comfortable in her discomfort…" Nghi Vo won the Hugo Award for Debut Novella with The Empress of Salt and Fortune , the first volume of her Singing Hills Cycle. Nghi's remixed and remastered The Great Gatsby for her ne...
Apr 21, 2022•45 min
"Leonard Cohen is like my all-time favorite musician … I, all my life, have had this reaction to sad music, of not feeling sad at all when I listened to it. Instead, what I feel is a kind of sense of uplift, and a sense of wonder and awe that a musician could take pain and turn it into beauty. And most of all, a kind of sense of connection with the musician and with all the other people who are listening to it. It's a kind of like beautiful acknowledgement that the state of being human involves ...
Apr 19, 2022•46 min
