Adam Ross is the author of Mr. Peanut, selected as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Economist . He’s been a fellow in fiction at the American Academy in Berlin and a Hodder Fellow for Fiction at Princeton University. He is editor of The Sewanee Review . Born and raised in New York City, he now lives in Nashville, Tennessee, with his two daughters. His new novel is PLAYWORLD. On the show, Adam joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about how the idea...
Mar 03, 2025•1 hr 2 min
Laila Lalami’s fifth novel, The Dream Hotel , is a dystopian story for our time. Set in Los Angeles in the near-distant future, the novel follows Sara –– a museum archivist and mother — who just landed at LAX from London and is retained by the Risk Assessment Administration for a crime they believe she might commit based on data and algorithms the government uses to track its citizens through their dreams. Lalami, a Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, has been hailed a “maestra of l...
Feb 24, 2025•59 min
Tana French is the New York Times bestselling author of eight previous books, including The Searcher , The Likeness , and T he Witch Elm . Her novels have sold over three million copies and won numerous awards, including the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, and Barry awards, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Best Mystery/Thriller, and the Irish Book Award for Crime Fiction. She’s been called a mystery writer for people who don’t read mysteries. She lives in Dublin with her family. Tana French joins ...
Feb 17, 2025•1 hr
Eric Puchner is the author of two story collections — Music Through the Floor and Last Day on Earth . His first novel, Model Home , was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award in Fiction. His latest novel, Dream State , publishes February 18. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about it. They discuss controlling time in a novel, since the book takes place over generations and moves not linearly but fluidly through time. They also talk about anticipating the future, because the novel projects ahead in ti...
Feb 10, 2025•59 min
Renee Fountain is president of Gandolfo Helin & Fountain Lit Mgmt. She’s been in the publishing industry for more than 30 years. She’s worked at Harcourt and Simon & Schuster with some of the best writers and illustrators in publishing, has managed iconic classics like Raggedy Ann and Nancy Drew, and brokered film and television options. Renee also spent five years with the CW Television Network as a book scout and story analyst for scripted television. Renèe represents fiction and non-f...
Feb 02, 2025•1 hr 5 min
Danielle Prescod is a 15-year veteran of the beauty and fashion industry. She is also the author of the memoir Token Black Girl , which was one of the buzziest books of 2022, and cited as a must read by People, USA Today, Town and Country, Ebony, The LA Times, and landed her on NBC’s Today Show and elsewhere. Her debut novel is The Rules of Fortune . It’s published by Mindy Kaling’s Book Studio, an imprint at Amazon, and hits shelves February 1, 2025. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about it, as ...
Jan 28, 2025•55 min
Kim (Freilich) Dower ( City Poet Laureate of West Hollywood from October 2016 – October 2018) has published six highly acclaimed collections of poetry all from Red Hen Press. Her newest What She Wants is called, “witty, sultry and thoughtful,” by the Washington Post. The bestselling, I Wore This Dress Today for You, Mom , an Eric Hoffer Book Award Finalist, was called a “fantastic collection” by The Washington Post , “impressively insightful, thought-provoking, and truly memorable” by The Midwes...
Jan 23, 2025•1 hr 7 min
Bradford Morrow is the author of 10 novels, as well as short stories, children’s books, essays, anthologies, and illustrated books. He is also the founder and editor of the literary journal Conjunctions , which has been in publication since 1981. Professor Morrow has taught literature at Bard College for 35 years. His latest is The Forger’s Requiem . It’s the third in a trilogy, following The Forgers and The Forger’s Daughter . He joins Marrie Stone to talk about these novels, as well as his tec...
Jan 13, 2025•1 hr 3 min
Rebecca Renner is a journalist and fiction writer from Daytona Beach, Florida. She’s a seventh-generation Floridian, and is committed to making life in her state better for everyone through writing about politics, social issues, and the environment. She has a Master’s of Fine Arts in creative writing from Stetson University, the oldest university in the state of Florida. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review , The Atlantic , The Washington Post , Glamour , VICE , New York Magazine and mor...
Jan 09, 2025•1 hr 15 min
One of the questions I often get this time of year is who were my favorite interviews and what were my favorite books? This year, the question prompted me to begin digging through my 25+ hours of recordings to find the gems from 2024. I decided to edit some of them together and share them here. Of course, this is just a small sampling and doesn’t include Barbara’s many treasures. One of my New Year’s resolutions is to try doing more reading and less watching. If you’re in that boat too and looki...
Dec 30, 2024•1 hr 9 min
I have a Christmas and Hanukah gift for you: my show with Stephen Dunn. This is one of my favorite shows and he was one of my favorite poets. He published something like 21 collections of poetry. The show you’re about to hear from 2001, the first time he was a guest on the show. Writers on Writing was on the radio then. Podcasting wouldn’t be along for four more years and it would be a number of years—I’ve lost track—before my cohost Marrie Stone joined us. I first learned of Dunn back in the ea...
Dec 24, 2024•54 min
Karl Marlantes served as a Marine in Vietnam, where he was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation Medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten air medals. He is the bestselling author of Deep River, Matterhorn: A Novel of the Vietnam War , and What It is Like to Go to War . His latest, Cold Victory , is out in paperback by Grove Press. Karl joins Marrie Stone to discuss it. He talks about writing books based on direct experience versus writing books based on research, how...
Dec 16, 2024•53 min
Caroline Leavitt , the New York Times bestselling author of thirteen novels, most recently Days of Wonder, A finalist for the Midatlantic Fiction Prize and longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Literary Prize. Caroline is also the co-founder of A Mighty Blaze and a book critic for People Magazine. Find out more at www.carolineleavitt.com Caroline joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about writing the end of the book before the beginning, how understanding story structure changed everything for h...
Dec 09, 2024•54 min
Suzanne Redfearn didn’t discover her talent for fiction until her 30s. A trained commercial and residential architect, she’d also worked as a copywriter, marketing manager, graphic designer, and other odd jobs. Today, Suzanne is the #1 Amazon and USA Today bestselling author of seven novels: Two Good Men , Where Butterflies Wander, Moment In Time, Hadley & Grace, In an Instant, No Ordinary Life, and Hush Little Baby. Her books have been translated into twenty-seven languages and have been re...
Dec 02, 2024•57 min
Susan Minot is an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, poet, playwright, and screenwriter. She also paints watercolors and makes collages. She was born in Boston and grew up in Manchester-by-the-sea, Massachusetts, with six siblings who are all artists. Her first novel was Monkeys, published in 1986 . She wrote the screenplay for Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Stealing Beauty” (1995.) Her novel Evening, nominated for the Los Angeles Times Book Award , was a worldwide bestseller and became a major...
Nov 26, 2024•1 hr 7 min
Coco Mellors is the author of Cleopatra and Frankenstein , which was a Sunday Times bestseller and is currently being adapted for television. Her second novel, Blue Sisters , came out in September 20240 and was a Read with Jenna pick. She joins Marrie Stone to talk about it. Coco discusses writing from different POVs, writing compellingly about addiction and substance abuse, how to write sex scenes in all their various forms (and how to trick yourself to write difficult scenes by switching POV),...
Nov 18, 2024•1 hr 6 min
Nicola Yoon is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Instructions for Dancing , Everything, Everything , The Sun Is Also a Star , and a co-author of Blackout and Whiteout . She is a National Book Award finalist, a Michael L. Printz Honor Book recipient, a Coretta Scott King New Talent Award winner and the first Black woman to hit #1 on the New York Times Young Adult bestseller list. Two of her novels have been made into films . She’s also the co-publisher of Joy Revolution , a Random House...
Nov 12, 2024•45 min
Alice McDermott is the author of nine novels, all published by FSG, including Charming Billy (winner of the National Book Award), That Night , As Weddings and Wakes , and After This (which were finalists for the Pulitzer). She is also the author of the essay collection What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction . Her most recent novel, now out in paperback, is Absolution . She joins Marrie Stone to talk about it, her door into the Vietnam War, and many of the lessons she applies to...
Nov 04, 2024•59 min
Jo Hamya was born in London in 1997 where she now lives. After living in Miami for a few years, she completed an English degree at King’s College London and a MSt in contemporary literature and culture at Oxford University. There, she divided her research between updating twentieth-century cultural theory into twenty-first-century digital contexts, and the impact of social media on form and questions of identity in contemporary women’s writing. Since leaving Oxford, she has worked as a copyedito...
Oct 29, 2024•1 hr 3 min
Zoe Whittall is a Canadian poet, novelist, and TV writer. She has published five novels including The Fake, The Spectacular, The Best Kind of People which is being adapted for film by Sarah Polley, the Lambda-winning Holding Still for as Long as Possible , and her debut, Bottle Rocket Hearts . She has film and TV credits on the Baroness von Sketch Show, Schitt’s Creek, and others. She’s also a poet, authoring three poetry collections to date. Her latest, Wild Failure , is a collection of 10 stor...
Oct 21, 2024•58 min
Jean Hanff Korelitz is the author of nine novels including The Latecomer and The Plot (both in development for limited series), You Should Have Known (adapted as HBO’s 2020 limited series, The Undoing , by David E. Kelley and starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant) and Admission (basis for the 2013 film starring Tina Fey). The Plot was featured on The Tonight Show as the Fallon Summer Reads 2021 pick. Korelitz lives in New York City. Her most recent novel, which is a follow-up to The Plot , is Th...
Oct 14, 2024•51 min
Jonathan Lethem is one of the smartest, riskiest, and most experimental writers working in crime fiction today. He writes about crime not only like a fiction writer with all that propulsive page turning thrill, but also like a sociologist, a psychologist, a historian and a philosopher. That might never have been truer of his work than his latest, Brooklyn Crime Novel , which came out last year and is recently out in paperback. It's as much a book about gentrification, integration, race, class, e...
Oct 07, 2024•54 min
Jenna Satterthwaite was born in the Midwest, grew up in Spain, lived briefly in France, and now lives in Chicago with her husband and three kids. Jenna studied classical guitar at the Conservatorio Profesional de Música de Zaragoza and earned her BAs in English Lit and French at Indiana University. Once upon a time, Jenna moonlighted as a singer-songwriter in folk band Thornfield. As well as being a literary agent with Storm Literary Agency , she is a debut novelist. Made For You came out earlie...
Oct 01, 2024•1 hr 2 min
Alice Hoffman is the author of more than 40 books, including novels, YA fiction, middle grade and children’s books, short stories and nonfiction. Perhaps best known for her 1995 novel Practical Magic , which was adapted for a 1998 film of the same name, many of her works fall into the genre of magic realism and contain elements of magic, irony, and non-standard romances and relationships. Toni Morrison called The Dovekeepers “... a major contribution to twenty-first century literature.” Her late...
Sep 23, 2024•57 min
This week we’re talking with four hybrid/self-published authors. Christine Amoroso spent the first decade of her professional career as an accountant. In 1997 she chased a childhood dream and began a career in elementary education, first as a teacher and then a principal. In 2014 she started a blog, Bare Naked in Public , writing personal narratives about life’s lessons. In 2017, Christine sold her possessions and moved to Italy to write her memoir. A year later she returned home with the first ...
Sep 16, 2024•1 hr 24 min
Elizabeth Strout’s latest novel, Tell Me Everything , brings together her whole cast of characters to Crosby, Maine. Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton finally meet. Lucy continues her intense friendship with Bob Burgess. And, along the way, there’s a murder investigation, separations, and struggles with addiction. The book asks the big questions — what gives our lives meaning, what is love, what’s the difference between being evil and being broken, and what does forgiveness really look like? Liz ...
Sep 09, 2024•1 hr
Patricia Engel is the author of five books including the newest collection of short stories, The Faraway World ; Infinite Country , a New York Times Bestseller and Reese's Book Club pick; The Veins of the Ocean , winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris , winner of the International Latino Book Award; and Vida , a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway and Young Lions Fiction Awards, and a New York Times Notable Book. She is a recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim...
Sep 02, 2024•49 min
Ben Shattuck is the author of Six Walks: In the Footsteps of Henry David Thoreau , which was a New Yorker Best Book of 2022, a Wall Street Journal Best Book of Spring, and the New York Times Best Book of Summer. His latest is The History of Sound , a collection of 12 stories told as duets or couplets, with two stories talking to each other. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about the collection, including finding the voice of each story across the three centuries of time the collection covers, point...
Aug 26, 2024•1 hr 7 min
Sarah Pearse lives by the sea in South Devon with her husband and two daughters. After moving to Switzerland in her twenties, she spent every spare moment exploring the mountains in the Swiss Alpine town of Crans Montana, the dramatic setting that inspired her debut novel, The Sanatorium , a Reese Witherspoon Bookclub Pick. The Retreat , her second novel, was also a New York Times Bestseller and a Top Ten Sunday Times Bestseller. Over 1 million copies of her books have been sold in over 30 count...
Aug 19, 2024•57 min
Julia Phillips is the author of the National Book Award finalist and NYT Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year debut Disappearing Earth . Her latest is Bear , out and available by Hogarth. She joins Marrie to talk about it, as well as the power of fairytales and using that structure in your work . She talks about working in a close third point of view, how to make setting a character in your story, and how the pandemic impacted this current wave of fiction. They also talk about finding an agen...
Aug 12, 2024•59 min
