Today we’re going to replay a show from 2007. Barbara DeMarco-Barrett is joined by Elmore Leonard, an American novelist, short story author and screenwriter many of you are familiar with. He was, according to British journalist Anthony Lane, "hailed as one of the best crime writers in the land." Mostly working in the genres of westerns and crime, more than 30 of his stories were adapted to the screen over the course of a writing career spanning 60 years.He wrote Get Shorty, Freaky Deaky, and Gli...
Sep 29, 2025•28 min
Bruce Holsinger’s Culpability was Oprah’s big pick this summer. No surprise. It’s a novel that gives book clubs a lot of contemporary ethical issues to talk about. From self-driving cars to drones to chatbots, technology isn’t just changing our daily lives, it’s changing our laws, our relationships, our sense of self. And it’s reshaping the way we talk about responsibility and culpability. Culpability is Bruce’s third contemporary family drama, following The Displacements and The Gifted School ....
Sep 22, 2025•56 min
Today, the microphone turns on Writers on Writing founder and host Barbara DeMarco-Barrett . She joins Marrie Stone to talk about her latest story collection, Pool Fishing . Barbara’s venture into noir fiction began with the short story, “Crazy for You,” originally published in Akashic Book’s, Orange County Noir, later included in USA Noir: Best of the Akashic Noir Series . She’s also the editor and contributor to Palm Springs Noir (Akashic) and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for her short s...
Sep 16, 2025•1 hr 4 min
One Story Magazine Editor Patrick Ryan cut his teeth on the short story form. Author of the critically acclaimed collections The Dream Life of Astronauts and Send Me , Ryan has spent a career editing masters like Joy Williams, Colum McCann, Alice Munro and Ann Beattie. For forty years, he’s tried his hand at novels, but nothing stuck. Until now. Ryan’s debut novel is Buckeye . The book has already become a Read With Jenna pick (which she calls a “once-in-a-decade epic”). It’s one of those cancel...
Sep 08, 2025•1 hr 4 min
Paul Bradley Carr is the author of the new novel, The Confessions. He has written three memoirs about his adventures in and around Silicon Valley. He was the Silicon Valley columnist for The Guardian , senior editor at TechCrunch , and cofounder of PandoDaily . His writing has also appeared in The Wall Street Journal , HuffPost , and National Geographic . He lives in Palm Springs with his family and is the co-owner of The Best Bookstore in Palm Springs. Find out more at PaulBradleyCarr.com , and...
Sep 01, 2025•1 hr 7 min
Michelle Huneven is the author of six novels including Round Rock, Jamesland, Off Course, Blame, Search and — most recently — Bug Hollow . Bug Hollow is a story about the Samuelsons, who lose their 18-year-old son in an accident. The book ripples out from there in a kaleidoscopic way, following the parents, siblings, girlfriend and others into the distant future and around in time to see how their lives play out. It’s told in chapters – or stories – from each character’s perspective. And it’s la...
Aug 25, 2025•59 min
Crissy Van Meter’s novel, Creatures (Algonquin Books, 2020), was a Belletrist Book pick, an NPR Book of the Year, a finalist for the WILLA Literary Award, and longlisted for the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award. Her writing appears in Vice, Guernica, Buzzfeed, and Catapult. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from the New School and teaches creative writing at The Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. She is the founder of the literary project Five Quarterly and the contributing editor fo...
Aug 19, 2025•53 min
Literary agent Richard Curtis was a pioneer in the e-book industry. Having worked in publishing for nearly 50 years, he understands nuances, trends, and the long arc of what makes authors and publishers successful. He adapted his agenting model to accommodate the consolidations of the publishing houses and what those changes meant for agents and writers. He’s written several books on those topics, and authors the popular Substack newsletter, Inside Agenting . But earlier this year, Richard disco...
Aug 11, 2025•53 min
Stefanie Leder is a TV showrunner and writer whose credits include the MTV teen dramedy Faking It , TBS comedy Men at Work , Netflix’s Boo, Bitch , and the long-running ABC Family comedy Melissa & Joey. She is also a guest lecturer on television writing at the Low Residency MFA at UCR. Bilingual in English and Spanish, she spent a year abroad in Costa Rica and has worked for a nonprofit on Fair Trade Coffee and anti-sweatshop campaigns. Love, Coffee, and Revolution is her first novel. You ca...
Aug 06, 2025•53 min
Ed Park is the author of the novels Same Bed Different Dreams (2023), a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Personal Days (2008), a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker , The New York Review of Books , Harper’s , The Atlantic , Bookforum , McSweeney’s , and elsewhere. He is a founding editor of The Believer and the former literary editor of The Village Voice , and has worked in newspapers an...
Jul 28, 2025•59 min
Jill Ciment, author of The Body in Question , was born in Montreal, Canada. She is the author of Small Claims , a collection of short stories, novels, and novellas; The Law of Falling Bodies , Teeth of the Dog , The Tattoo Artist , Heroic Measures , and Act of God , and the memoirs, Half a Life and Consent . She has been the recipient of numerous grants and awards, including the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, two New York Foundation for the Arts fellowships, the Janet Heidinger Kafk...
Jul 23, 2025•58 min
The New Yorker has said that Amy Bloom “gets more meaning into individual sentences than most authors manage in whole books.” She is the author of five novels: White Houses , Lucky Us , Away , Love Invents Us and – most recently – I’ll Be Right Here . She’s also authored three collections of short stories: Where the God Of Love Hangs Out , Come to Me (finalist for the National Book Award), and A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You (finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award). In 2022,...
Jul 14, 2025•1 hr
An acknowledged master of the short story form, Richard Bausch's work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly , Esquire, Gentleman's Quarterly, Harper's, The Missouri Review, The New Yorker, Narrative, New Letters, Playboy, Ploughshares, and The Southern Review , and his stories have been widely anthologized, including The Best American Short Stories, O. Henry Prize Stories, and Pushcart Prize Stories , among others. He is the author of thirteen novels and ten collections of stories, including his ...
Jul 08, 2025•1 hr
Chris Whitaker is the author of four novels including Tall Oaks, All the Wicked Girls, We Begin at the End and All the Colors of the Dark (now out in paperback). The New York Times bestseller has sold more than one million copies. But more extraordinary is Chris’s story of becoming a professional writer and how these bestsellers get written. He joins Marrie Stone to talk about his unusual path into publishing and how he used writing to overcome trauma. (In fact, Chris is so self-taught that he r...
Jun 30, 2025•1 hr 3 min
Born in Seattle, Caroline Fraser holds a Ph.D. in English and American literature from Harvard. Formerly on the editorial staff of The New Yorker , she is the author of three previous nonfiction books, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder , God's Perfect Child: Living and Dying in the Christian Science Church , and Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution . She served as editor of the Library of America edition of Laura Ing...
Jun 23, 2025•56 min
Wally Lamb is the author of six New York Times bestselling novels: I’ll Take You There, We Are Water, Wishin’ and Hopin’, The Hour I First Believed, I Know This Much Is True , and She’s Come Undone. He also edited Couldn’t Keep It to Myself and I’ll Fly Away , two volumes of essays from students in his writing workshop at York Correctional Institution, a women’s prison in Connecticut, where he was a volunteer facilitator for twenty years. He’s been on the show three times in the past. Those inte...
Jun 16, 2025•1 hr 2 min
Gillian McAllister graduated with an English degree before working as a lawyer. She lives in Birmingham, England, where she now writes full-time. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller Wrong Place Wrong Time and the Sunday Times bestsellers Everything But the Truth , Anything You Do Say (titled The Choice in the US), No Further Questions (titled The Good Sister in the US), The Evidence Against You , How to Disappear , and That Night . Her newest novel, Famous Last Words , is the focu...
Jun 10, 2025•44 min
We don’t have many guests return to the show six times. Jess Walter is now one of them. Barbara DeMarco-Barrett has interviewed him three times — for his novels Beautiful Ruins and The Financial Lives of the Poets , as well as his story collection We Live in Water . He’s been on with Marrie Stone for The Cold Millions and the story collection The Angel of Rome . There are a few reasons we’re always eager to talk to him. First, he’s always trying something different — short stories, novels, histo...
Jun 02, 2025•1 hr 1 min
Darrow Farr is a Salvadoran-American writer who was a Stegner Fellow in Fiction at Stanford University from 2017-2019 and received an MFA in Creative Writing from The Michener Center at the University of Texas. She was born and raised outside of Philadelphia, where she now lives with her husband and son. The Bombshell is her debut novel. Darrow joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about why she chose a 17-year-old female protagonist and single POV—until the ending of the book, placing the story...
May 28, 2025•54 min
Richard Russo is the author of ten novels, most recently Somebody’s Fool, Chances Are, Everybody’s Fool and That Old Cape Magic ; two collections of stories; one previous essay collection about writing — The Destiny Thief: Essays on Writing, Writers and Life ; and the memoir Elsewhere . In 2002 he received the Pulitzer Prize for Empire Falls , which, like Nobody’s Fool, won multiple awards for its screen adaptation, and in 2023 his novel Straight Man was adapted into the television series Lucky ...
May 19, 2025•1 hr 2 min
Charlotte Wood is the author of seven novels and three books of non-fiction. Her novel Stone Yard Devotional was shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize. It was described by the UK Guardian as ‘a quiet novel of immense power’ and has been praised by authors Anne Enright, Tim Winton, Karen Joy Fowler, Hannah Kent and Paula Hawkins among others. Her previous books include The Luminous Solution , a book of essays on the creative process; the international bestseller, The Weekend; and The Natural Way ...
May 14, 2025•55 min
Vauhini Vara grew up alongside internet startup companies. She was in middle school when AOL sent those first floppy disks to our homes, inviting us to dial up to the World Wide Web. A graduate of Stanford and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she became a tech writer for The Wall Street Journal and a business reporter for The Atlantic, The New Yorker and other publications. In 2017, Vara profiled Sam Altman, a co-founder of OpenAI, and gained early access to ChatGPT. She used the program to write abo...
May 06, 2025•55 min
Jennifer Haigh’s first novel, Mrs. Kimble , won the PEN Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Mercy Street , was named a Best Book of 2022 by The New Yorker and won the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award. Her short stories have been published widely, in the Atlantic , Granta , The Best American Short Stories , and many other places. Published in eighteen languages, her work has been recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation, the Michener Foundation and the American Academy of Arts and Lett...
May 01, 2025•53 min
Andrew Porter is the author of two story collections, The Disappeared and The Theory of Light and Matter . He’s also the author of the novel In Between Days . His latest, out this month, is The Imagined Life and it treads on some familiar territory as the others. Andrew joins Marrie Stone to talk about it. His work has been compared to Richard Yates and John Cheever . He talks about those influences and his hyper-focus on the domestic realm. He also talks about the impacts his former professor, ...
Apr 21, 2025•55 min
Tova Mirvis is the author of the memoir The Book of Separation as well as three novels, Visible City , The Outside World and The Ladies Auxiliary , a national bestseller. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times , The Washington Post , The Boston Globe Magazine and Real Simple , and her fiction has been broadcast on NPR. She lives in Newton, MA with her family. Her most recent novel is We Would Never . Tova joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about how the idea for her new book came from...
Apr 15, 2025•1 hr 4 min
In 2007, with his Caldecott-winning masterpiece The Invention of Hugo Cabret , Brian Selznick invented a new way of storytelling. The book became the basis for the 2011 Oscar-winning movie Hugo , directed by Martin Scorsese. Brian is the author and illustrator of many other books for children, including Wonderstruck (also a movie), The Marvels , Kaleidoscope , and Big Tree , which was named one of the Best Children's books of 2023 by the New York Times and the audio book, narrated by Meryl Stree...
Apr 07, 2025•1 hr 10 min
Colum McCann first came on the podcast in 2010 to talk about his National Book Award winning novel, Let the Great World Spin . He most recently returned in 2020 with his New York Times bestseller Apeirogon . He’s back this month with a stunning new novel, Twist . He joins Marrie Stone to talk about the book and his inspiration. They also discuss the need for stories in this current historical moment, why Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a book for our times, the things currently giving him hope, a...
Mar 31, 2025•1 hr 1 min
Scott Turow is a writer and former practicing lawyer and the author of 13 bestselling works of fiction, including Presumed Innocent . Scott has also published two nonfiction books, including One L , about his experience as a law student. His books have been translated into more than 40 languages, sold more than 30 million copies worldwide, and have been adapted into movies and television projects. He frequently contributes essays and op-ed pieces to publications such as the New York Times, Washi...
Mar 24, 2025•1 hr
Charlotte McConaghy is an Australian author living in Sydney with her partner and two children. She has a Masters Degree in Screenwriting from the Australian Film Television and Radio School, and a number of published SFF works in Australia. Her novel Migrations was her first foray into adult literary fiction, published in North America by Flatiron Books, and by Penguin Random House in Australia and the UK. It is being translated into over 25 languages and adapted to film. Once There Were Wolves...
Mar 17, 2025•50 min
Eowyn Ivey was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2013 for her debut novel, The Snow Child . Her latest, Black Woods, Blue Sky , offers a dark fairytale, a love story of a different kind, and depicts a mother-daughter relationship like none we’ve read before. Ivey joins Marrie Stone to talk about the backstories behind the novel. They also chat about writing different points of view, including writing from a 6-year-old perspective, setting up the rules of magical realism, and makin...
Mar 10, 2025•1 hr 1 min
