In the 1840s, a Scottish minister named John Ferguson accepts the task of traveling to a remote island to evict Ivar, the only man who lives there. When Reverend Ferguson falls off a cliff, Ivar brings him back to life and the two find a common understanding even as they realize they don't speak the same language. That's the basis of Carys Davies' new novel, Clear . In today's episode, NPR's Scott Simon asks the author about how she discovered a real-life extinct language called Norn, and how th...
Jun 27, 2024•8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Eight translators from eight countries travel to a Polish forest to begin adapting famed author Irena Rey's newest book into their respective languages. But when Irena Rey disappears, a competitive, ego-fueled search unravels in the surrounding woods and within each person. In today's episode, author Jennifer Croft speaks with NPR's Scott Simon about her new novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey , and how her own experience as an International Booker Prize-winning translator sparked an interest in ...
Jun 26, 2024•10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Memory Piece , the latest novel from National Book Award finalist Lisa Ko, kicks off in the 1980s with three teenage girls who find a deep connection to one another. Into the1990s and eventually the 2040s, the book delves into their growth as individuals and friends. In today's episode, Here & Now's Deepa Fernandes speaks with Ko about how art, gentrification and activism plays a role in each woman's life, and how memory and interdependence helps them find hope for their futures. To listen to Bo...
Jun 25, 2024•10 min•Transcript available on Metacast The story of Saba, the protagonist of Leo Vardiashvili's novel Hard by a Great Forest , is much like the author's own. A young boy flees the Soviet Republic of Georgia with his father and brother as the country is ravaged by a war. Decades later, when his father goes back to their homeland and promptly disappears, Saba must face his family's past and immense loss in an effort to find him. In today's episode, Vardiashvili tells NPR's Scott Simon about being separated from his own family, and the ...
Jun 24, 2024•8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today's episode is all about what it means to "make it" and why there's no one path to success. First, Jennifer Breheny Wallace speaks with Here & Now's Deepa Fernandes about her new book Never Enough , which examines "toxic achievement culture" and the high pressure young people are under in regards to grades and college admissions. Then, WBUR's Tiziana Dearing speaks with Mo Rocca about Roctogenarians , co-written with Jonathan Greenberg, which profiles people who reached their goals and bigge...
Jun 21, 2024•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast Once upon a time, author Porochista Khakpour worked as a shop girl in the luxury stores lining Rodeo Drive. She tells NPR's Ailsa Chang how excited she would get when Iranian-American customers came in but how poorly those interactions would pan out to be. Her new novel, Tehrangeles , explores the story of one such powerful family in LA on the cusp of getting their own reality TV show. And as Khakpour and Chang discuss, it opens a whole lot of questions about whiteness, assimilation and cultural...
Jun 20, 2024•9 min•Transcript available on Metacast After riding out the first year of the pandemic alone in her small studio apartment in New York City, Glynnis MacNicol saw an opportunity and ran with it. Once vaccines had rolled out in 2021, she booked a flight to, and apartment in, Paris and the food, wine and sex that followed is the fuel of her new memoir, I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself . In today's episode, MacNicol speaks with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly about pursuing pleasure, fully and unapologetically. To listen to Book of the Day sponso...
Jun 19, 2024•9 min•Transcript available on Metacast In the new novel One of Our Kind , Jasmyn Williams moves her family to the planned Black utopia of Liberty, California. But things start to take a turn when Jasmyn realizes not everyone who lives in Liberty is the way she expected them to be. In today's episode, author Nicola Yoon speaks with NPR's Ayesha Rascoe about writing in the thriller genre, dismantling the idea that Black people are a monolith, and finding inspiration in The Stepford Wives . To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and ...
Jun 18, 2024•9 min•Transcript available on Metacast At the height of the Drake and Kendrick Lamar beef a few weeks back, Questlove took to Instagram to say, amongst other things, that "hip-hop is truly dead." In today's episode, he tells NPR's Rodney Carmichael where he was coming from whether or not he actually believes that and explains the musical shift, personal stories and cultural changes detailed in his new book, Hip-Hop Is History . To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and support NPR's book coverage, sign up for Book of the Day+ at ...
Jun 17, 2024•7 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today's episode highlights two books that grapple with hardships and perseverance within a family. First, Here & Now's Robin Young speaks with Michelle Horton about Dear Sister , a memoir chronicling how Horton's sister was arrested for killing her husband, the abuse she'd been suffering at his hands for years, and the family's fight to reduce her prison sentence. Then, NPR's Scott Simon speaks with journalist Lawrence Ingrassia about A Fatal Inheritance , which tracks generations of cancer in I...
Jun 14, 2024•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast Comedian, TV writer and podcast host Chelsea Devantez moved around a lot as a kid. She jokes in today's episode that her mom "loved to get divorced" but that also led to what she describes as a pretty great co-parenting situation between her mom and godmother for a while. It's one of the many stories in Devantez's new memoir, I Shouldn't Be Telling You This (But I'm Going to Anyway) . She spoke to NPR's Elizabeth Blair about the book, her journey as a domestic violence survivor and the experienc...
Jun 13, 2024•12 min•Transcript available on Metacast You Like It Darker is a new collection of short stories by Stephen King and as the author tells NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, one of those stories spent decades tucked away in a desk drawer before he gave it an ending. In today's episode,the two discuss the bigger questions of destiny and morality in that story and in much of King's work, and why the writer thought several of his best-selling novels would never see the light of day. To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and support NPR's book cov...
Jun 12, 2024•9 min•Transcript available on Metacast Harriet Jacobs is one of the best-known female abolitionists and authors who wrote about their experiences of enslavement in the South. But while searching for information about Jacobs' children, literary historian Jonathan Schroeder discovered something else: The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots , the long-lost autobiography of Jacobs' brother, John Swanson Jacobs. In today's episode, Schroeder speaks with NPR's Juana Summers about the life of the author, his escape to fre...
Jun 11, 2024•6 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Mango Tree kicks off with a phone call: Journalist Annabelle Tometich is informed her mom has been arrested for shooting a man, with a BB gun, who was trying to take mangoes from her yard. What follows is a memoir about a rich but turbulent upbringing in a half-white, half-Filipino family in Fort Myers, Florida. In today's episode, NPR's Scott Simon asks Tometich about the moment she realized the violence in her household wasn't normal, and what that mango tree represented for her immigrant ...
Jun 10, 2024•9 min•Transcript available on Metacast U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limn recently edited and introduced You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World , a collection of poems by writers like Joy Harjo and Jericho Brown that pays homage to landscapes across the United States. In today's episode, Limn joins NPR's Rachel Martin to play a game for the new podcast Wild Card . They discuss some pivotal moments in Limn's life marked by natural scenery, like a creek she played in growing up and a big realization she had about her fertility while swimmi...
Jun 07, 2024•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Marcela Fuentes' debut novel, Malas , is set in a small town nestled on the border between Texas and Mexico. There, two vastly different women begin to uncover decades of secrets, town gossip and broken family histories wrapped up in rodeos, Chicano politics and a hardcore punk band. In today's episode, NPR's Isabella Gomez Sarmiento speaks with Fuentes about the complicated ideals of womanhood in Mexican-American culture and the way her protagonists struggle to live their truths. To listen to B...
Jun 06, 2024•12 min•Transcript available on Metacast Jin Han, the narrator of R.O. Kwon's Exhibit , is a photographer going through it both with her work and her husband. When she meets ballerina Lidija Jung, her world is turned upside down. Exhibit becomes a story about "what you might give up for what you want most," as Kwon tells NPR's Ayesha Rascoe. In today's episode, they discuss the nuances of wanting to give in to sexual desires even when they might be problematic for cultural perceptions and stereotypes of Asian women, and the way shame, ...
Jun 05, 2024•9 min•Transcript available on Metacast Before she founded the riot grrrl movement of the 1990s, Kathleen Hanna was a teenager volunteering at a rape and domestic violence shelter in Olympia, Washington. In today's episode, the Bikini Kill and Le Tigre frontwoman tells NPR's Kelly McEvers how the anger and grief she absorbed there manifested into lyrics and performances that would take the punk and music scenes by storm. That story is at the heart of Hanna's memoir, Rebel Girl , which also grapples with setting boundaries, carrying th...
Jun 04, 2024•12 min•Transcript available on Metacast There's a lot of tragedy that goes into watching your home erupt into a battlefield. But journalist Illia Ponomarenko says as the Russian military seized city after city in their latest invasion of Ukraine, people also came together in beautiful ways. His new memoir, I Will Show You How It Was , recounts what living and covering the war has been like so far. In today's episode, The Kyiv Independent co-founder speaks with NPR's Scott Simon about Ukrainians' willingness to fight for their country,...
Jun 03, 2024•8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today's episode is all about food but not in the form of recipes. First, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Victor M. Valle speaks to Here & Now's Deepa Fernandes about The Poetics of Fire , his new book analyzing the history of chiles in Mesoamerican and Indigenous cuisine as a lens to understand Mexican-American and Chicano culture. Then, NPR's Scott Simon asks Michelle T. King about Chop Fry Watch Learn , a part-memoir, part-reported analysis of Taiwanese chef Fu Pei-mei's life and impact on Chine...
May 31, 2024•20 min•Transcript available on Metacast Across seven decades, Claire Messud's novel This Strange Eventful History follows generations of a family from a colonized Algeria to far stretches of the world after the country's independence, always grappling with the idea of identity and belonging and political upheaval. In today's episode, Messud speaks with NPR's Ari Shapiro about how she took inspiration from her own grandparents' story, and how looking back at their past sparked a desire in her to chronicle the world she grew up in for h...
May 30, 2024•9 min•Transcript available on Metacast When Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro went on the BBC program Desert Island Discs , he spoke about how much he loves the music of jazz singer Stacey Kent. In today's episode, Ishiguro and Kent tell NPR's Juana Summers how that mention led them to meet and embark on an artistic endeavor together a new songbook called The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain , featuring lyrics by Ishiguro set to music composed by Kent's partner, Jim Tomlinson. To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and...
May 29, 2024•9 min•Transcript available on Metacast Writer and filmmaker Miranda July says the popular imagination sort of drops off once a woman gets married and has kids. Her new novel All Fours turns that on its head it's a story about an artist in her 40s who departs from her husband and child on a road trip that takes her to some very unexpected places. In today's episode, July speaks to NPR's Brittany Luse about the interviews she conducted with women going through perimenopause and menopause for this book, and the whisper network with her ...
May 28, 2024•8 min•Transcript available on Metacast When Dick Goodwin reached his 80s, he asked his wife historian Doris Kearns Goodwin to finally open and sift through the hundreds of boxes he'd kept from his time as a presidential aide and speechwriter to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and as advisor to Robert Kennedy. What resulted is An Unfinished Love Story , a new book by Kearns Goodwin with a personal lens to the history of the 1960s. In today's episode, she speaks to NPR's Steve Inskeep about what she found in her husband's archive...
May 27, 2024•8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Today's episode is about two massive stars: Whoopi Goldberg and Tom Selleck. First, Goldberg speaks with NPR's Ayesha Rascoe about her new memoir, Bits and Pieces , which touches on her relationship with her mother, the way she navigated beauty standards growing up, and what it means to grapple with grief over time. Then, Selleck joins NPR's Scott Simon to discuss You Never Know , his initial reluctance to take on his role in Magnum P.I . and his thoughts on being labeled a "mustachioed hunk." T...
May 24, 2024•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Years ago, Karla Tatiana Vasquez tried to search up a recipe for one of her favorite Salvadoran dishes, Salpicn Salvadoreo. The scarce results not only disappointed Vasquez, but created a new mission: to collect and preserve the recipes of the Salvadoran diaspora along with the stories of the women who've been passing them down for generations. In today's episode, NPR's A Martinez visits Vasquez's kitchen to discuss The SalviSoul Cookbook and the relationship between food, migration and trauma. ...
May 23, 2024•8 min•Transcript available on Metacast A plane ticket to Paris, a vintage Dior dress and a spectacular first-ever oyster these three things upend the life of Stella, the sheltered, cautious protagonist at the heart of The Paris Nove l, a coming-of-age story about losing all inhibitions in one of the world's most romantic cities. In today's episode, author Ruth Reichl speaks with NPR's Scott Simon about indulging in life's simple pleasures, writing in honor of her late editor and choosing to set her story in the Paris of the 1980s. To...
May 22, 2024•10 min•Transcript available on Metacast Racism is a major contributor to economic disparities in the U.S. but in her new book, The White Bonus , writer Tracie McMillan crunches the numbers to understand just how much money white privilege can mean. In today's episode, she speaks with NPR's Michel Martin about the different families she profiled, the generations of economic policy she analyzed, and the rift created within her own family during the process of reporting this book . To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and support NP...
May 21, 2024•8 min•Transcript available on Metacast Caoilinn Hughes' novel The Alternatives revolves around the four Flattery sisters, each with a more impressive career or degree than the last, all with a profound grief for the parents they lost at a young age. When one of the sisters purposely goes off the grid, the other three are reunited in the Irish countryside in an attempt to find her. In today's episode, NPR's Andrew Limbong asks Hughes about crafting the witty dialogue between the sisters, writing side characters that jump off the page ...
May 20, 2024•7 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 2022, WNBA star Brittney Griner was detained by Russian authorities, convicted of drug charges and given a nine-year prison sentence. Her new memoir, Coming Home , details the conditions she was held in and her eventual return to the U.S. following a swap deal. In today's episode, NPR's Juana Summers asks Griner about the mental and physical toll she's still grappling with, reuniting with her wife and trying to forgive herself for what happened. To listen to Book of the Day sponsor-free and s...
May 17, 2024•13 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
