“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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “ 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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast "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•Transcript available on Metacast “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 most...
Apr 05, 2022•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast “…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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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, with ...
Mar 22, 2022•37 min•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “…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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “...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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast “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•Transcript available on Metacast 
