“Ever since we left, when I was 13, it's a place that I think about constantly. I think about it in hypothetical terms. It's something that I just sort of lose myself in all the time. I left before things really got complicated. I left when I was 13. What if I had stayed until now? And what if I had left and gone back? You know, the book kind of stemmed from this story that I had been working through in my mind, all of these hypothetical versions of myself. And then it turned into this.” Bobby F...
Sep 22, 2022•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I already had a kind of Don Quixote set up in mind. And so I was like, Wouldn't it be funny if Arthur was the sort of Sancho Panza in this? I'll just barely touch on it and see where it goes. And I thought he needs someone totally full of himself to shake him up…” Readers fell in love with Arthur Less — and Andrew Sean Greer took home a Pulitzer Prize for Less , the novel that introduced us to Arthur. Andrew joins us on the show to talk about his new novel, the not-really-a-sequel, Less Is Lost...
Sep 20, 2022•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast “This book feels very much…drawing from the Black Saints: Whitney Houston, Paul Mooney, Little Richard, Luther Vandross, almost my own canon, my own tradition, my own history, to make sense of what's happening now. I’m not going back to Homer, necessarily. I'm kind of trying to create a new lineage, because I feel that we've been betrayed by our presented histories.” Saeed Jones joins us on the show to riff on his incredibly personal and indelible new poetry collection Alive at the End of the Wo...
Sep 17, 2022•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast "Well, home is a complicated concept....So you've shaken me awake at three o'clock in the morning. Where's home ? I’ll say Zanzibar without hesitation. Oh, but then on the other hand, I've been living here and working here for 50 years, my family, my children, and my grandchildren live here. The idea that this is not my home, it's just ridiculous. I just won't have it. You know, this is my home. So home is complicated, both are home, but it means something different." An epic story of life, loss...
Sep 15, 2022•48 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I'm heading into my mid 70s and I really want to just get into a novel and live inside it. No sense of hurry. No deadline, no sense that anyone's waiting for this. I don’t want to talk to anyone about it, but I just want to inhabit it.” Award-winning author Ian McEwan’s new novel, Lessons , takes readers on an emotional journey through the life of one man and McEwan joins us on the show to talk about aging, writing a novel in lockdown, what kinds of books make us cry and much more with Poured O...
Sep 13, 2022•53 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I start with the emotion. I don't know what the story is. I don't know who the characters are necessarily. I'm working on very little like, I'm thinking, ‘oh, well, the way this light looks through a window’, or something — very few details here and there. But I don't know what happens in this story.” Join three amazing authors talking about their three fabulous fall reads: If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery, The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li and Bliss Montage by Ling Ma. The authors speak with...
Sep 10, 2022•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast “…In this particular book, I think I wanted to combat the feeling that we were already inundated with, and even the feelings that are attached to social justice issues. I wanted to combat the feelings of anger and helplessness and all of that with joy.” Margaret Wilkerson Sexton follows her NAACP Image Award-winning novel The Revisioners with On the Rooftop , a stunning novel about a mother whose dream of stardom for her three daughters clashes with their own desires in a rapidly gentrifying 195...
Sep 08, 2022•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast “That nine-year-old kid still follows me and is with me and is very much a part of me... And this is the hope for the book, not only for non-immigrants, but for immigrants, to really start to have that internal conversation about what we have been through. And I think this book is mostly for them. The book was for me, and then putting it around the world is for everybody. But I hope that non-immigrants can see that we don't want to do this, and that it's difficult, and that we carry this with us...
Sep 06, 2022•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I think about food constantly, but more so than anyone else it's the people I work with who are inspiring me now.... I'm always inspired by the people I cook with, and the people I work with in the restaurants, and they're, you know, they're the ones who are inspiring me most right now, because they're making it all happen.” Chef and restaurant owner, Mason Hereford’s new cookbook Turkey and the Wolf: Flavor Trippin’ in New Orleans is full of flavorful, fun recipes and beautiful photos that wil...
Sep 03, 2022•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I think it is a conversation I'm having with my younger self, who loved the idea of time travel, who loved the idea that these people perhaps not so different from us, who quite quickly could imagine herself out of her body and into another world against all the laws of physics. And I know I'm not alone in that. I think so many people want to read for a moment in their day or week, of escape, but not mindless escape, but detailed, pleasurable, important escape…” Jessie Burton’s debut novel, The...
Sep 01, 2022•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I think they grew out of the setting of this weird island, this odd place, this place of southern stories and ghosts and food and how they are misfits, but they find their tribe, they find where they belong with other people who think they don't belong either. And I think that is a universal truth for us all.” Sarah Addison Allen’s charming new novel, Other Birds , is our September B&N Book Club pick and she joins us on the show to talk about ghosts, unconditional love, mothers and mothering, p...
Aug 30, 2022•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I think it's really important to remember that poetry has always sort of existed in the moment. It's full of the life that we're living right now. It is a remnant of the life that we're living right now. You know, distilled moments, it's the mess of our life. It's all of those things. And I think we do ourselves a disservice if we think those things don't include joy, that don't include breath and contentedness and moments of peace. And we all have that sometimes, as we struggle.” Ada Limón, ou...
Aug 27, 2022•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast “We're all constantly translating ourselves to the world—we all are trying to take the inevitable stuff that happens in our psyche, our fears, and hopes and desires and dreams and trying to communicate that with others. And some of us are more successful at it than others.” A group of four friends find themselves at the center of a deadly battle between good and evil at an alternate 1800s Oxford University in Babel , the epic new novel from R.F. Kuang, author of the bestselling Poppy War series....
Aug 25, 2022•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast “And so, then I thought, Who do I most admire ? Who taught me the most, and also, they're doing it for completely selfless reasons, right? And I thought, Oh, that moment and the parking lot . So, I thought, I'm going to start a book in the parking lot of a McDonald's dumpster in a dying town and show you how, in the most unlikely places, magic is happening.” Beth Macy’s 2018 bestseller Dopesick and the Emmy-nominated Hulu streamer it inspired have helped changed our national conversation about O...
Aug 23, 2022•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast “But I had fun growing up, you know, kids Double Dutch and playing football in the front yard, trash can basketball, running around 40 deep into projects with extended family, cutting the lights off—we really have fun. Of course, you've seen the drug selling, you've seen the dice games. We found a way to become comfortable in an uncomfortable situation.” Keith Corbin’s story is unlike any we’ve heard for a James Beard Award nominated chef, and he holds nothing back in his candid memoir, Californ...
Aug 20, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast “To me, science is the rigorous attempt at understanding the world around you. And most people think that that means you're in a lab wearing a coat, working with test tubes. But I think that that's just a matter of using the scientific method in your everyday life. It's a matter of observing the world around you and being curious enough to ask questions and having the logic skills and some math and science skills to find the answers to those questions. But it goes beyond physics and chemistry. I...
Aug 18, 2022•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast “This is one of the great differences between journalism and literature, which I practice in. You write journalism in order for everything to be absolutely clear at the first reading … you write fiction in order to reflect the complexity of the world. And that complexity isn't necessarily grasped at first meeting.” Elizabeth Finch is the latest (and deceptively slim) new novel from Julian Barnes, author of the Booker Prize-winning novel The Sense of an Ending . He joins us on the show to talk ab...
Aug 16, 2022•1 hr•Transcript available on Metacast “To me, the thing as a writer that you should always be working towards is like, how can I make this just be delicious for the reader?” Jana Casale has perfected the art of writing about the ordinary lives of women in such a way that fans of Elena Ferrante and Sally Rooney will flock to, and her latest story following the lives of three young women as they navigate love, How to Fall Out of Love Madly , is just out. Jana joins us on the show to talk about the lives and relationships of Millennial...
Aug 11, 2022•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast “All three of the books that I have written during the pandemic have really been my way of going into another world and finding a place where none of this was happening. And that I could just relax and have fun. And so, I hope that my books are that kind of fun, joyous of maybe slightly salacious time for readers, too, because that's what I enjoyed as I was writing them.” Jasmine Guillory is one of our favorite rom-com authors, with her seventh and eighth books ( By the Book and Drunk on Love ) ...
Aug 09, 2022•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast “To write a young woman who refuses to define herself by anything other than her activism, her mind, her curiosity, that was just a delight, and she wasn't the most predictable character, but she was the one who told me what to do on every page.” How to describe Tess Gunty’s dynamic debut, The Rabbit Hutch ? Think Jennifer Egan + Denis Johnson. Think polyphonic novel about climate change and gentrification and coming-of-age in a dying American Dream with an unforgettable 18-year-old as its heart...
Aug 06, 2022•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast “But when I write, that's when I feel I can take part in society, I can contribute to ideas, and to teach and to share, and to say, I love you to society—to maybe talk about some of the difficult things in life, but to affirm that these experiences only serve to make life what it is.” From space aliens and cursed violins to a Queen of Hell with a heart, to found family, coming-of-age and living in your truest self, Ryka Aoki’s Light from Uncommon Stars is our latest Speculative Fiction Monthly P...
Aug 04, 2022•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast “There's just so much rich material in Hollywood during the 1940s—which is where much of the book is set—there is just sort of an endless rabbit hole you can go down. And of course, one of the problems with writing a book about the movie industry is that sitting around watching movies technically counts as research.” We still think about Anthony Marra’s incredible debut, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena , years after first reading. His newest novel, Mercury Pictures Presents , is an epic story...
Aug 02, 2022•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I just had so many questions about adoption and motherhood. And you know, you've read my books, you know that I'm very interested in what makes a family and how does our family influence us. And that's all part of this book, too.” From her sparkling debut, The Weird Sisters , to her latest, Any Other Family , Eleanor Brown writes big-hearted novels with hopeful endings about family and finding ourselves. She joins us on the show to talk about the story behind her latest novel, how questions and...
Jul 28, 2022•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast “What's really interesting about taste memory is it's not that you're trying to necessarily replicate the dish exactly as it was, I think you're actually just trying to replicate your memory of it, because your memory is always going to be the platonic ideal of it.” Eric Kim has a delightful approach to food, and his debut cookbook is a charming exploration of the Korean American table. He joins us on the show to talk about home cooking and how our family stories connect to food, representation ...
Jul 26, 2022•56 min•Transcript available on Metacast “One thing I really have learned—or at least for myself about writing—is never to explain why a person is the way they are, just to make a dramatic case for why they are the way they are. So, the moments I have that are backstory, or that go back and forth in time, it's because that backstory or that moment of slippage of time is dramatically relevant to the present moment of the story.” Alice Elliott Dark ( In the Gloaming ) returns with Fellowship Point , a spectacular novel of friendship and ...
Jul 21, 2022•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I wish I could tell you that I went to a cabin and wrote it perfectly and got it in on time, and it just flowed out of me. But really, the truth of the matter is, it came in fits and starts. And it was written on notepads and half-filled notebooks and phone apps and bar napkins….I grew up in a time of a lot of white men writing, Oh, my sad childhood stories. And so, my whole thing was I'm not going to do that, I'm not going to do that .” Isaac Fitzgerald walks through the world with an open hea...
Jul 19, 2022•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast “The primary intent of these books is to take a break... have something you can just curl up with for an afternoon. This is a book that is not going to hurt you. And I think that that's so vital in this day and age, to be able to just pause for a second. I want the book to feel like a cup of tea as well... But I wanted to give you the option of chewing on some of the stuff in there.” Hugo Award-winning author Becky Chambers is arguably a master of the space opera, with her complex, hopeful chara...
Jul 16, 2022•42 min•Transcript available on Metacast “When you're writing a children's book, it shares much relation with horror, because it has to be usually very immediate and very visceral and gripping. Because otherwise the kids are gonna get bored. And your window of opportunity to grab the reader is … longer with horror, you can do the slow creeping dread better, but you have to grab the reader, metaphorically, by the throat.” Whether you know her as Ursula Vernon or T. Kingfisher, one thing is for sure—this Hugo, Nebula, and Locus award-win...
Jul 14, 2022•45 min•Transcript available on Metacast “But there is joy in advocating for changing of the world for the better, for not allowing the world to tell you who you shall be, but rather reimagining a world in which you can be anything.” Award-winning journalist and professor at Northeastern University Caleb Gayle delivers a stunningly original story of America in his first book, We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power . Caleb joins us on the show to talk about growing up in Tulsa, Oklahoma and the a...
Jul 12, 2022•46 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I decided to give myself the license to fail, and to write across gender, to write in the voice of a midwife's daughter. And if the book isn't working, fine, we'll write it from the perspective of the midwife's husband, from some other male character. But I loved it. It was so emancipating to not be me, to not be (at the time) this 30-something dude. And I loved it. And I think, my best books, my best characters, whether it's first person or third person, are women.” Bestselling author and all-...
Jul 09, 2022•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
