“We were doing all of this for people we did not know and could not imagine. And as is the case, too, like, when you're planting trees, you hope that they're gonna outlive you. And the trees that were planted have outlived some of the people who are deeply involved in that project. Which is, you know…it's both this sorrow and it's a gratitude. We were addressing our needs. And our needs were actually to care for one another, and to join each other, and to love each other and to come to love to l...
Oct 22, 2022•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast “When I came back, I was thinking about how to tell the story. And I wanted to meet people who, in one way or another, resembled the young people who I'd known as a kid and I was talking to various people, and I had some ideas. And then I got a call from a lawyer, whose name is Ken. And he called up and he said, You know, I've heard about what you're doing. And I have a client who se experience, I think, speaks to what you're trying to do …” Writer Nicholas Dawidoff ( The Catcher was a Spy ) spe...
Oct 20, 2022•51 min•Transcript available on Metacast “By making a certain voice, then I'm going to force myself to do new things in that story. The voice is for me, very measured and realistic and regular, regular. But it's almost like DNA. Once you do that, then you're committed to continuing to do it, which means you're committed to finding some kind of power, even in that somewhat limited mode, which is great fun.” The only thing better than reading a short story by George Saunders is listening to him talk about how — and why — he does it. Libe...
Oct 18, 2022•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast “There's kind of an aspect of melancholy that I love as a reader… But I can't write a book that I wouldn't want to read… Although I am interested in just sadness and like a certain beautiful quality…I can't write books that I don't want to live in, and I don't really want to live in just a depressed book. I don't want to just live in a depressed world, there has to be more fire than that.” Lydia Millet — finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize ( Love in Infant Monkeys ) and the National Book Award ...
Oct 15, 2022•47 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I was always in a play, always in rehearsals. And if I wasn't in a play, I was counting the hours ‘til I could be in a play. Because it was the first time I felt a sense of belonging, a sense of community.” In Making a Scene , actress Constance Wu ( Lyle, Lyle Crocodile ) takes readers backstage in her own life in often hilarious — and always real and relatable — essays. She joins us on the show to talk about authenticity and big emotions, love, her big break (and what happened next), her liter...
Oct 13, 2022•50 min•Transcript available on Metacast "I think the knee-jerk reaction to pandemic literature — that I think a lot of readers might have as well, I don't want to read that because it's going to be triggering, it's going to be about, you know, CDC scientists brushing against the clock — there are actually very few pandemic novels that I can think of that actually operate on that level. They're thinking about Hollywood, probably, and not about literature. Most plague literature that I can think of, or dystopian literature generally, is...
Oct 11, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I want to tell stories. I hate the whole, don't tell, show mantra because it's not true—it has its like moments like, you know, when the reader finishes something of mine, I want them to feel as if it's something they had experienced, as if it's like a memory for them. Because like, for me, that's always been the best stuff. And like that can be so hard to do.” If you haven’t yet read Morgan Talty’s debut linked story collection Night of the Living Rez , you’re in for an exceptional read; think...
Oct 08, 2022•43 min•Transcript available on Metacast “He thinks of himself as a character in a fairy tale in a way who's going on a quest. And there's so many stories like that about a character who's going in search of a lost loved one, whether it's a daughter, a mother, a son, there's this sense of I'm going off to find you . And that's really powerful.” Celeste Ng follows her massive hit Little Fires Everywhere with a novel set in a world that “looks like ours, but with the volume kind of turned up to 11” in Our Missing Hearts , an indelible st...
Oct 06, 2022•44 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I want to escape into these like incredible, immersive situations, really. But I think I try and balance this kind of creation of a world or this world building with the dialogue. And that's where things like the humor come in. And particularly with this one, because it's quite a gritty subject. But it was really important to have that joy and have that humor. And to my mind that comes very akin with the bravery in the book and the courage in the book, there is this kind of ability, even under ...
Oct 04, 2022•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast “So you know, something that is a big part of my project…is actually this idea that we deserve pleasure. I think that pleasure and care, these are antidotes against various kinds of violence and degradation that we're all beset with. And so for me, when I wrote this novel, I did not write it for a critic at The New York Times , you know. I wrote it for the past version of me. And I wrote for someone who would need to read this, who would be reading this book after work on the subway.” Sarah's Th...
Oct 01, 2022•41 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I think I figured a lot of things out literally as I was writing the book. I'm usually an obsessive methodical writer, or I have everything, if not mapped out, I kind of know spatially, what's going to happen in a piece of writing. But with this, I just kind of had to write it to figure out what it was. For years, friends knew that I was working on this — friends who were in the book, actually. But I could never explain what it was nor could they imagine what it might be. You know, I would just...
Sep 29, 2022•54 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I feel like very often when we have stories about womanizing characters, whether we piece those stories out, so we see each woman—individually or not, they don't really have stories. They don't really have lives except as they relate to that main character. So, it was always going to be each woman steps forward, each woman gets a chapter.” Laura Warrell takes us behind the scenes of her smart, sharp and deeply resonant debut novel Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm . She joins us on the show to talk ab...
Sep 27, 2022•49 min•Transcript available on Metacast “I did nothing but read the entire time I was writing this….literally every waking moment, I was doing some type of research and a lot of research I did for this book was on joy and celebration and on community. Because, yes, we're going through all of these things, but there's a reason the cover is bright and celebratory, because that's also where the book goes, where the journey goes.” Hafizah Augustus Geter covers an incredible amount of ground in her memoir The Black P eriod: On Personhood, ...
Sep 24, 2022•55 min•Transcript available on Metacast “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 
