Big Books & Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller

The 25th season of Talking Volumes launches later this month. To celebrate, we thought we’d bring you one of our favorite conversations from last year. The 2023 season finale of Talking Volumes brought author and columnist  Margaret Renkl  to Minnesota hours after the first snow carpeted our Northern landscape. She declared it “magical” — a theme familiar to those who’ve read her  New York Times c...

The third season of Rural Voice kicked off at the Minnesota State Fair on Monday, Aug. 26. It was a steamy day, but it didn’t discourage rural change makers who gathered at the MPR booth for a lively and hopeful town hall with moderator Kerri Miller. The question before them: How is rural Minnesota changing, and how are rural communities thriving in the midst of it? Rural Voice at the Minnesota St...

Jo Hamya’s new novel, “ The Hypocrite ,” opens as the trap is being laid. Sophia, a 20-something playwright, has invited her father, a famous and provocative British novelist, to come see her new work. As the play begins, he is shocked to realize he recognizes the set. It’s a replica of the kitchen in his vacation home near Sicily. Then the lead actor saunters onstage wearing the author’s favorite...

The first sentence of Frank Bruni’s new book says it all. It reads, “Let me tell you how I’ve been wronged.” More and more Americans are living mired in resentment, says Bruni, convinced that they are losing because someone else is winning. And it’s poison to our collective culture. In his new book, “ The Age of Grievance, ” he writes: “[Grievance] turns everything — beer, M&M’s, Skittles, res...

When A.J. Jacobs decided to immerse himself in early Americana, he didn’t think about the fact that the required wool stockings wouldn’t have elastic. “They would fall down to my ankles,” he laughs. “I had to put on little sock belts every morning. I’ll never get back that time.” But no matter. He was committed to getting into the headspace of the Founding Fathers, because he wanted to better unde...

Debut novelist Sarai Johnson created four generations of Black mothers and daughters to tackle the questions that came up in her own life: What does forgiveness look like? Can cycles of trauma be broken? Can a daughter truly leave her mother’s mistakes in the past? “ Grown Women ” expertly probes for answers via the lives of Evelyn, Charlotte, Corinna and Camille. Resentment lingers like a cancer,...

Claire Messud has long wanted to write a novel inspired by her family’s history in Algeria, thanks to a handwritten memoir, more than 1,500 pages long, penned by her paternal grandfather. It was rich with stories and history and photos about her ancestors, who were born in French Algeria but then expelled from their homes in 1962 when Algeria won its independence. Her new novel, “ This Strange Eve...

New York Times bestselling author Nicola Yoon’s new novel, “One of our Kind,” is one of the most talked about books of the summer. On this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, Yoon joins MPR News host Kerri Miller to talk about what led her to write a book about finding the sinister in a Shangri-La. When does our natural bent to protect and enjoy become destructive? What is the true meaning of communi...

Lily Chen is not endowed with good fortune — despite the fact that her scientist mother managed to grow a backyard of four-leaf clovers. She doesn’t win raffles or lotteries. She scrapes out a meager living as an unpaid intern with the hopes that it might give her a shot at an entry-level gig. In short: Not lucky. But then a chance encounter upends her life and changes her idea of what fortune rea...

The Civil War is remembered for its sweeping battles: Gettysburg, Atlanta, Antietam. Less known are the small troops of men, enlisted by both sides, to fight far from the battlefields. These ruthless soldiers relied on stealth to sneak behind enemy lines — often wearing their opponent’s uniform — and destroyed supply lines, assassinated military officials and gathered critical information. Today,...

Taiyon Coleman has been writing since she was a child. At age 8, she announced to her family that a novel was in the works. Today, she’s a published author and a professor of literature at St. Catherine University. But the road from there to here wasn’t as straight-forward as you might think. Coleman joins host Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold Ideas this week to talk about what happened in the i...

America is steeped in the notion of rugged individualism. It’s comforting to think success is based on our own hard work and self determination. But social scientist Robert Mark Rank says random chance governs far more of our lives that most of us want to admit. This week on Big Books and Bold Ideas, Rank joins MPR News host Kerri Miller to talk about his new book, “ The Random Factor .” He shares...

Noor Khan is still reeling from the disintegration of her family when she stumbles across a library cart stacked with books in her new small-town high school. In her heart, she just wants to finish her senior year and get back to Chicago as quickly as possible. But when she learns the books are being removed by a group of parents trying to ban literature they deem as obscene, she is enraged. Will...

Dystopian novels aren’t known for being hopeful. But that’s exactly what Leif Enger brings to the genre with his new book, “ I Cheerfully Refuse .” The beloved Minnesota author joined MPR News host Kerri Miller at the Sheldon Theatre in Red Wing on June 4 for a special “on the road” version of Talking Volumes. Their conversation revolved around books: the unpredictable journey of writing them, the...

What do you imagine your death will look like? It’s not a morbid or depressing question to Alua Arthur. She’s a death doula, and she firmly believes that giving thought to that question is the key to living a meaningful life. Arthur herself thinks about dying a lot. As she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, she has detailed plans for what she’d like her deathbed to be like...

Who knew boring could be an asset? In Lea Carpenter’s new spy novel, “ Ilium ,” we meet our young and restless unnamed narrator on a day when she’s urging herself to be less mundane, to take more risks. She has no idea that the spies she’ll soon be working for want her precisely because she’s inexperienced, untested and ordinary. She quickly gets pulled into a high-stakes mission against a target...

Birds, bats, freshwater mussels and a small catfish. They all slipped away in 2023 , among the 21 species declared extinct by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Grief is a rational response. So are the questions novelist and conservationist Lydia Millet articulates in her new book, “ We Loved It All .” A blend of memoir and ecological truth-telling, Millet’s first nonfiction work examines what th...

Big Book and Bold Ideas talks with authors from around the globe. But our favorite moments come when host Kerri Miller sits down with Minnesota writers to talk about story, craft and how calling this state home influences both. This week, we took a look back at some conversations with notable Minnesota authors, including Shannon Gibney, who just won her third Minnesota Book Award, Hmong writer Kao...

Jamie Figueroa’s new memoir, “ Mother Island ” is stylistically unique. She combines prose and creative nonfiction, myth and short stories to explore her memories. But the heart of the book — her push-pull relationship with her mother and her process of uncovering a true self — is as old as time. Figueroa’s mother was taken from Puerto Rico as a young child and raised in a New York City orphanage,...

Alexandra Fuller’s new memoir begins with the death of her 21-year-old son, Fi, and chronicles her attempts to grieve well in the searing aftermath of his loss. Among other things, that meant acknowledging her kinship with others who had gone before her. In her gorgeous new book, “Fi: A Memoir of My Son,” she writes: “The way a pilot sees wind and clouds, or a sailor reads currents and water, I lo...

Danny Ryan doesn’t see himself as ambitious — which is surprising, seeing as he’s both stolen and made millions. But in his mind, he’s just an average guy trying to survive in a world that would rather he not. Ryan is the central character of Don Winslow’s sweeping crime trilogy that draws parallels to movies like “The Godfather” and “Goodfellas.” Readers first met Ryan as a mid-level Irish-Americ...

Americans overwhelmingly support gender equality. But not as many see themselves as feminists . Elizabeth Cobbs says that’s because we don’t know our history. Her latest book, “ Fearless Women ,” chronicles how the fight for women’s rights began at the founding of our country, when Abigail Adams urged her husband to “remember the ladies” (and her plea was met with laughter), and continues through...

Myriam J. A. Chancy spent her childhood in Haiti and then moved with her family to Winnipeg. But those island roots shaped who she became and inspired her latest novel, “ Village Weavers .” It follows a complicated female friendship that spans decades and countries. Growing up in 1940s Port-au-Prince, Gertie and Sisi are enthralled with each other — until their families discover a secret and force...

When Kao Kalia Yang’s mother was a child growing up in Laos, she lived a comfortable life. Her father was a prosperous merchant. She was the only Hmong girl in the village to go to school. She felt valued. The war changed all that. Hunted by North Vietnamese soldiers, Yang’s maternal family had to flee into the jungle and live a desperate existence for years. Eventually, her mother met a boy also...

What do you see, hear and experience when you drop miles into the deepest parts of the ocean? For journalist Susan Casey, it was transformative — even emotional. Her latest book, “The Underworld,” is a homage to the abyss and the scientists who explore it. She also describes her own dives in deep-sea submersibles, through the oceanic “ twilight zone ,” which is rich with bioluminescent creatures,...