Book Dreams

Is it possible for one person to write both award-winning literary speculative fiction and Marvel's newest “Captain America” series and also be a former civil rights lawyer, a film school graduate, and be less than 35 years old? If the person in question is author Tochi Onyebuchi, the answer is yes. In this episode, Julie and Eve talk with Tochi about his new novel, Goliath, a sweeping science fic...

How’s this for fun? Take 27 incredible writers–including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, PEN Awards, Women's Prize for Fiction, Edgar Award, and more–and invite each of them to write an erotic short story. Then publish the collection in one steamy anthology with the authors listed alphabetically at the beginning of the book but none of the stories attributed, so nobody know...

“Wussy” European vampires. African folklore and mythology, and how they help establish that “homophobia is not African.” How reading Jackie Collins and Leon Uris during childhood fosters a lifelong passion for books. The structuring of an immersive, propulsive fantasy trilogy. This week on Book Dreams, Eve and Julie discuss all of this and so much more with Marlon James, the powerhouse author of A...

How did a forensic and psychiatric nurse transform the way that the FBI studies, profiles, and catches serial killers? In this week’s episode of Book Dreams, Julie and Eve speak with Dr. Ann Wolbert Burgess, the inspiration for the psychological expert, Wendy Carr, on one of Eve and Julie’s favorite Netflix series, “Mindhunter,” as well as her co-author Stephen Matthew Constantine. In the 1970s a...

In 2019, a librarian at the Central Library in Bristol, England, uncovered a mystery. Pasted to the bindings of four Renaissance books were scraps of parchment from a medieval manuscript. And on these scraps, written in old French, were two names that have captivated readers for almost a millennium: Merlin and Arthur. In this week’s episode, Eve and Julie talk about the origins and the enduring po...

Can an author write a novel about a classical musician and get all the details right? And can he make that world the backdrop for a gripping contemporary thriller? If the author is Brendan Slocumb, then the answer is a resounding yes. In this episode, Brendan joins Eve and Julie to talk about his debut novel, The Violin Conspiracy, about a concert violinist whose Stradivarius is stolen while he's...

After hearing New York Times Book Review editor Pamela Paul call Ian Urbina’s The Outlaw Ocean “one of the best narrative non-fiction books by a journalist I've ever read,” we instantly decided to invite Ian on Book Dreams and were thrilled when he accepted. A Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, Ian based The Outlaw Ocean on five years of reporting on the lawlessness of the high seas....

If you like hearing about the craft of writing and the writing life, you’ll love this bonus episode from The #AmWriting Podcast. #AmWriting focuses on fun, practical, actionable advice for writers of all kinds, and they have a long history of conducting great interviews with great authors. In this episode, hosts KJ, Sarina, and Jess talk with author Jenny Lawson–whose most recent bestseller is Bro...

What does the natural world look like after human beings abandon it? Nuclear waste sites, war zones, slag heaps, ghost towns–journalist Cal Flyn delves into the history and rebirth of these neglected places in her book, Islands of Abandonment: Nature Rebounding in the Post-Human Landscape. In this episode of Book Dreams, Cal shares with Eve and Julie some of these strange cautionary tales, and how...

“It always looked like the women outside of the church were having the most fun. They were wearing the tight jeans and the heels, and I was like, ‘It's so unfortunate. They're going to hell.’” –Deesha Philyaw Even as a child, author Deesha Philyaw understood that church teachings about women and sexuality didn’t “really align with what we know to be the nuance and the complexity of human experienc...

Deep beneath the asphalt streets of New York City lurks a breed of creature that’s haunted the subway’s subterranean labyrinth for over a century. No, it’s not sewer alligators or radioactive rats. Instead, we’re speaking of…bookworms. And documentarian Uli Beutter Cohen has been on the hunt to capture their travels. In 2014, Uli founded the viral Instagram account Subway Book Review, which docume...

“I think a lot about how to map the scale of our own lives against the scale of existence.” –Kathyrn Schulz Not long after Kathryn Schulz fell in love with the woman she would marry, her beloved father died. Now she’s written a memoir, Lost & Found, in which she shares these deeply personal stories and expands them into a consideration of the ways that loss and discovery and joy and grief affect,...

What are dreams made of? What role can they play in predicting the future, and why? To what extent have they shaped the past? What can we glean when we know the content of our dreams, and what does science have to say about why that is? And should we all be taking naps? In this Book Dreams episode on–you guessed it–a book on dreams, Brazilian neuroscientist and dream researcher Sidarta Ribeiro off...

(RE-RELEASE) What happens when a Harvard professor puts the weight of her reputation behind an alleged ancient gospel with monumental implications for the Roman Catholic Church, and the gospel turns out to be a fake? In 2012, Karen King, the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard’s Divinity School, announced the discovery of a gospel in which Jesus refers to “my wife.” Investigative reporter Arie...

LIVE EPISODE: If you love Jane Smiley, this episode is for you. Eve and Julie are joined by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author in an interview that was recorded live for Miami Book Fair 2021. They discuss Jane’s most recent book, Perestroika in Paris, as well as Jane’s writing process, beloved pets, and what it’s like to be a writer in Paris. Unlike every other interview we’ve aired so far, this in...

MINI EPISODE: Do you lose your keys, your wallet, your glasses…in your own home? Do you forget the names of people you met two minutes ago? How often do you start a sentence with what’s that word I’m thinking of? Yeah, us too. This is the second in a series of “mini episodes” where Eve or Julie picks a book on a topic she needs help with, and then they come together to assess whether the book actu...

“Today we're learning things as fundamental as the shape of our universe, or how the universe might've begun or ended. We are learning new things about planets and solar systems beyond our own that could potentially host life. And these … [findings are] fundamental to who we are as humans and who we are as planet citizens.” In this episode of Book Dreams, award-winning astronomer Emily Levesque jo...

“It's a piece of family lore or legend that I've been hearing since I was a quite young boy.” In this week’s episode of Book Dreams, acclaimed author Sunjeev Sahota shares with Eve and Julie the family and personal experiences that helped shape his latest, transfixing novel, China Room. Set in both 1920s rural India and 1990s small-town England, the book originates with the story of Sunjeev’s grea...

Belle da Costa Greene. Morgan Library visionary. One of the most prominent and influential librarians in history. Democratizer of museums. And, until two decades after her death, no one outside her family knew she was passing as white. We know a lot about public-facing Belle: she was JP Morgan's personal librarian from 1905 until his death in 1913, and she continued to build and direct The Morgan...

Pigeons: rats with wings or wonder birds? Rosemary Mosco, science writer and naturalist, enters the dovecote with Eve and Julie to settle the debate. The author and illustrator of A Pocket Guide to Pigeon Watching: Getting to Know the World’s Most Misunderstood Bird, Rosemary defends her feral, feathered friends with an extraordinary (yet widely unknown) historical and anatomical tour. She discuss...

What happens when an author takes a genre that's considered a bedrock of American culture and flips the wagon upside-down? As Tom Lin puts it, “I’m not following the rules of the American Western.” The author of the debut novel The Thousand Crimes of Ming Tsu, Tom subverts the “old, old notions of what makes an American” and redefines the classic genre by telling his story through the eyes of a Ch...

What if our experience of ancient Greek plays, rather than involving stultifying boredom, could instead evoke powerful emotions? Bryan Doerries–author of many books involving ancient Greek plays and Artistic Director of Theater of War Productions–talks with Julie and Eve about the tragic loss in his life that caused Greek plays to suddenly begin “sp[eaking] directly to me as if they've been writte...

A modern western set in hell. A tale of revenge between Krampus and Santa. One man's determined trek through the brutal landscape of purgatory. These dark stories, and more, all sprang from the imagination of the author and American gothic fantasy artist known simply as Brom. In this episode, Julie and Eve talk to Brom about what it’s like to both write and illustrate his books, which include his...

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what is the worth of a word? David Shariatmadari, author of Don't Believe A Word: The Surprising Truth About Language, talks with Julie and Eve about little-known origins of words and how their modern-day usage both reflects and impacts culture. For example, the word “happiness” no longer suggests a fleeting state of mind, as it did before the 18th century;...

What’s it like for a professional ballerina to try a sedentary art form like writing? Georgina Pazcoguin, soloist with the New York City Ballet, talks with Eve and Julie about the creation of her debut memoir, Swan Dive: The Making of a Rogue Ballerina, in which she shakes the “stereotype of the uptight ballerina to bits.” Georgina takes Eve and Julie behind the curtain of the ballet and describes...