Poured Over

"It is an amazing, amazing translation experience….But it took a long time to get to the point where the language started moving because you have to start out sort of in English laying down a rock, rocks, and then a rock and a rock, building a wall. It doesn't move, and it's just right, right next to the ground. And because you can't obviously start translating in full sentences really. My whole i...

"One of my favorite places to take a little walk around is the public cemetery, which is on a little hill that overlooks the bay. And you know, if you ever wanted to be buried somewhere, that's the place to be buried. And right across the street from it, and a little ways down the road is this beautiful canyon you can walk up. The trees are covered with Spanish moss, and there's fog. And so it's p...

"Storytelling can just be you understanding yourself, but it turns into something else when it's a shared piece — so much of anything in life is practice, and just pure showing up…I think that's just important to remember, you're not always going to feel inspired or inspirational, or you're not going to feel you've done your best. And you just have to ignore that voice and keep going." Lauren Grah...

"I loved it more than everybody. And afterwards, I thought for the first time,  whatever I do, I've got to get as close to that as I can . Not the noise or the music or being a rock star, but the creativity of it and the energy of it and the way that you affect people, and I knew that my life wouldn't be the same. And it's kind of always been like that." Nick Hornby ( High Fidelity, Fever   Pitch,...

"I grew up in a blue-collar neighborhood. And you know, nobody was expected to be a novelist — that was not a thing, that was not a choice in my neighborhood. And when I made that choice, it was very strange to people. And it was a really hard thing for people to accept and my father and my grandfather did not understand that at all. And they discouraged me. But then once I succeeded, they really...

"One of the ways you can get into my cast of characters is by leaving a very detailed written record. Because that's what we historians have to work from, you're not allowed to make stuff up like a novelist can… And, of course, it skews, to some extent, the way history is written. Because the rich leave more records than the poor, men leave more records than women, white people leave more records...

"When I was a kid, I was super, super geeky, it was so nerdy. And all I read was dragon books, or ghost books, or elf books…someone tried to give me a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird , and I just remember thinking,  Where are the dragons? And when I went to do my doctorate in creative writing and literature —especially at the time, and even now, they kind of steamroll that out of you, they sort of t...

"They're rooted in our culture as well. And because of all that, I think they feel a little bit more real, even though they are fantastical magical realms…and there's also this timeless quality in a way as well….I do think also there is a lot of room for imagination to grow in these stories." Sue Lynn Tan joins guest host Kat Sarfas on the show to take readers behind the scenes of her latest epic,...

"We are writing our stories to the world, as opposed to just reading the old stories. And somehow, some way accidentally, intentionally, desperately on the case and caught off guard, Art is Life captures this huge sweep and ends about where we are now in the present—which is an epic place as well." Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Jerry Saltz ( How to Be An Artist ) is consistently one of the smartes...

"I'm really driven by poetry. I'm really driven by language. But also, I'm driven by a desire to connect with the people. So I could have been a teacher. I could have been a politician. I could have been anyone that communicates with people verbally because I liked that. I wound up a performer, but it was all rooted in poetry. And as a book person, I have loved books since I was a toddler." Writer...

"It's hard to be funny, you can't really plan on — you don't know what will land with people…. absurdity just exists constantly in the world that we live in. And to my mind, the humor comes from the way different people traverse absurdity, how they try to normalize it, or how they freak out because they want to build their own weirdness on top of it. And so for me, that's where I get a lot of the...

"I had never known what it was like to feel full. And I know that sounds like really odd, but because most people can — I would be with friends and a friend would stop eating. She's like, I'm full.  And I'm like,  What's wrong with me that I don't know what it feels like to feel full? And I don't know what the answer to that question is, to this day. I don't know if it's a psychological or emotion...

"I always feel like as a reader, I always want to go in ready to be changed, ready to be transformed by what I'm reading, ready to be expanded. And that's what I love about books, they work on you kind of like magic." Madeline Miller's novels,  The Song of Achilles  and  Circe , keep working their magic on readers everywhere. She joins us on the show to take listeners behind the scenes of her new...

"More people than we realize are works in progress, are trying to figure out a way to think about the world… As Beyoncé said in her new album, they're contradicted. They're internally contradicted more than we think. We can make the kind of change we seek, we deserve in this country, if we allow the idea that more of us are contradicted, more of us need help sorting through the world, and we have...

"…The idea just kind of spun itself into existence in my head, the world started to form almost immediately — when my creative brain kind of immediately kicks in like that, I've learned to listen to it, because usually, that means something, something good is trying to come out." N.K. Jemisin — winner of three consecutive Hugo Awards for Best Novel (each of the Broken Earth books) and now a fourth...

"…It was at the end of an exhibition called  The Art of The Troubles . And that had been a little controversial (as these things very often are in post-conflict societies). Some people felt it had gone too far. Other people felt that it hadn't gone far enough. It just made me think about how maybe art could be used to say things that are really unsayable in a place where people are obsessed with l...

"We don't know our parents, I mean, we think we do; you know, all of us have a practice of dealing with contained worlds. And that practice begins with our families, it begins with our parents, because these are individuals that we don't fully understand, but we are completely dependent on for our survival... And so it creates this really interesting situation where, you know, we take them for gra...

"I was always writing, and I think it goes back to that  Charlotte's Web thing when I had that experience of something taking me out of this world. It was mysterious, and transcendent, and glorious. And I'm still searching for that every day — if I can find a story that will do that to me and just kind of mystify me and leave me a slightly different person than I was before." Jennifer Finney Boyla...

"People write medical histories, people write personal case histories, I didn't want to do either. People write memoirs; I wanted to do all of them in the same book. And I wanted to do that without blurring the boundaries between any and all of those… I consider those parts of living history." Siddhartha Mukherjee is an oncologist, a professor, a bestselling author and a winner of the Pulitzer Pri...

"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 actua...

"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,...

"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 read...

"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 M...

"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...

"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...