Poured Over

"In the end, all the good ideas and sort of fancy craft approaches get you absolutely nothing if there's no emotional content. That's what it is. I mean, fiction is about going inside other people's minds and consciousnesses and looking through their eyes and living their lives in a way and that's all about emotions." Jennifer Egan challenged the way many of us thought about how (but not why) we t...

"I love being immersed in the grand project of a novel. When I was a kid, I was drawn to books about secret worlds, like  The Secret Garden , or  The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe  where you disappear to the back of a wardrobe…" How many times have you re-read Emily St. John Mandel's genre-blending novels  Station Eleven  and  The Glass Hotel?  Emily joins us on the show to talk about her lates...

"…Cynical as he is of the world that he encounters, he's also pretty cynical and critical of himself. And that manifests itself in that sense of humor that you're talking about not a light-hearted sense of humor, but a very cynical and dark sense of humor, a sense of the absurd." Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of  The Sympathizer  and  The Committed  (now out in paperback), a...

"As you might imagine, over the years, many people heard stories about my family. And they said,  Hey, why don't you write a memoir ? I really wasn't very interested in writing a memoir as I perceived a memoir to be, so the idea of spending years working on a book about the issues in my immediate family, which I grew up with, and was intimately familiar with, it felt like I would be locked in a cl...

"They're not all villains and all heroes, I think a lot of people are very morally gray…" The atmospheric and haunting Wild and Wicked Things is a beautifully written tale of queer love in an alternative post-WWI England that invokes the glittering world of Gatsby with a blend of blood magic and gothic mystique. Francesca May joins us on the show to talk about the appeal of The Great Gatsby, the p...

"We should call no future  unthinkable  and no future  unimaginable . We have to be willing to think about the hard things and ready ourselves for them, we also have to free ourselves from the limitations of the present so that we can find refuge in the future that we want." Futurist and game designer Jane McGonigal wants to help you change your brain with her new book,  Imaginable: How to See the...

"The original impulse to write a book for this age was knowing that this is a time of identity formation for me, curiosity about the outside world. And I guess I wanted to make an offering in that space … I just wanted to write a book with an Asian American protagonist. And I thought,  how cool it would have been for me at that age to see that at the library . " Actor John Cho ( Searching ,  Bette...

"My book starts in my brain with me telling myself a story. And I choose not to write it down, as I'm thinking about it. Sometimes for months, sometimes even maybe for a couple of years. My feeling is that if I stop thinking about it, or stop daydreaming about the story, then it's died a natural death in my brain and shouldn't make it to the page." Nine strangers, one determined detective and plen...

"And within that time, I realized that the story needed to be about regular citizens. But because so much had been written, I found myself needing a new way of telling the story, a story that was very public, that was on everybody's lips." In 2017, Robert Mugabe was deposed in coup, an act that novelist NoViolet Bulawayo never thought she would see in her lifetime. She joins us on the show to talk...

"The thing that really sort of blew me away, one of the reasons why we have sort of the type of poetry that we have today and the type of literature that we have today — it bloomed and was, I think, seeded in some ways by Sylvia Plath and her experience." Lee Kravetz joins us on the show to talk about his unexpected and entertaining debut novel,  The Last Confessions of Sylvia P. , part literary m...

"The book's title comes from Josephine Baker's speech at the March on Washington … she was speaking to a crowd that was younger, and maybe did not know her from her heyday of performance. And she compels them to go and ask their parents and grandparents about her and the system,  T hey'll tell you that I was a devil and they'll be right. I was a devil in other countries. And I was a little devil i...

"…A big part of this book is to have a more whole picture of our history here. It is the last 30 years, 90s to now, but we do devote a big chunk of the before as well because we want to plant those roots and say  This began a long time ago . Let's at least start this conversation where we acknowledge and have a more deep understanding of our history. It doesn't all end with this book either." Jeff...

"If you want to create art, and you want to create art the way you want to, and it's just for you, that's fine. But if you want to have a writing career, then my advice is..." Olivie Blake's dark academic fantasy debut, The Atlas Six , has a cult following for a reason (believe the hype!) and she joins us on the show to talk about her character-driven epic (and which of her characters appeared fir...

"I'm writing about group creativity, which is not something we often do … what's interesting to me is what happens in the friction between people's minds through conversations, through discussion, through the exchange of ideas, through debate, through sort of egging one another on … bringing about any idea that's going to sort of undermine the nature of reality as we know it." Gal Beckerman of  Th...

"I sketched out some of these pool scenes a long, long time ago, maybe 15 years ago, but just you know, a few paragraphs. And then I don't know, I put them in a drawer somewhere..." It's been 20 years since Julie Otsuka's sublime debut,  When the Emperor was Divine , almost 10 since the collective voice of  The Buddha in the Attic . Julie's third novel,  The Swimmers , is just out, and she joins u...

"It's a great question. And no one has ever asked me that question. I think it's taught me about how to construct the arc of a narrative." We've learned so much from Debbie Millman and her fabulous interviews on her long-running podcast  Design Matters . Since 2005, Debbie's introduced us to incredible thinkers from a variety of disciplines, and now 55 of the more than 500 interviews she's done ar...

"Believe me, there probably was not a day that went by where I didn't say to myself,  What on earth am I doing? And why did I take this on?  Early on in the process, I was talking with a Churchill expert over breakfast in Washington, DC, and he was basically asking me,  Why on earth are you doing this?  And my answer to him, which stuck throughout the whole project, is that it's all in the telling...

"There's a reason why all our old stories are fantastical and mythological, and why our fairy tales are so old. Because I think there is something in these mythologies and these folklore stories that tell us something about ourselves. And we've always done it, we've always put it into fantastical to explain the real." Marlon James returns with  Moon Witch, Spider King,  the second installment of h...

"...It means the world to me to witness any kind of massive scale love of books." Sarah J. Maas knows how to build worlds that readers never want to leave. The second installment of her fiery (and spicy) Crescent City series,  House of Sky and Breath , is just out and Sarah joins us on the show to riff on #booktok, fandom, the screen adaptation she's working on with Ron Moore, her love of Lord of...

"I wrote  The Sum of Us in the hopes that people would read it together, that people from all walks of life, different backgrounds, whether they're connected by something, a community, a school, a workplace, would pick it up and find for each person, a way into the story of America's troubled history with racism, and then a way out together." Trained as a lawyer, and an expert in economic and soci...

"You know, when I wrote the book, I sort of thought it would resonate with a fairly narrow… I was writing it for people who are more or less like me, you know, little girls who grew up in junkyards and didn't go to school, and then going to college and everything changed." Tara Westover's memoir was a massive hit with readers everywhere when it was first published; four years later, Educated is ou...

"The Nineties were the last decade that we're ever going to talk about as a decade…" Chuck Klosterman has been challenging how we think, see and hear since his first book, Fargo Rock City , in 2001 to 2016's  But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past.  He joins us on the show to talk about his new book,  The Nineties , Gen X, the end of monoculture, the rise of in...

"And fiction is all about obstacles. It's all about misapprehension, misunderstanding, lack of information, lack of connection, and the problems that come up, arise out of those things." Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Chang-rae Lee's most recent novel,  My Year Abroad , is now out in paperback and it's unlike anything he's written before. Chang-rae joins us on the show to talk about homecomings a...

"But I do feel like I was on a quest as a writer, for my work to get bigger. I just wanted it to contain a larger portion of the world than it started off with… I tried to make it large in its emotional scope, as well as in the amount of action that happens in it." Lan Samantha Chang did, in fact, have as much fun writing our February 2022 B&N Book Club pick, The Family Chao,  as we had reading it...

"It's about people following their passions, and it's about falling in love for the first time whether that love is romantic, or with a professional industry."  Anatomy: A Love Story  is everything  Noble Blood's  creator and host Dana Schwartz  loves  in a story: spooky and fast-paced with a dash of romance, a perfect mix for the BN YA Book Club, and our pick for February '22. Dana joins us on th...