Allegra Goodman’s new book, This Is Not About Us, is a Late Show With Stephen Colbert Book Club Selection.  Her novels include Isola (a Reese’s Book Club selection and Libby award winner), Sam (a Read With Jenna Book Club selection), The Chalk Artist (winner of the Massachusetts Book Award), and more. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and elsewhere and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories Raised in Honolulu, Goodman studied English and philosophy at Harvard and received a PhD in English literature from Stanford. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer’s Award, the Salon Award for Fiction, and fellowships from MacDowell and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Allegra joins Barbara DeMarco-Barrett to talk about literary fiction, writing in different genres, revision, short stories, how much she knows about her story before going in, readers, and more.

 
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(Recorded February 20, 2026)

Host: Barbara DeMarco-Barrett
Host: Marrie Stone
Music: Travis Barrett (Stream his music on Spotify, Apple Music, Etc.)