Nerdette

Barbara Kingsolver Calls Her New Novel ‘My Love Letter To Millennials’

11.16.2018 - By WBEZ ChicagoPlay

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Barbara Kingsolver says her new novel, ‘Unsheltered,’ is “my love letter to millennials.”  “Today’s problems can’t be fixed by yesterday’s people,” she tells Greta. “They’re going to be fixed by tomorrow’s people.” Kingsolver is the author of several award-winning books, including ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ and ‘The Bean Trees.’  ‘Unsheltered’ is set both in the run up to the 2016 presidential election and in the aftermath of the American Civil War, and she says it’s about “how people behave when it seems like all the old rules have stopped working.” Kingsolver tells us about the end of the world, why she's still optimistic, and what it's like to narrate the sex scenes when she records her own audiobooks. (“You just try to get through it all in one take”). She also answers one of Greta’s more poignant questions: “Are we just %#&!ed?”

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