How do you carry someone else’s memory — both in body and in mind?

The prairie witch in Karen Russell’s fantastical new novel, “The Antidote,” describes it as a pressure and a weight. She has the ability to receive the memories of her fellow citizens in a small failing town in Nebraska, which offers relief to anyone who feels like their pasts are too heavy to bear.

“Whatever they can’t stand to know,” she says, “the memories that make them chase impossible dreams, that make them sick with regret and grief. Whatever cargo unbalances the cart, I can hold on to anything for anyone.”

But when a Dust Bowl-era storm blows through, the deposited memories likewise rush away. What happens when the past is forgotten?

Russell’s long-awaited novel contains epic calamity, deep friendship and just enough magic to stir the pot as she reckons with the consequence of collective forgetting.

Guest:

• Karen Russell is the author of many books, including the Pulitzer Prize finalist, “Swamplandia.” Her new novel is “The Antidote.”

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For many people, a good life is a stable life — a life that’s predictable and filled with purpose. For others, happiness the point. They embrace moments of bliss and satisfaction.

But what about a life that’s focused on curiosity, exploration and a variety of experiences that broaden our world?

University of Chicago psychology professor Shigehiro Oishi says that’s a psychologically rich life — and in his new book, “Life in Three Dimensions,” he argues that a psychological rich life is just as important as a life filled with happiness and meaning.

Professor Oishi joined Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to discuss the markers of a good life. They talk about the value of risk, the importance of awe and how the American individualism can hinder a good life.

Guest:

• Shigehiro Oishi is a celebrated professor of psychology at the University of Chicago. His latest book is “Life in Three Dimensions: How Curiosity, Exploration, and Experience Make a Fuller, Better Life.”

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“A Lesser Light” is Minnesota writer Peter Geye’s sixth novel, and he says he couldn’t have written it earlier in life.

The story revolves around a cold and often hostile marriage. It’s 1910, and husband Theodulf is the newly commissioned caretaker of a grand lighthouse situated on the treacherous shore of Lake Superior. His new bride, Willa, has been forced into the marriage by her scheming mother after a family tragedy. The terrain is brooding, the climate unforgiving. Maybe no surprise, the new relationship is equally harsh.

But Geye says the complexity of Theodulf and Willa are what make them human, and as he’s gotten older, he appreciates the “many shades” of their rocky marriage.

“Of all the institutions in our culture, marriage and parenthood are two of the most fraught,” Geye tells host Kerri Miller. “They can be the most beautiful, the most wonderful, the most amazing — and I don’t know a whole lot of people who end up together like Theodulf and Willa do. But it’s more interesting to me when people like that do.”

Geye joined Miller on stage at The College of St. Scholastica in Duluth on May 1 for a special “on the road” edition of Talking Volumes. They discussed the complications of marriage and family life, why Geye chose to tell this story from many different points of view, and how his many years spent traveling to Lake Superior influenced his book. Music for the evening was provided by Superior Siren.

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We could learn a lot from the good boys (and girls) in our life.

That’s the main thesis of philosopher Mark Rowlands new book, “The Word of Dog.”

He says out loud what many dog owners secretly wonder: Is my dog a better person than me? And while Rowlands certainly agrees that humans remain top of the intellectual pyramid, he does theorize that our canine companions inhabit the world in a uniquely uncomplicated way.

“Although dogs have no idea what philosophy is,” he writes, “they live the big questions.”

Join Rowlands and fellow dog lover Kerri Miller for this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to be enlightened and inspired by the dogs in your life.

Guest:

• Mark Rowlands is a professor of philosophy at the University. His new book is “The Word of Dog: What our Canine Companions Can Teach Us about Living a Good Life.”

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Rules are good. Discretion is better.

So argues philosophy professor Barry Lam in his new book, “Fewer Rules, Better People.” While Lam acknowledges law as the backbone of society, he says America has forgotten the good of discretion. Be it a sports referee, a parent, a police officer or a prosecutor, decision makers need the freedom to exercise discernment about how the rules get applied.

Lam joins Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas for a philosophical and practical discussion about how discretion greases the wheels of our culture and why removing it creates a lumbering bureaucracy.

Guest:

• Barry Lam is a professor of philosophy at UC Riverside and host of the podcast Hi-Phi Nation. His new book is “Fewer Rules, Better People: The Case for Discretion.”

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“The story of America in the 21st century is the story of chosen scarcities.”

So begins “Abundance,” the new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson that has politicos abuzz.

In it, they argue that progressives have created a culture of scarcity the last few decades, especially when it comes to solving America’s thorniest problem, like homelessness, housing affordability and green energy. The solution, they say, is to face up to the failures of liberal policies, no matter how well intended, and renew a politics of plenty.

“If you look back in American history, America used to built things — proudly,” Thompson tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “And then at some point over the last 50 years, liberalism — which was once defined as the politics of building — became defined as the politics of blocking. [In the book], we’re trying to execute a bit of a paradigm shift here: We want to marry the politics of building with modern progressivism.”

Guest:

• Derek Thompson is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He is the co-author of the new book, “Abundance,” along with the New York Times’ Ezra Klein.

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Can one decision be the fulcrum of a life?

Or is destiny really millions of tiny choices swirled with events out of our control?

That’s one of the many questions at the heart of Eric Puchner’s gorgeous new novel, “Dream State.” It’s received a dizzying amount of praise since it was released in February — making the New York Times best seller list, becoming an Oprah Book Club pick. But despite the buzz, the novel is deceptively hard to pin down.

Set in rural Montana, the book begins with two college buddies, as one of them, Charlie, prepares to marry the love of his life. But when Cece heads to the family cabin early to prepare for the wedding and meets no-nonsense best friend Garrett, her world wobbles.

What happens next — amidst a wedding besieged by norovirus — launches the next 50 years, as the three friends remain intertwined by regrets and grief, possibilities and love.

Puchner joins host Kerri Miller for a wide-ranging conversation on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. Among topics of discussion: why so few authors write about male friendship, why meeting friends from your beloved’s past can be so perilous and why setting “Dream State” in a Montana cabin was so crucial to the plot.

Guest:

• Eric Puchner is an associate professor in the Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University and the author of the novel “Model Home,” as well as several short stories. His new book is “Dream State.”

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For more than 20 years, author Chris Bohjalian carried the seed of a Civil War story in his imagination. It was inspired by the true story of a Southern woman who nursed a Union soldier back to health after he was injured on the battlefield.

But the idea didn’t grow roots until the racial uprisings after the murder of George Floyd, when Confederate statues came tumbling down.

“Years ago, Tony Horowitz wrote a remarkable book called ‘Confederates in the Attic,’ wondering why so much of the South was still fighting the Civil War,” Bohjalian tells host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “Horowitz journeyed through the (region) to understand why the Lost Cause still existed in the minds of so many Southerners. I thought about that book a lot in 2020, as the statues came down on Monument Avenue in Richmond. That’s when it really clicked in my mind.”

Bohjalian and Miller also talk about the delicate dance of writing historical fiction — when facts must be accurate but the story enticing — and how the current day echoes our nation’s past.

Guest:

• Chris Bohjalian is the author of many books including “The Flight Attendant,” which was turned into a streaming series. His 25th novel is “The Jackal’s Mistress.”

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When superstorm Sandy wreaked havoc on Eiren Caffall’s childhood home of New York City, her first thought was: What about the museums?

That distressing question provoked her first novel, “All the Water in the World.” In this futuristic dystopia, climate change is unchecked. Cities are drowned, people are adrift. But already, some are thinking of the after by looking to the past. The former curators and researchers at the American Natural History Museum have taken up residence on the museum’s roof, forming a new sort of family and thinking about how to preserve the artifacts still in their power.

“Museums are … the repositories of our collective understandings, evidence of discoveries, warehouses of materials that will fuel discoveries in the future,” writes Caffall. “They hold the past in trust for the future.”

This week, Caffall joins host Kerri Miller to talk about the hope she wants to see in dystopian fiction.

“The narratives we have in the popular culture about what disasters do to people are mostly incorrect,” she says. “There isn’t usually vast looting or mass violence. There’s usually a coming together of people trying to remake community, trying to support each other, trying to think about what happens in the aftermath.”

“To me, that’s a more interesting, more important, maybe more feminine story about what it takes to rebuild.”

Guest:

• Eiren Caffall is a musician, writer and researcher. Her first novel is “All the Water in the World.”

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Lauren Francis-Sharma was a young law student interning in Johannesburg in 1996 when she was given the opportunity to observe portions of the Truth and Reconciliation Amnesty Hearings, which were set up to expose the horrors of apartheid in South Africa.

Listening to testimony of atrocities and knowing that these public confessions came with exoneration changed her. She filled legal pad after legal pad with stories and kept them for decades.

“I think it’s brilliant, in some respects — how a country moves forward from such an atrocious history. What can we do to heal a nation?” she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “But I was left asking myself: Is this enough? Do people feel satisfied by truth alone?”

And in fact, that’s the question at the center of Francis-Sharma’s taut new thriller, “Casualties of Truth.” Shifting between South Africa in the late 1990s and Washington, D.C., in 2018, the novel tells the story of Prudence Wright who is forced to confront a violent past she has tried to ignore. But violence begats violence, and trauma begats trauma. How can one truly atone?

Guest:

• Lauren Francis-Sharma is the author of “‘Til the Well Runs Dry” and “Book of the Little Axe,” as well as the assistant director of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference and a recovering corporate attorney. Her new thriller is “Casualties of Truth.”

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