Last month, the Wall Street Journal declared this summer to be the era of the “man band.” Those would be boy bands who’ve grown up — think New Kids on the Block, Boys II Men and the Jonas Brothers — along with their fans, who now have more disposable income to fork out. Exhibit A: The Backstreet Boys residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas last summer grossed more than $55 million.

But it’s about more than the money. It’s about the mostly middle-aged women who are no longer afraid of the cringe — and the mostly middle-aged boys-turned-men who are no longer afraid to embrace the passion of their fans.

Novelist Emma Straub saw that fandom first hand when she went on a New Kids on the Block cruise several years ago — and was blown away by the intensity and camaraderie of the now adult “Blockheads.” That visit inspired her new novel, “American Fantasy,” which is a deep dive into the lucrative world of a fictional ‘90s-era boy band named Boy Talk and the woman who still worship them.

Straub joins Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to talk about boy bands, the pleasure of enjoying them without shame and how aging changes our perceptions of our past — and current — selves.

Guest:

• Emma Straub is is a New York Times-bestselling author and the owner of a Brooklyn-based bookstore, Books Are Magic. Her latest novel is “American Fantasy.”

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Between death and emigration, Ireland lost almost a quarter of its population in the mid 1800s to the Great Hunger. Entire villages starved to death after potato blight wiped out the island’s primary subsistence crop, and British overseers did little to help.

“Hamnet” author Maggie O’Farrell’s ancestors lived that history and stayed in Ireland. According to family lore, her great-great-grandfather was a map-maker who helped the British redraw maps of the island after the famine altered the land.

Inspired by that story, O’Farrell decided her next novel would be centered on her homeland of Ireland and the tragic era that marked both the place and her people.

“I think it’s hard for us,” she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “These days, we can look at the statistics [of death and people leaving]. But if you zero down to one or two people’s tiny little lives, you see the enormity of tragedy behind it.”

O’Farrell’s new novel, “Land,” tells the story of two such people, Tomás and his wife, Phina, who survive the Great Hunger and have four children. It’s a universal story told through the specifics of one family and one piece of land. She talks about it — and her work on the Oscar-winning adaptation of her novel, “Hamnet,” — on this weeks Big Books and Bold Ideas.

Guest:

• Maggie O’Farrell is an author and screenwriter. Her new novel is “Land.”

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When novelist Ann Patchett is on Big Books and Bold Ideas, watch out. She and host Kerri Miller trade quips, stories, theories and book recommendations like two longtime friends.

And this week, Patchett returns to talk about her latest novel, “Whistler.” She and Miller discuss the backstory about the novel within the novel. They trade stories about why friendships lost and rediscovered have a special mind of magic. And, of course, they talk about Minnesota author and friend of the show Kate DiCamillo, who has a special knack for editing Patchett’s work — and vice versa.

This is a rollicking, warm and delightful conversation — a singular Big Books and Bold Ideas, as only Miller and Patchett can do.

Guest:

• Ann Patchett is a prolific writer. Her latest novel is “Whistler.”

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Has mythology given Medea a bad rap? Has her story been distorted because it was more appealing to portray her as a lusty, vengeful, violent woman married to a golden-boy hero?

The essential conundrum, writes novelist Natalie Haynes, is Medea’s shift from superpowered sorceress to helpless, abandoned wife.

Medea is at the center of Haynes’ new novel about Jason’s quest for the Golden Fleece and the tragedy that flows from their love affair. She joins host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to talk Medea’s essential juxtapositions and what ancient myths have to say to modern culture. They also talk about how Haynes’ time doing stand-up comedy informs her writing.

Guest:

• Natalie Haynes is a mythologist and the author of many novels, including “Stone Blind” and “A Thousand Ships.” Her new book is “No Friend to This House.”

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Kate Bowler is officially over being grateful.

Not because gratitude doesn’t matter. But because it’s been pushed as the latest iteration in a long series of self-help projects that are more obligation than opportunity.

“It’s become a new form of toxic positivity or a despairing hopefulness,” says Bowler on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, “that if you list enough things, you can stack up everything you are grateful for and then determine to be happy.”

That’s a sharp contrast to joy, which Bowler says is available even in the midst of the messy muck of every day.

“Joy is going to make you say thank you. It is so good to be,” she says to Kerri Miller. “But it’s not something you can achieve by climbing this grueling ladder called gratitude to the top rung.”

Bowler’s candid, funny and refreshing treatise on joy is captured in her new book, “Joyful, Anyway” — and on this week’s Big Books conversation.

Guest:

• Kate Bowler is the author of many books including, “Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I’ve Loved,” host of the podcast “Everything Happens” and a professor at Duke University’s Divinity School. Her new book is “Joyful, Anyway.”

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On the surface, the main characters in Kelly Yang’s new novel, “The Take,” have little in common.

Ingrid Parker is a rich, white, female movie producer who has paid her dues and scrapped her way to position of power in Hollywood.

Maggie Wang is a young, broke, Asian American writer who is desperately looking for approval and a break.

But what they share is an an awareness of time: Ingrid doesn’t have enough. Maggie is impatient for it to move faster.

When a medical experiment ties the two together, their individual assumptions about ambition and aging and mentorship and power are challenged. How much are they each willing to sacrifice in the quest to succeed?

Yang, who is mostly known for her middle-grade books, including the wildly successful “Front Desk” series, says she wrote her first adult novel because she needed to process what she experienced firsthand in Hollywood. She talks about that and much more with Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas.

Guest:

• Kelly Yang is a New York Times bestselling author of over 15 books for kids and teens, including the “Front Desk” series. “The Take” is her debut adult novel.

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Hans Christian Anderson hoped to find a household straight out of a Charles Dickens novel when he visited the Dickens family at their country home in the summer of 1857.

Instead, he found a marriage in shambles, a band of miserable and neglected children and a host who was desperately hoping Anderson would leave — the sooner, the better.

But Anderson didn’t leave. He lingered, for five awkward and painful weeks, while the Dickens family disintegrated around him.

Francine Prose takes this historic moment and fictionalizes it in her new novel, “Five Weeks in the Country.” Told from multiple perspectives, the book details the very public dissolution of the Dickens family and the very modern question of what to do when good art is produced by a terrible person.

On this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, Prose and host Kerri Miller tackle it all — including why Prose likes reality TV, how she grapples with being a fan of Dickens work without liking Dickens the person, and what it means to write risky, even after you’ve written 23 novels.

Guest:

• Francine Prose author of many books, including “Household Saints” and “Lovers at the Chameleon Club, Paris 1932.” Her new novel is “Five Weeks in the Country.”

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The theme for this spring member drive show is family. We mine the Big Books and Bold Ideas archives for the best conversations with authors who’ve used their own histories as inspiration.

They include:

• Luis Alberto Urrea, whose novel, “Good Night, Irene” was inspired by his mother’s wartime experiences — which he didn’t learn the whole truth about until after her death.
• Poet Safyia Sinclair, who chronicled how her father’s Rastafari faith controlled her childhood home in her memoir, “How to Say Babylon.”
• Christine Kuehn and her explosive book, “Family of Spies,” which uncovers how her grandparents were Nazi spies who were instrumental in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

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When Tara Menon describes the underwater world that surrounds an island off the coast of Thailand, her language is both restrained and lush.

“The reef is busy with color,” she writes, “Fiery scorpion fish, yellow frog-fish, red snappers, white-and-orange clown fish, a shoal of electric-blue angelfish, fat black sea cucumbers, powder-blue surgeonfish. Sand suspended between the dimpled surface glitters in the sunlight.”

Her prose, like the story, exemplifies the contrast between the simple joy of true friendship and the aching loss left behind when that gift is stripped away.

Menon’s novel, “Under Water,” unfolds before and after the devastating Boxing Day tsunami in 2004, that surged across the Indian Ocean and killed more than 225,000 people. But the heartbeat of the story is the friendship between two girls who each have to navigate a stinging loss.

Menon joins Kerri Miller for a conversation about writing, the elegance of restraint and how to avoid sentimentality when building a story around childhood friendship and exuberant nature, on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas.

Guest:

• Tara Menon is an assistant professor of English at Harvard University. Her debut novel is “Under Water.”

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On the day the Sharafs bury their 18-year-old daughter, the girl’s mother is so bereaved, she can barely stand. The father is so anguished, he nearly climbs into the grave himself.

But as Patmeena Sabit’s debut novel unspools, it’s up to the reader to parse the truth about the girl’s death — and who may have been accomplices to it. The narrative is told through a kaleidoscope of viewpoints. Fellow Afghan immigrants, journalists and law enforcement each relate what they saw, through their own lens. But eye witnesses can be wrong. Neighbors have an agenda. One person’s truth is another person’s lie.

For Sabit, that’s the whole point.

“When I was creating the story, I was thinking … about the nature of perception and how reliable that is, and objective truth and if there is an objective truth to any one situation,” she tells Kerri Miller.

“Good People” is both a cultural study of a community’s judgement and an interrogation of what it means to be an American — all with a crime at the center of it. Sabit and Miller talk about it on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas.

Guest:

• Patmeena Sabit was born in Kabul and fled to Pakistan and then to the United States with her family after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. “Good People” is her debut novel.

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