Bruce Holsinger’s Culpability was Oprah’s big pick this summer. No surprise. It’s a novel that gives book clubs a lot of contemporary ethical issues to talk about. From self-driving cars to drones to chatbots, technology isn’t just changing our daily lives, it’s changing our laws, our relationships, our sense of self. And it’s reshaping the way we talk about responsibility and culpability.

Culpability is Bruce’s third contemporary family drama, following The Displacements and The Gifted School. He’s also the author of the historical thrillers A Burnable Book and The Invention of Fire as well as many nonfiction books. In his “spare time,” Bruce teaches in the Department of English at UVA, where he specializes in medieval literature and modern critical thought and edits their quarterly journal New Literary History. He also teaches craft classes and serves as board chairman for WriterHouse, a nonprofit in Charlottesville.

Bruce joins Marrie Stone to talk about Culpability and his unusual writing backstory. He discusses jumping genres and how that impacted his brand, how Bruce mastered the contemporary family drama, and how to write about hyper-contemporary issues without that writing feeling stale or outdated a year from now.  Bruce also talks about the advantages of writing from the first person, present tense point of view, injecting other textures of narrative — like text conversations and book excerpts — into your narrative without breaking the story’s flow. He shares his experiences with agents and different publishing houses, and so much more.  

 If you’re in the Orange County area, Bruce will be at the quarterly “Evening with an Author” series in Laguna Beach on October 15th. More information on that event can be found here.

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(Recorded on September 12, 2025)

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