Novelist, essayist, and educator Brian Platzer joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss his new novel, The Optimists, which follows private school teacher Mr. Keating over three decades. Platzer reflects on the real-life inspiration for the book, his own mentor, Rod Keating, and the fleeting intensity of teacher-student relationships that nevertheless turn out to be formative. He explains how he came to decide that the fictional Keating, struggling to tell the story of his own life, would narrate the story of a remarkable student, Clara, alongside his own. Platzer also talks about the novel’s other central relationships, including Keating’s marriage to his wife, Caroline, and his connection to his ex’s son, Jacob. Platzer, himself a private school teacher, considers the novel’s private school setting, as well as the high cost of elite education and small classroom sizes in New York City, the competitive pressures placed on young people, and the broader impact of the gap between private institutions and public schools. Platzer reads from The Optimists. 

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell.

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Writer and editor Yi-Ling Liu joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and Jennifer Maritza McCauley to talk about state-controlled censorship. Liu, the author of a new book, The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet, explores what it means to build community through the internet while contending with surveillance and suppression. Liu, Terrell, and McCauley discuss the sale of TikTok to U.S. companies, the growing online surveillance and censorship in the United States, and how American citizens can learn from Chinese “netizens” about how to survive under censorship. Liu tells the stories of four people– a renowned feminist, a gay dating app entrepreneur, an aspiring rapper, and a famous science fiction writer—who all found ways to dance around The Great Firewall and earn success for themselves and for their communities online. Liu details the widespread impact of each of these “wall dancers” and reflects on the inspirations that led them to foster social change through online media. Liu explores the importance of cultural exchange and connection online and considers her own personal experience with living and creating under censorship. Liu reads from The Wall Dancers.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This podcast is produced by Jennifer Maritza McCauley, V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell.

Yi-Ling Liu

• The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet

Others 

• “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” Ralph Ellison
• Journey to the Center of the Earth by Jules Verne
• Waste Tide by Chen Qiufan, trans. by Ken Liu 
• The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu, trans. by Ken Liu
• Sale of TikTok to U.S. Companies | Politico
• TikTok Censorship Investigation | Los Angeles Times
• Sale of NVIDIA Chips to China | Associated Press
• The Great Firewall
• Lü Pin on Feminist Voices
• The Feminist Five
• The Mitu Movement in China

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Novelist Eleanor Shearer joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss her new novel, Fireflies in Winter, which depicts the little-known history of how the Leeward Maroons of Jamaica—a free Black community descended from formerly enslaved Africans and indigenous people—came to Nova Scotia at the end of the 18th century. Shearer, who is British and has Caribbean ancestry, explains the genesis of her interest in the Maroons as an example of successful resistance to slavery, since they fought the British in Jamaica, but also a kind of collusion with it, as they captured and returned runaway slaves to plantations there. She reflects on the connections between her Black heroines’ precarious situation in historic Canada and the situation of immigrants in the U.S. and elsewhere today. She also considers her research process, depicting queer life in earlier periods, the importance of sensory and embodied detail in historical writing, and her choice to write about the past in the present tense. Shearer reads from Fireflies in Winter.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell.

Eleanor Shearer

• Fireflies in Winter
• River Sing Me Home
• ‘Rebranded plantations’: how empire shaped luxury Caribbean tourism | Slavery | The Guardian

Others

• Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery
• Davos 2026: Special address by Mark Carney, PM of Canada | World Economic Forum
• Prime Minister Carney delivers remarks at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting
• Black Loyalist Heritage Center, Nova Scotia
• Carrefour Atlantic Emporium Bookstore
• Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 8, Episode 22: Suzette Mayr and Kai Thomas on Canada Versus Trump

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Award-winning journalist, activist, poll worker, and former attorney Anjali Enjeti discusses her new book, Ballot, which considers the real and metaphorical role that ballots play in our democracy. Co-hosts Whitney Terrell and Jennifer Maritza McCauley (in her first episode joining the co-host rotation) talk to Enjeti about her childhood encounters with ballots, the history of ballots in America, and the problems she encountered with Republican-installed Dominion voting machines in Fulton County, Georgia, where she was an election worker during the 2020 presidential race. She debunks the false claims of election fraud in Fulton County during that election and discusses the Trump Administration’s recent seizure of 700 boxes of 2020 ballots from Fulton County, what those ballots represent, and whether or not the administration might try to alter them. She reads from Ballot.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell.

Anjali Enjeti

• Ballot
• The Parted Earth
• Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change

Others

• Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 2, Episode 8: Lacy Johnson and Anjali Enjeti on the State of Reproductive Rights
• FBI raid in Georgia has little legal basis – but serves Trump’s goal to weaken trust in election results | The Guardian
• FBI’s Search of Fulton County, Georgia, Election Center Is Unprecedented, Experts Say | ProPublica
• Trump is trying to change how the midterm elections are conducted | The Washington Post
• Move to Seize Ballots Thrusts F.B.I. Into Trump’s Election Conspiracy Claim | The New York Times
• Trump’s Mug Shot Is Released After Booking at Fulton County Jail | The New York Times
• Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich

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Award-winning nonfiction writer and former investigative journalist Joe Jackson joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about President Trump’s “Don-roe Doctrine” and his imperial ambitions in Venezuela, Cuba, Greenland, and beyond. Jackson, the author of a new book, Splendid Liberators: Heroism, Betrayal, Resistance, and The Birth of American Empire, explains how Trump’s plan relies on the template set by the Spanish-American War, through which the U.S. rose as a world power and ended Spanish rule in the Western Hemisphere. Jackson sheds light on the rhetoric that fueled the war, as well as the violent history of U.S. military interference in Cuba and the Philippines. Jackson takes us through iterations of the Monroe Doctrine and outlines the impact of that philosophy on Trump’s desire for imperial expansion as well as his authoritarian control domestically, in cities like Minneapolis. He discusses how the Spanish-American War served as a turning point for America’s soul, including writers of the time, and how it birthed a culture of war that has continued to impact the nation, its citizens, and the world ever since. Jackson reads from Splendid Liberators.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell.

Joe Jackson

• The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power, and the Seeds of Empire
• Atlantic Fever: Lindbergh, His Competitors, and the Race to Cross the Atlantic
• Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary

Other Books:

• The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane
• The Winning of the West, Volumes 1-4, by Theodore Roosevelt
• Carl Sandburg
• McTeague by Norris
• "The Storytellers of Empire" by Kamila Shamsie – Guernica 
• Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph by T.E. Lawrence
• Jose Marti Reader: Writings on the Americas
• Noli mi Tangere (Touch Me Not) by Jose Rizal
• On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
• Cuba in Wartime by Richard Harding Davis
• The Essential Frank Norris, incl. The Octopus
• Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson

Other Links:

• Society of American Historians
• Western Writers of America
• True West Magazine
• Monroe Doctrine (1823, archive.gov)
• Roosevelt Corollary (19o5, archive.gov)
• “Manifest Destiny” by John Fiske, March 1885 Harper’s Magazine Archives (subscription to read)
• Trump’s Manifest Destiny - Project Syndicate
• Library of Congress: “Remember the Maine!”

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Interdisciplinary performance artist and Xicana feminist scholar Jessica Lopez Lyman joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about Minnesota’s history with state violence and local resistance to it, as well as ICE’s intensified presence in recent weeks. Lopez Lyman, the author of a new book, Place-Keepers: Latina/x Art, Performance, and Organizing in the Twin Cities, discusses immigration in Minnesota and how the increased ICE presence is affecting immigrant and BIPOC communities. Lopez Lyman speaks about the January 7 death of Renee Nicole Good, a white woman and legal observer who was shot and killed by an ICE officer, and compares the current situation to the time following police officer Derek Chauvin’s murder of George Floyd in 2020. She notes the pervasiveness of the harm wrought by ICE’s presence throughout Minnesota, a state with a romanticized, pastoral, and sometimes inaccurately homogenous image. She considers the importance of mutual aid, community care, and legal observers, and explains the term “movidas,” which refers to subversive knowledge and “small, hidden actions that are not public protests, that are really foundational for creating larger social movements.” She reads from Place-Keepers. 

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell.

Jessica Lopez Lyman

• Place-Keepers: Latina/x Art, Performance, and Organizing in the Twin Cities

Others:

• One State, Two Very Different Views of Minneapolis The New York Times
• Gloria Anzaldúa
• Audre Lorde
• Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
• Maria Isa
• “Video shows woman dragged from car by ICE agents in Minneapolis as she tells them she's autistic” CBC News
• "Family of man killed by off-duty ICE agent in LA demands charges: ‘The ache will never go away’" The Guardian
• NYTPitchbot- Jan. 15, 2026
• "Native Americans are being swept up by ICE in Minneapolis, tribes say"- The Washington Post
• "The killing of Daunte Wright and trial of Kimberly Potter" 2021 MPR News
• "The murder of George Floyd" 2020 MPR News
• "The death of Philando Castile and the trial of Jeronimo Yanez" 2016 MPR News 
• "Right-wing, anti-Islam protest draws large group of counter demonstrators" MPR News 
• "The Miracle of Minneapolis" 2015 The Atlantic

"AMERICAN SCENE: Minnesota: A State That Works" 1973 TIME

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Award-winning writers and longtime friends Vauhini Vara and Karan Mahajan join co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V. V. Ganeshananthan to discuss Vara’s recent New Yorker essay “What If Readers Like AI-Generated Fiction?” Vara explains recent research by scientist Tuhin Chakrabarty, who has attempted to fine-tune large language models to produce better writing by feeding them authors’ entire oeuvres. She considers what it means that when Chakrabarty ran the results by some creative writing graduate students, they preferred AI imitations of writers like Junot Diaz, Sigrid Nunez, and Tony Tulathimutte to the writers themselves, or could not tell the difference. She and Mahajan talk about their decades-long connection and familiarity with each other’s writing. They muse on what it means that, when Vara talked Chakrabarty into letting her compete with a large language model, even Mahajan could not separate her original work from what it produced. Mahajan and Vara debate ways in which this technology will and won’t change how literature is written and received, the importance of style, reading as a collective experience, and if there is anything AI will never be able to capture about writing. Vara reads from the essay. 

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell.

Vauhini Vara

• “What If Readers Like A.I.-Generated Fiction?” | The New Yorker 
• Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age
• This Is Salvaged
• The Immortal King Rao

Karan Mahajan

• The Complex
• The Association of Small Bombs
• Family Planning

Others:

• Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• “In the Penal Colony” by Franz Kafka
• Ngugi wa Thiong'o

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Bestselling and award-winning writer Matthew Pearl joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss his new novel The Award. Pearl explores the relationship between cultural prizes and ideas of nationhood, as well as imposter syndrome and external validation, like MFAs, literary awards, and being seen writing in coffeeshops by and with other writers. He reflects on developing the character of David Trent, an aspiring young writer in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Pearl himself formerly lived and participated in cafe culture. He talks about the ethical lines David is willing to cross to achieve success and how he rationalizes these choices to himself. He also explains the larger-than-life character of Silas Hale, the famous and mercurial novelist who lives downstairs from David, controls their shared thermostat, and has no interest in mentoring his young neighbor. Pearl considers how David’s life changes when he publishes a book and wins a prize. He reads from The Award.

This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell.

Matthew Pearl

●    The Award

●    Save Our Souls: The True Story of a Castaway Family, Treachery, and Murder

●    The Taking of Jemima Boone: Colonial Settlers, Tribal Nations, and the Kidnap That Shaped America

●    The Dante Chamber

●    The Last Bookaneer

●    The Technologists

●    The Last Dickens

●    The Poe Shadow

●    The Dante Club

Others:

●    Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 7, Episode 19: Jacinda Townsend and James Bernard Short on American Fiction

●    Erasure by Percival Everett

●    Rabbit, Run by John Updike

●    The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz

●    The Wife by Meg Wolitzer

●    Yellowface by R.F. Kuang

●    The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris

● Young Lions Fiction Award | The New York Public Library

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Acclaimed fiction writer and long-time creative writing professor Elizabeth McCracken joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V. V. Ganeshananthan to discuss her ninth book and first volume about craft, A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction. McCracken reflects on her long-held reluctance to attempt such a project and the impossibility of creating absolute rules for writing. She explains why she doesn’t believe in “show don’t tell,” “write what you know,” “write every day,” and other classic canards of craft. McCracken talks about the importance of imagining characters’ physicality; well-executed present tense; how time can shape narrative; justifying flashbacks; and writing outside one’s own identity. She reads from A Long Game. 

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell.

Elizabeth McCracken

• A Long Game: Notes on Writing Fiction
• The Hero of This Book
• The Souvenir Museum
• Bowlaway
• Thunderstruck & Other Stories
• An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination
• Niagara Falls All Over Again
• The Giant’s House
• Here's Your Hat What's Your Hurry?

Others:

• Tinkers by Paul Harding
• The Gates of the Alamo by Stephen Harrigan
• Affliction by Russell Banks
• Gilligan’s Island
• Allan Gurganus

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2025 Maya Angelou Book Award winner Alison C. Rollins joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V. V. Ganeshananthan to discuss her 2024 poetry collection Black Bell. She explores the history and symbolism of a bell-laden iron device used to control and torture enslaved people and describes the replica she created after studying metalworking. She also recounts the story of Harriet Jacobs, who spent seven years hidden in her grandmother’s attic before escaping slavery. Rollins talks about how her poems engage in call and response with other texts, including the music of Sun Ra and Stevie Wonder and images connected to ornithology, anatomy, Afrofuturism, and the history of slavery. She reflects on who has historically been granted the title of “poet” in America and discusses the archival research behind her writing. Rollins rings a glass bell and reads several poems from Black Bell.

To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This podcast is produced by V.V. Ganeshananthan, Whitney Terrell, Amelia Fisher, Victoria Freisner, Wil Lasater, and S E Walker.

Alison C. Rollins

• Black Bell
• Library of Small Catastrophes

Others:

• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
• The Divine Comedy - Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso by Dante Alighieri
• The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis
• The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
• Wu - Tang Clan - Enter The Wu - Tang (36 Chambers) [Full Album Mix]

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