National Book Award-winning novelist Susan Choi and critic and editor Oscar Villalon talk to Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell about the business, prestige and (hopefully) idealism of literary awards. Choi talks about critical reception versus award recognition, the roles of luck and taste, and how winning a major prize for her novel Trust Exercise changed her career. Villalon talks about making his way through stacks of nominated books, who can afford to judge book awards, diversity on judging panels, and his experience chairing the 2021 Pulitzer Prize fiction jury.

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 excerpts from 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 Anne Kniggendorf.

Selected Readings:

Susan Choi

Oscar Villalon

Others:

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New York Times Moscow bureau chief Anton Troianovski and Yale historian Marci Shore join hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about a possible Russian invasion of Ukraine. Troianovski discusses his reporting on the recent talks between the U.S. and Russia, contextualizes Russia’s unusual demands, and considers the odds of a diplomatic solution. Shore lays out the Ukrainian political history that helped set the stage for current tensions, explains how Trump learned from Putin’s efforts to subvert Ukrainian elections, and recommends favorite Ukrainian writers. The episode also features Reginald Dwayne Betts reading Serhiy Zhadan’s poem “Headphones,” which he selected for inclusion in The New York Times Magazine.

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 excerpts from our interviews at our Fiction/Non/Fiction Podcast Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

Selected readings:

Anton Troianovski

Marci Shore

Others:

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Authors Paul Lisicky and Terese Marie Mailhot join hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about the possible long-term mental health effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. First, Lisicky discusses the situation in light of his experiences with the AIDS epidemic and through the lens of his memoir Later: My Life at the Edge of the World. In the second half of the show, Mailhot reads from her bestselling memoir Heart Berries and talks about how children’s futures may be shaped by the trauma they have experienced since early 2020.

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 excerpts from our interviews at our Fiction/Non/Fiction Podcast Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

Selected readings:

Paul Lisicky

Terese Marie Mailhot

• Heart Berries

Others:

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Novelist Asali Solomon joins hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss accountability, the ongoing Congressional investigation into the January 6 insurrection, and her new novel. The Days of Afrekete, an Obama-era story, follows Liselle Belmont, a Black woman throwing a dinner party for her white husband, a politician who is suspected of corruption. As she considers her own personal and political choices, she flashes back to a lost love: her college girlfriend Selena. Solomon reads from the book and talks about depicting accountability and its lack, the intimate costs of being connected to power, and how Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Toni Morrison’s Sula, and Audre Lorde’s Zami influenced her storytelling. She also reflects on how reading the late bell hooks gave her a new vision of herself in the world.

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 excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

Selected readings:

Asali Solomon

Others:

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Acclaimed novelist Nadifa Mohamed joins hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss the crisis around migrants passing from Belarus into Poland and thus into the E.U. Mohamed analyzes the crisis, engineered by Russian-backed strongman Alexander Lukashenko, in the context of Europe’s historical antipathy toward immigration, and reads from her Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, The Fortune Men, the fictionalized account of a Somali immigrant named Mahmood Mattan, set in Cardiff, Wales during the 1950s. She discusses how attitudes toward immigration shaped Brexit and the U.K.’s draconian new Nationality and Borders Bill, which will potentially affect the lives of around six million people, including the novelist herself. 

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 excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf and Hayden Baker.

Selected readings:

Nadifa Mohamed

Others:

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Author and editor of the New York Times Book Review Pamela Paul and New York Times journalist Cecilia Kang join hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to consider how social media and search engines have changed everyday life. First, Paul provides a nostalgia tour of pre-internet life, and reads from her new book, 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet, a wake-up call to identify the elements that might be worth saving. Then Kang, who has covered Facebook for 15 years, analyzes the globally dominant company’s relentless focus on growth, and reads from her new book with co-reporter Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination. Kang also considers the impact of information shared by former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen.

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 excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf and Hayden Baker.

Selected readings:

Pamela Paul

Others:

Cecilia Kang

• An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination

Others:

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In this special episode, taped live at the Miami Book Fair, novelist Joshua Ferris joins hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss his new novel, A Calling for Charlie Barnes, which takes an often humorous look at the catastrophe of its protagonist’s life. When Charlie Barnes is simultaneously hit with a cancer diagnosis and the Great Recession, all he wants is to live within another story. Ferris talks about the lies we tell ourselves and the fictionalized accounts of the past that plague and define families.  

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 excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

Selected readings:

Joshua Ferris

Others:

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In this special episode, taped live at the Miami Book Fair, novelist Ha Jin joins hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss his new novel, A Song Everlasting, which explores the ways in which politics and art are intertwined from the point of view of a Chinese singer who makes his home in the U.S. After talking about the current tensions between China and Taiwan, Jin describes how the U.S. has had a negative influence on this conflict and depicts China as a strong but rapidly declining force. Then he speaks about how, like his main character, Tian, he believes that producing genuine art is the best way an artist can leave a lasting political influence.       

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 excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This podcast is produced by Hayden Baker and Anne Kniggendorf.

Selected readings:

Ha Jin 

Others:

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Novelist Julia Elliott and poet and writer DaMaris B. Hill join hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to consider the writing and face of rural America—particularly as it might look 30 years from now. First, Elliott talks about growing up as an outsider in her own South Carolina hometown, and reads from her debut novel The New and Improved Romie Flutch. Then, Hill, who was born in West Virginia, speaks to the diversity of rural spaces and reads a historical poem, “Beloved Weirdo,” from her forthcoming poetry collection Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood. Hill also speaks about judging the Maya Angelou Book Award.

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 excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This podcast is produced by Hayden Baker and Anne Kniggendorf.

Selected readings:

DaMaris B. Hill

Julia Elliott

Others:

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Novelist Elizabeth Wetmore and essayist and poet Kathryn Nuernberger join hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss Texas’s new abortion law. As the Lone Star State’s SB8 invites anyone to sue those “abetting” an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, Roe v. Wade has never seemed more at risk. In this episode, Wetmore talks about the Southwest’s history of suppressing women’s rights to birth control and reads from her novel, Valentine, which takes place in Texas and depicts a cast of women struggling to navigate the aftermath of sexual violence and access to abortion in 1976. Then, Nuernberger reads from her essay collection, The Witch of Eye, and her poetry collection, RUE; she discusses midwives, witch trials, herbalism, torture, and how these subjects help us interpret the history of women’s reproductive rights.       

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 excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/

This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf.

Selected readings:

Elizabeth Wetmore 

Kathryn Nuernberger

Others:

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See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.