Author Diana Abu-Jaber returns to MPR News this week. 
Friday’s Big Books and Bold Ideas will feature a conversation between host Kerri Miller and Abu-Jaber about her latest novel, “Fencing with the King,” a book set in Jordan that explores family dynamics and inheritance. 
It’s not the first time Abu-Jaber and Miller have talked. For this week’s blast from the past, enjoy their 2011 discussion about “Birds of Paradise,” which NPR named one of the top books of that year and won a 2012 Arab-American National Book Award. 
Guest: 

Diana Abu-Jaber is an award-winning author and a professor at Portland State University. Her latest book, “Fencing with the King,” was just released in paperback. 



To listen to the full conversation you can use the audio player above.
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From the archives: Diana Abu-Jaber on 'Birds of Paradise'

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What do you imagine your death will look like? 
It’s not a morbid or depressing question to Alua Arthur. She’s a death doula, and she firmly believes that giving thought to that question is the key to living a meaningful life. 
Arthur herself thinks about dying a lot. As she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, she has detailed plans for what she’d like her deathbed to be like. But more importantly, she says living with an awareness of mortality helps her live with intention.
“Every day that I live is a day that I can get closer to the life that I actually want,” she says. 
Arthur’s new book, “Briefly Perfectly Human” is both memoir and a surprisingly joyful treatise on why facing mortality is the key to living well. Don’t miss this wise, tender and inspiring conversation. 
Guest: 

Alua Arthur is a recovering attorney and the founder of Going With Grace, a death doula training and end-of-life planning organization. Her new book is “Briefly Perfectly Human.” 



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Alua Arthur says facing death is the key to living well

Who knew boring could be an asset? 
In Lea Carpenter’s new spy novel, “Ilium,” we meet our young and restless unnamed narrator on a day when she’s urging herself to be less mundane, to take more risks. 
She has no idea that the spies she’ll soon be working for want her precisely because she’s inexperienced, untested and ordinary. 
She quickly gets pulled into a high-stakes mission against a target who has a complicated backstory when it comes to American intelligence forces. 
Carpenter joined spy novel enthusiast Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. They talked about how Carpenter’s own family history inspired her interest in America’s intelligence agencies, why women are exceptionally good spies, and how family life both complicates and clarifies the work.
Guest: 

Lea Carpenter is a novelist and a screenwriter. Her new book is “Ilium.” 



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Lea Carpenter explores what happens when the business of spying gets personal

Birds, bats, freshwater mussels and a small catfish. They all slipped away in 2023, among the 21 species declared extinct by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. 
Grief is a rational response. So are the questions novelist and conservationist Lydia Millet articulates in her new book, “We Loved It All.” A blend of memoir and ecological truth-telling, Millet’s first nonfiction work examines what the vanishing will mean for the coming generations and for our sense of self. 
“No one wants to tell our children how glorious it was before you were around,” she writes. 
Millet joins host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to talk about how she carries hope, even as she mourns the destruction in the natural world. 
Guest: 

Lydia Millet is a novelist and conservationist. Her new book is, “We Loved It All: A Memory of Life.” 



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Lydia Millet writes a devotion to the species disappearing from our planet

Big Book and Bold Ideas talks with authors from around the globe. 
But our favorite moments come when host Kerri Miller sits down with Minnesota writers to talk about story, craft and how calling this state home influences both. 
This week, we took a look back at some conversations with notable Minnesota authors, including Shannon Gibney, who just won her third Minnesota Book Award, Hmong writer Kao Kalia Yang and not-ashamed-to-be-a-mystery-writer William Kent Krueger. 

Minnesota’s best writers on Big Books and Bold Ideas

Jamie Figueroa’s new memoir, “Mother Island” is stylistically unique. She combines prose and creative nonfiction, myth and short stories to explore her memories. 
But the heart of the book — her push-pull relationship with her mother and her process of uncovering a true self — is as old as time. 
Figueroa’s mother was taken from Puerto Rico as a young child and raised in a New York City orphanage, separated from her native language, culture and ancestry. As many immigrants before her, she learned to keep her heritage distant, as a way to assimilate into a new country.
But Figueroa chafed at the disconnect — “my mother did not know how to define herself on her own terms” — and set out to remember. 
As she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, “[My mother] was concerned about how we were seen. She wanted to be included. Anything she could do to get closer to ‘white identity’ made it easier for her.”
“As a daughter, I respect those were the choices she was forced to make — and I feel like my life is lived in opposition to that.”
Guest:

Jamie Figueroa is the author of the acclaimed novel, “Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer.” Her new book is “Mother Island.” 



Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.
Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

From the archives: Diana Abu-Jaber on 'Birds of Paradise'

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