“If you’re doing an unreliable narrator, you have to drop clues so the reader can infer the author’s presence behind the narrative voice.”

Sara Levine joins me to discuss her novel Treasure Island!!!

When a college graduate with a history of hapless jobs (ice cream scooper, gift wrapper, laziest ever part-time clerk at The Pet Library) reads Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island, she is dumbstruck by the timid design of her life. Convinced that Stevenson's book is cosmically intended for her, she redesigns her life according to its Core Values: boldness, resolution, independence, and horn-blowing. The New York Times raves, "A rollicking tale, shameless, funny and intelligent."

Buy Treasure Island!!!

“What I learned from my first book is that every single thing isn’t life or death ... that not every little thing is going to make or break you. ”

Johannes Lichtman joins me to discuss his novel Calling Ukraine.

National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and author of Such Good Work Johannes Lichtman returns with a novel that is strikingly relevant to our times--about an American who takes a job in Ukraine in 2018, only to find that his struggle to understand the customs and culture is eclipsed by a romantic entanglement with deadly consequences.

Buy Calling Ukraine from Bookshop.

“I think of writing like walking across a frozen lake. There’s times to drop through and go under, but you have to be able to get back out and surface and not lose yourself.”

Lauren Oliver joins me to discuss her novel Panic.

Heather never thought she would compete in Panic, a legendary game played by graduating seniors, where the stakes are high and the payoff is even higher. She’d never thought of herself as fearless, the kind of person who would fight to stand out. But when she finds something, and someone, to fight for, she will discover that she is braver than she ever thought.

Dodge has never been afraid of Panic. His secret will fuel him, and get him all the way through the game, he’s sure of it. But what he doesn't know is that he’s not the only one with a secret. Everyone has something to play for.

Buy Panic from Bookshop.

photo credit: Adalena Kavanagh

“I tend to prefer worldbuilding that tries to conjure the world for the reader, giving interesting details that they’ll fill in themselves.”

Lincoln Michel joins me to discuss his debut novel The Body Scout.

In the future you can have any body you want—as long as you can afford it.

But in a New York ravaged by climate change and repeat pandemics, Kobo is barely scraping by. He scouts the latest in gene-edited talent for Big Pharma-owned baseball teams, but his own cybernetics are a decade out of date and twin sister loan sharks are banging down his door. Things couldn't get much worse.

Then his brother—Monsanto Mets slugger J.J. Zunz—is murdered at home plate.

Buy The Body Scout from Bookshop.

photo credit: Kate Greathead

“You couldn’t make the writing terrible and inept, because who wants to read that? But if I made it graceful and elegant and lyrical throughout, why is the narrator not a successful writer?”

— Teddy Wayne

Teddy Wayne joins me to discuss Apartment.

In 1996, the unnamed narrator of Teddy Wayne’s Apartment is attending the MFA writing program at Columbia on his father’s dime and living in an illegal sublet of a rent-stabilized apartment. Feeling guilty about his good fortune, he offers his spare bedroom--rent-free--to Billy, a talented, charismatic classmate from the Midwest eking out a hand-to-mouth existence in Manhattan.

The narrator’s rapport with Billy develops into the friendship he’s never had due to a lifetime of holding people at arm’s length, hovering at the periphery, feeling “fundamentally defective.” But their living arrangement, not to mention their radically different upbringings, breeds tensions neither man could predict. Interrogating the origins of our contemporary political divide and its ties to masculinity and class, Apartment is a gutting portrait of one of New York’s many lost, disconnected souls by a writer with an uncommon aptitude for embodying them.

Buy Apartment from Bookshop.

Photo credit: Art Streiber

“I didn’t expect it to be therapeutic. I don’t think I expected it to be quite as painful as it was….I wished as I was writing it that I hadn’t agreed to do it.”

— Carmen Maria Machado

Carmen Maria Machado joins me to discuss her memoir In The Dream House.

In the Dream House is Machado’s wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.

That struggle gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope―the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman―through which Machado holds the events up to the light.

Buy Carmen’s memoir In the Dream House.

“It was very revelatory and exciting to feel that after years of false paths, that at long last I finally found something that felt natural.”

— Ryan Chapman

Ryan Chapman joins me to discuss his debut novel Riots I Have Known.

An unnamed Sri Lankan inmate has barricaded himself inside a prison computer lab in Dutchess County, New York. A riot rages outside, incited by a poem published in The Holding Pen, the house literary journal. This, our narrator’s final Editor’s Letter, is his confession. An official accounting of events, as they happened.

As he awaits imminent and violent interruption, he takes us on a roller coaster ride of plot and language, determined to share his life story, and maybe answer a few questions. How did he end up here? Should he have remained a quiet Park Avenue doorman? Or continued his rise in the black markets of postwar Sri Lanka? What will become of The Holding Pen, a “masterpiece of post-penal literature” favored by Brooklynites everywhere? And why does everyone think the riots are his fault? Can’t they see he’s really a good guy, doing it for the right reasons?

“Savage, fearless, and funny as hell, Riots I Have Known also possesses, not so strangely, a poignant core.” —Sam Lipsyte

Buy Ryan’s novel Riots I Have Known.

“My interest is in getting the reader immersed in such a way that they experience some kind of surprise that opens them up to something about the world they didn’t know before.”

— Namwali Serpell

Namwali Serpell joins me to discuss her debut novel The Old Drift.

1904. On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there is a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. In a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles the fates of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. This sets off a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families as they collide and converge over the course of the century. As the generations pass, their lives—their triumphs, errors, losses and hopes—emerge through a panorama of history, fairytale, romance and science fiction.

“A dazzling debut, establishing Namwali Serpell as a writer on the world stage.” —Salman Rushdie, The New York Times Book Review

Buy Namwali’s novel The Old Drift.

photo credit: Joshua Meier

“We want a story’s most pressurized form. If someone’s gonna have a slice in your story, have them eat the whole pizza. Take the story to the point right before it tips over. That’s where the story should rest, on that blade.”

— Nathan Englander

Nathan Englander joins me to discuss Kaddish.com.

Larry is the secular son in a family of Orthodox Brooklyn Jews.  When his father dies, it’s his responsibility to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months.  To the horror and dismay of his sister, Larry refuses—imperiling the fate of his father’s soul.  To appease her, Larry hatches an ingenious if cynical plan, hiring a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to recite the prayer and shepherd his father’s soul safely to rest.

“I want people to literally just laugh, laugh, laugh, cry. Like sit down and eat this book in a sitting.”

Buy Nathan’s novel Kaddish.com.

photo by Ceridwen Morris

“Sometimes you write early scenes, and they operate as a sort of scaffolding. They help you while you’re constructing the building, but eventually you’re going to take them down.”

— Sam Lipsyte

Sam Lipsyte joins me to discuss Hark.

In an America convulsed by political upheaval, cultural discord, environmental collapse, and spiritual confusion, many folks are searching for peace, salvation, and—perhaps most immediately—just a little damn focus. Enter Hark Morner, an unwitting guru whose technique of “Mental Archery”—a combination of mindfulness, mythology, fake history, yoga, and, well, archery—is set to captivate the masses and raise him to near-messiah status

Hark is Sam Lipsyte’s fourth novel.

Buy Sam’s novel Hark.