Tahereh Mafi’s latest book is a departure for the author of the bestselling dystopian Shatter Me series, and magical middle grade novels including Furthermore. A Very Large Expanse of Sea, set in the months after 9/11, is a semiautobiographical novel centering on flinty, music-loving teen Shirin, a hijabi girl who puts up mile-high walls to protect herself from the attacks of the ignorant and the Islamophobic. It’s a story of bigotry and breakdancing and artistic escape, and is also one of the best depictions of the heady, overwhelming days of first love we have ever read. Mafi stopped by the podcast to talk about drawing inspiration from her own life, the role of books in her childhood, and growing up first-generation in the U.S.

Since 2011 Ransom Riggs has told stories set in the strange and dangerous world of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, taking his peculiars across Europe and across time. In the fourth chapter of the series, Map of Days, they’ve made their way from Europe to the U.S., where they encounter the very different landscape of peculiar America, complete with turf wars, haunted diners, and roadside nightmares. We talked to Riggs about shiny surfaces, uncanny things, and the new book. 

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Becky Albertalli is known for hilarious, feelsy, sweet and sour high school stories stuffed with wildly relatable insights and characters that will become your best friends. Adam Silvera is known for searching, often speculative tales of first love, painful memories, and coming of age that want to rip your heart out and use it as a book jacket. So ever since the two announced that they were collaborating on a meet-cute love story, fans have been debating whether we should prepare ourselves for happy tears or miserable tears. No spoilers here, but we did talk to Becky and Adam about their fandoms, their high school selves, and What If It’s Us, their ridiculously adorable book.

Neal Shusterman deals in dark fictional visions — but he never forgets to give readers a reason to hope. His Unwind dystology centered on a dystopia in which children can be retroactively aborted, or "unwound," and harvested for their organs. In his ongoing Scythe series, death by disease or accident have been rendered obsolete, and mortality is in the hands of an elite group of professional killers known as scythes. He won the 2015 National Book Award for Challenger Deep, in which a young man's descent into mental illness is rendered as a surreal sea journey into the depths of the Marianas Trench. Now in his latest novel, Dry, Neal has paired up with son Jarrod Shusterman to tell the story of a California drought turned deadly. The two of them joined us to talk about water zombies, what to do when a great idea comes to you when you're driving, and why great writing is best done on a boat.  And yep, there's a lightning round.

Lauren Oliver grew up in a house full of books, writes her novels even when she's at parties, and has so many ideas she started a company, Glass Town Entertainment, to help her turn more of them into things you can watch and read. She has written for kids, teens, and adults, seen her work adapted into film, and hit the bestseller list with works including Before I Fall and Replica. Her latest, Broken Things, combines cult literary fandom and true crime into the story of two girls wrongly accused of the murder of a third. We talked to her about her fandoms, her teen years, and why our culture is so scared of girls.

In show business, a "triple threat" is a performer who can sing, dance and act -- and that makes Neil Patrick Harris, who is all these things and the author of an inventive series of books for young readers, a quadruple threat.  The star of Netflix's A Series of Unfortunate Events joined Josh Perilo from B&N's Union Square, just before the launch event for The Magic Misfits: The Second Story, the latest adventure in his delightful series for young readers, what readers can find in the B&N Exclusive Edition, and how he is infusing these stories with his love for the mystery of stage magic.

Angie Thomas's Black Lives Matter-inspired debut, The Hate U Give, has topped the bestseller list since its release, gained fans around the world, and become the most visible title in a much-needed wave of fiction examining police brutality against black communities. It’s also one of the best coming of age books in recent memory, combining a heartbreaking topical story with a warm, funny, vividly specific portrait of a family and a neighborhood. In the weeks before the book hits the big screen, we talked to Thomas about the adaptation process; writing her forthcoming novel, On the Come Up; and the books and authors that helped pave the way for her and Starr Carter’s story.

Nova Ren Suma writes haunting, female-fronted tales about sinister things, exploring the complexities of family, different kinds of ghost stories, and what it means to be a woman in the world. Her latest, A Room Away From the Wolves, takes place in the stifling rooms of an all-female boarding house in New York City. Deeply unreliable teen narrator Bina flees to Catherine House after an unnamed trauma, and there she falls under the sway of long-dead founder Catherine de Barra, and of fellow boarder Monet, who may just be the key to breaking Catherine House’s spell. We talked to Nova about New York stories, girls gone astray, and her path to becoming a writer.

Ibi Zoboi’s debut, American Street, turned heads with its gorgeous mashup of vodou-infused magical realism and the coming of age immigrant’s story of Haitian teen Fabiola, navigating a strange new life in the U.S. following her mother’s detainment midway through their journey from Port au Prince to Detroit. Her sophomore novel, Pride, is a novel not of displacement but of deep roots, a remixed take on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice set in Zoboi’s adopted childhood home of Bushwick, Brooklyn, following her own move at age four from Port-au-Prince, Haiti. In her hands, Elizabeth Bennet becomes Haitian-Dominican teen Zuri Benitez, whose neighborhood is her kingdom—but whose status quo is threatened by both her imminent departure for college and the arrival on her street of the ultra-rich Darcy family, including the handsome, infuriatingly snobby Darius Darcy. Zoboi talked with us about the inspirations that became her second novel, her path from slam poetry to the written word, and the importance of being courted.