The B&n Podcast

Perhaps no writer is better suited to help us grapple with the tumultuous and unexpected recent history of Russia — a history that has enormous impact on the rest of the world — than the journalist and author Masha Gessen.  Her new book, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia is a panoramic, magisterial, and even page-turning look at the end of one era and the beginning of another, and the effect of decades of trauma on a nation.  With her book just named a finalist for the 2017 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Masha Gessen joins Bill Tipper on the podcast for a deep dive into a society that many Americans are fascinated by — but which few of us understand.

The short stories in Jenny Zhang’s debut collection Sour Heart started out as separate tales, but soon the young author found herself in possession of the story of a community — told through  moments in the lives of Chinese-American children growing up in a New York City neighborhood.   Insightful and wry, ferocious and beautiful, these interlinking stories earned Sour Heart a spot in Barnes and Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program. In this episode, the author joins Miwa Messer to talk about her book, navigating family, and coming of age in America.

Claire Messud may be best known to most readers as the author of the 2006 bestseller and Booker-prize nominated novel The Emperor's Children, a diamond-sharp satire of wealth, privilege, power and self-deception set just before and after the events of September 11th, 2001.  But her new novel the Burning Girl explores the haunted terrain of a lost childhood friendship and follows two young women into a confrontation with adulthood fraught with perils both familiar and enigmatic. This week, Claire Messud joins Bill Tipper to talk about her new book, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to explain the inexplicable.

If you’ve read a comic book in the last 30 years—or even if you’ve only been to the movies—you've felt the impact of Frank Miller’s work. One of the most influential comics creators of his era, Miller’s work for DC and Marvel comics in the 1980s helped redefine superheroes, bringing a dark, often dystopian sensibility to beloved characters.  Nowhere was that more earthshaking than in 1986's The Dark Knight Returns, Miller's story of an aging Batman battling not just the Joker  but his own failing body, a corrupt government and a collapsing social order.  In this episode of the podcast, Miller talks with Joel Cunningham about his return to that grimly exciting Gotham with Batman: The Dark Knight: Master Race.

Tom Perrotta can be hard to pin down: in Election, he wickedly sent up American politics with a dark comedy of high school ambition; his treatment of suburban couples in 2004’s bestseller Little Children earned him a comparison to Chekhov in the New York Times.  And in 2011’s The Leftovers, he pushed the boundaries of realism and fantasy to create a haunting meditation on loss.  But his latest novel, Mrs. Fletcher, breaks new ground again, with the story of a middle-aged single mother who finds herself exploring a new identity – one in part defined by her sudden exposure to the world of internet pornography.  Simultaneously, the novel tracks Eve's son Brendan as he arrives at college, full of ideas and desires that have been influenced by the same online sources.  In this episode, the author talks with Bill Tipper about his eyes-wide-open confrontation with American sexuality in forms virtual and otherwise.

In the summer of 2014, Celeste Ng's debut novel Everything I Never Told You became a nationwide bestseller and was tagged on multiple best-of-the-year lists as the story of a teenage girl gone missing from her 1970s middle-class household became a container for a novel of big ideas about prejudice and privilege. Now class, race, and motherhood take center stage in her new novel, Little Fires Everywhere.  The author sat down with Miwa Messer to talk about how she turned a tale of scandal in an affluent Midwestern suburb into a map of 21st-century American discontents.

Jesmyn Ward’s writing marries a devastating realism with a unique sensitivity to the long echoes of violence and trauma.  Her National Book Award-winning novel Salvage the Bones brought mythic resonance to the ordeal of a family from a town on the Mississippi Gulf Coast during the days just before and after the devastation of hurricane Katrina.  Her new novel Sing, Unburied, Sing nods to William Faulkner and Toni Morrison with a tale of addiction, imprisonment, love and struggle —  told by the living, the dying and by ghosts.  In this episode, Miwa Messer talks with Jesmyn Ward about her electric fiction.

Yaa Gyasi's moving novel Homegoing begins with the divergent fates of two half-sisters in 18th Century Ghana, and weaves in the stories of their descendants across eight generations and three hundred years of history.  In this episode of the podcast,  the author talks with Miwa Messer about how a visit to a slave-trading castle on the West African coast inspired her ambitious and critically acclaimed debut.

The author of 15 works of fiction and nonfiction, Jennifer Finney Boylan may be known to most readers via her bestselling memoir She's Not There.   As she told Miwa Messer in this episode of the podcast, her new book Long Black Veil also draws on events from her life, but here Boylan weaves them into a droll, offbeat thriller in which the unexpected consequences of one night kick off a tale about secrets and lies, silence and truth, and the triumph of love and friendship.

Christina Baker Kline's fiction draws us with subtle and irresistible power into the lives and hearts of her characters, from the abandoned children of her bestselling novel Orphan Train to the enigmatic heroine of her latest book.  In this episode of the podcast, the author talks with Miwa Messer about A Piece of the World, in which she investigates and re-imagines the story behind Andrew Wyeth’s iconic and yearning painting "Christina's World.”

"The primal need for stories is the most important thing in anybody’s life… we’re all still children being read to.”  Over an astonishing 26 books in 25 years, Sherman Alexie has devoted himself to what he calls the “sacred” task of telling the truth through stories.  In this episode of the podcast, Miwa Messer talks with Alexie about his new memoir You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me, a viscerally funny, tragic, and honest rendering of the author's childhood, his mother Lillian’s life, and the way her outsized persona shaped the storytelling wizard her son would become.

Sitting down to talk with the writer Dennis Lehane, one of the biggest challenges is how not to stumble into spoilers. The author of novels like Mystic River and Shutter Island is dedicated to the art of keeping his reader off balance, as his complex and frequently troubled characters are brought to face uncomfortable and sometimes terrifying truths: the result is a kind of suspense that far outstrips the machinations of an ordinary thriller. On this episode of the podcast, Miwa Messer sits down with Dennis Lehane to talk – spoiler-free! – about latest novel, Since We Fell, and his career writing heart-stopping fiction. 

For many writers, the word “vampire” conjures visions of immortal beings of vast powers and romantic destinies.  For Jo Nesbo, it meant research into the annals of abnormal psychology, into a world of delusion and obsession more disturbing than any supernatural fable.  In this episode of the podcast, the bestselling Norwegian writer talks with Bill Tipper about the stranger-than-fiction cases that inspired The Thirst, Nesbo’s latest novel to feature the world-weary and painfully honest Oslo detective Harry Hole.

You never know where the idea for a great story is going to come from.  For the writer Imbolo Mbue, a scene glimpsed as she strolled through a bustling New York City neighborhood offered the inspiration for her first novel. Ten years later, her novel Behold the Dreamers was tapped as the latest Oprah’s Book Club pick. In this episode the Cameroonian-American author talks with Bill Tipper about how her moving, timely tale of two very different families was born.

When a stroke left celebrated cook and food writer Judy Gethers unable to work in the kitchen, her son, editor and novelist Peter Gethers, wanted to cook her ideal meal – an epic attempt at haute cuisine he chronicles in his new memoir, My Mother's Kitchen: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner, and the Meaning of Life.  In this episode, Gethers talks with Amanda Cecil about the moment in the kitchen when he realized he'd bitten off more than he could chew.

A blockbuster debut like Paula Hawkins's psychological thriller The Girl on the Train might seem a hard act to follow, but Into the Water — with its nod to a classic Agatha Christie whodunit — is even more intense, claustrophobic and ambitious than its predecessor.  In this episode, Paula Hawkins talks with Miwa Messer about the origins of her haunting new story.

Get thee to a nunnery: to research her new novel Saints for All Occasions, bestselling writer J. Courtney Sullivan found herself investigating the unseen lives of cloistered nuns. In this episode, the author talks with Amanda Cecil about how events from her own family life inspired her tale of secrets and lies in an Irish-American clan's past.

John Grisham's latest page-turner leaves behind the courtroom but keeps the crime: Camino Island turns on the theft of a rare manuscript. In this episode, John Grisham talks with Jim Mustich about how his first audience for fiction was an unintended one: a law school professor who read with a distinctly critical eye.

From elevator inspectors to championship poker to an epic of escape from bondage, Colson Whitehead likes to write about outsiders. In this episode the author talks with Miwa Messer about his incredibly varied career (don't forget the zombies!) and how his award-winning bestseller (and 2016 Oprah's Book Club pick) The Underground Railroad went from idea to the page.