The B&n Podcast

Our guest on today's episode is the award-winning writer Kate DiCamillo, whose books include contemporary classics like Because of Winn Dixie, The Tale of Despereaux, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane and Flora and Ulysses. DiCamillo is one of a handful of writers to win American Library Association's prestigious Newbery Medal twice, and in 2104 was named National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. DiCamillo writes books for young readers across many age ranges, and she's the rare writer who can both sweep a family away into a world of fantasy, like that inhabited by the mouse Despereaux, or precisely render an American small town like the Naomi, Florida of Because of Winn-Dixie. Her new novel Beverly, Right Here is the story of a young girl who sets out in search of a new life, and it's part of a triptych of moving, funny and absolutely memorable stories set in the small-town south that began with Raymie Nightingale and continued with Louisiana's Way Home. Kate DiCamillo joined B&N's Bill T

Our guest on today's episode of the B&N Podcast is the journalist and bestselling author Shea Serrano, whose unconventional, hilarious and insightful works put the writer's obsessions with sports, movies, and music into a dialogue with big issues like race, class, gender — who gets to take center stage and who wields cultural power. In books like The Rap Year Book and Basketball (and Other Things), Serrano proved that when you're in the hands of the right writer, a subject can come alive for super fans and newbies alike. Serrano is back with Movies (and Other Things), in which he takes on everything from defining the Mean Girls expanded universe to what it means for marginalized people to see themselves represented on screen. He sat down just before the book's publication with B&N's Miwa Messer for a wide-ranging conversation about the movie moments he loves — and why they matter.

Today's guest is the bestselling writer Leigh Bardugo, whose works of boldly imagined and intricately plotted fantasy like Shadow and Bone, Six of Crows and Crooked Kingdom have made her one of the superstars of YA fiction — and now she's expanding her territory in her new novel for adults with Ninth House. In Bardugo's Grishaverse novels the author has rewritten the templates for 21st-century fantasy, building worlds inspired by Tsarist Russia and the 17th-century Dutch Republic, and weaving quite modern, witty stories of espionage and crime into tales of sorcery and myth. To the delight of her fans, Netflix has announced that a new series based on Shadow and Bone and Six of Crows is about to begin filming. But the author has fresh wonders in store: Ninth House retains Bardugo's gift for fantasy and magic but departs from YA and sojourns into a version of our world. It's a darkly conceived world of Ivy League secrets, power, privilege, and yes, magic. Bardugo joins B&N's Miwa Messer by phone to talk abo

On this episode of the B&N Podcast we're bringing you our final installment of our special podcast series King of the Dark, one devoted to a project that has been woven through most of Stephen King's career, the multi-volume fantasy epic The Dark Tower. The Dark Tower began with King's 1982 novel The Gunslinger, and unfolded over the course of seven numbered books and 22 years, a sprawling saga of wild west outlaws and powerful sorcery, of a quest through ages and a tower that spans universes. That would be a massive creation for any author, but King's Dark Tower is unique in that it's a world that keeps bleeding into and crossing over with his other stories in ways large and small, so that the Dark Tower's Mid-World begins to look like a secret network of passageways that interlink King's entire body of work. Liz Braswell, Louis Peitzman and Bill Tipper are joined for this conversation by B&N Science Fiction and Fantasy blog editor Joel Cunningham, who has spent more time in the Dark Tower world tha

Our guest on the B&N podcast today is none other than Queer Eye star Jonathan Van Ness.  Van Ness's brand new new memoir is titled Over the Top and that title resonates with the dramatic, witty, and scene-stealing persona that fans of the show have come to know — but it's the subtitle, A Raw Journey to Self-Love — that really says volumes about this engaging and revealing new book. Van Ness charts the tumultuous course of a life growing up in a small town, navigating the world of a queer teen without role models, and finding a way forward — first as a hairstylist, and then as a performer, comedian, podcast host and TV star. In Over the Top, Van Ness is absolutely candid about abuse and addiction and talks openly about living with HIV — it's a book that's dead set against a culture of silence and shame about the facts of life. And when Jonathan Van Ness joined us in the studio — just as Over the Top was being published — he was just as forthcoming in person as he is on the page.

The Testaments is Margaret Atwood's long-awaited return to the world and characters of her 1985 classic The Handmaid's Tale, a dystopian novel set in a fictional near-future theocracy called Gilead, a nation in which religious fundamentalists wield absolute power, and which organizes itself chiefly around the subjugation of women. Atwood's literary career has been among the most prolific and wide-ranging among novelists of her generation — a short sampling of her notable works includes Cat's Eye, Alias Grace, The Blind Assassin, The Robber Bride and the MaddAddam Trilogy — The Handmaid's Tale and the story of its narrator Offred has resonated with readers through decades. It's acquired a fresh generation of readers since becoming the basis for a television adaptation on the streaming platform Hulu. So it's no exaggeration to say that readers worldwide were exultant to learn that this fall Atwood would return to Gilead and to some of its characters in her new novel The Testaments. And the resulting book is no

On this episode of King of the Dark, Louis Peitzman, Liz Braswell and Bill Tipper turn from the grand scale of Stephen King's dark epics to the supremely concentrated pleasures of his short fiction. King has published over 200 works of short fiction, most of which have been collected in volumes including Night Shift, Skeleton Crew, Everything's Eventual and others. In many of these — especially some of the earlier stories collected in Night Shift and Skeleton Crew — the master is at his elemental best, spinning tales that take just a few pages to cast a spell that lasts long after the short, sharp shock of the ending has been delivered. So we decided it was time to devote an episode to the glorious — and some times a little gory — work in miniature that is the classic King short story.

Today our guest is the spellbinding storyteller Ann Patchett, joining  us to talk about her new novel The Dutch House.  Patchett is the author of a treasure trove of fiction including 2011's State of Wonder, and 2016's Commonwealth, but she may be most widely known for her award-winning 2002 novel Bel Canto, which crafted a symphonic and deeply humane multi-character story amid an embassy hostage crisis.  She's also the author of the widely lauded memoir Truth and Beauty, a wide-ranging essayist, and a bookseller, the co-founder of Parnassus Books in Nashville, where she lives.  In The Dutch House, Patchett plunges readers into the story of Danny and Maeve, a brother and sister whose lives are bound up in the memory of the house they once lived in and the splintering of their family. Patchett joined B&N's Miwa Messer by phone to talk about composing on her feet, sibling bonds, and what it means to find a home.

Welcome to episode fifteen of King of the Dark, our special series on the B&N Podcast devoted to the worlds of Stephen King. It's big week for us — Louis Peitzman, Liz Braswell and Bill Tipper started with King's 1974 bestseller Carrie and now we've arrived at his latest novel, The Institute, which was published just last week, on September 10th. It's a story packed with themes that will be familiar to King's fans — the story concerns a group of children who possess psychic talents, a drifter who finds a fresh start in a small town, and a government conspiracy willing to stop at nothing. But it's also about kids banding together against grotesque forces, about uncertain journeys across America, the ease with which the powerful exploit human weakness, and the unheralded strength in the bonds of friendship, shot through with humor, horror, incredible tension and an eye for workaday cruelties and unexpected moments of beauty. In other words, vintage Stephen King. A quick warning: Spoilers Ahead! If you have

Our guest on this episode is author and cartoonist Randall Munroe, author of the new book How To: Absurd Advice for Common Real-World Problems. Munroe became an internet legend via his webcomic XKCD, a daily feature published since 2005 in which a cast of stick figures take on the conundrums of 21st-century living via a mixture of scientific analysis, wry humor, and absolutely unpredictable creativity. It's inspired flash mobs, taught lessons in radiation exposure and password security, and coined the immortal phrase "someone is wrong on the internet." Munroe's scientific background is no joke — he's a former NASA roboticist — and he became a bestselling author in 2014 with his book What If, which used science to answer readers' wild questions like "could you make a jetpack out of machine guns." In How To, Munroe applies science to the everyday — but uses Rube Goldberg concepts to find the most unnecessarily complicated, difficult, and expensive way to do everything from charging your phone to making friends

Welcome back to King of the Dark, our special series on the B&N Podcast, a journey through the gloriously shadowy fiction of Stephen King. On today's episode, we're not quite caught up to the author's brand new release The Institute — we'll be talking about that one next week. This week, we're looking at 2013's Doctor Sleep — a marvelous novel that is both a sequel to his classic The Shining and a bewitching tale all on its own. Danny Torrance, the psychically gifted little boy of The Shining, is now an adult, tormented by some of the same addictions that plagued his father, but working to fight his demons in every sense of the word. Dan uses his abilities — his Shining, you might recall — is to help the dying find peace, but when he meets a young girl named Abra with talents like his, he also discovers the plot of a terrifying secret society called The True Knot — and they have plans for Abra and all children like her. If you didn't think that The Shining would lead us to a page-turning thriller about

On today's episode of the B&N Podcast we were joined by one of the most influential writers in the world, whose books examine how humans think and behave in ways large and small. As a staff writer for the New Yorker and in his books The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, and David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell, as well as in his podcast Revisionist History, Gladwell has marshaled the tools of an array of sciences to challenge conventional wisdom about everything from how to spot an art forgery to what makes a basketball team succeed. His new book Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don't Know is his first in six years, and its origin, Gladwell writes, was in the author's confrontation with the perplexing, tragic and infuriating events that led to the death of Sandra Bland in a Texas jail in 2015. When author joined B&N's Bill Tipper in the studio, he explained how his outrage over Bland's story led to the questions raised in Talking to Strangers.

Welcome back to King of the Dark, our special series on the B&N Podcast, celebrating and exploring the fictional worlds of Stephen King. Every week for this limited series Liz Braswell and Louis Peitzman join Bill Tipper as they ready through many of King's most fascinating, enduring, and sometimes enigmatic creations, including Carrie, The Shining, It, Misery and many more, talking along the way about their adaptations and the connections between them. We've arrived this week at 2011's bestselling 11/22/63 — a take on the perennial question: if you could travel back in time and change one thing, what would it be? In 11/22/63, King wraps his imagination around the assassination of JFK and creates an almost literal doorway into the past. The result is a love letter to midcentury America and King's unique twist on an enduring theme in speculative fiction. In this episode Liz, Louis and Bill talk about 11/22/63's link between domestic abuse and political violence, the story's surprising connection with the

Today on the B&N Podcast our guest is the New York Times bestselling author Mary H.K. Choi, who in two razor sharp novels — 2018's Emergency Contact and her brand-new Permanent Record — captures the lives, anxieties and loves of young people crossing that fraught and fractured border between teen life and the big world of adulthood. Her novels are shelved in that increasingly varied category we call "YA fiction," But as a culture journalist with credits that range from the New York Times and The Atlantic to Wired and HBO's Vice News Tonight, Choi infuses her stories with wit, pathos, and a sensibility that speaks to the anxieties and possibilities that come with life in an electronically mediated world — and that combination has brought her devoted readers across generations. Mary H.K. Choi joined B&N's Miwa Messer in the studio to talk about the obsessions that drive her fiction, and Permanent Record's story of 21st century love meeting 21st century fame.

Welcome back to King of the Dark, our special series on the B&N Podcast devoted to the fictional creations of Stephen King.  Every week, Liz Braswell and Louis Peitzman join B&N's Bill Tipper for a deep dive into some of the most arresting works from the enormous Stephen bookshelf. This week we've arrived at King's 2006 novel Lisey's Story. Stephen King has worked aspects of his personal life -- the places he has lived, his personal obsessions and struggles -- into so many of his novels that it feels tough to call out any one of them as especially personal. But the origin of Lisey's Story is, according to the author himself, deeply connected to a critical event in King's life, the aftermath of his brush with death after being struck by a van. It's the imagined story of an acclaimed writer's widow -- the Lisey of the title -- reluctantly confronting the strange circumstances or her late husband's gift. Magic, madness and nightmarish horror all play a role, but there's an unusually elegiac note that run

Our guest on the podcast today is Lorenzo Carcaterra, whose work in both fiction and nonfiction has often been wrapped up with the mean streets of New York City. Carcaterra first came to the attention of readers with two works of nonfiction, A Safe Place: The True Story of a Father, a Son and a Murder and Sleepers, which became a major motion picture directed by Barry Levinson and starring Robert Deniro, Brad Pitt, Kevin Bacon and Jason Patric. He's followed that up with bestselling works of fiction including Apaches, Street Boys, and 2014's The Wolf. He joins us in the studio to talk about his life growing up in Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood, his career in tabloids and the early days of reality TV, and his new book Tin Badges, a thriller set among New York City ex-cops on the trail of a cold case that turns red-hot.

Welcome back to King of the Dark, our special summer series on the B&N Podcast exploring the strange alternate reality that is Stephen King's fiction. Louis Peizman, Liz Braswell and Bill Tipper started with Carrie and have been reading their way up to the present day, but this is something of an unusual episode, because today they're talking about some books that didn't have Stephen King's name on them when they were published — and one that did. Around the same time that King's career was taking off, several potent works appeared by a writer named Richard Bachman, including the novels The Running Man, Thinner, and The Long Walk. As shrewd readers later discovered, the connections between King and Bachman were close — and it was a connection that King would explore fully in his 1989 novel The Dark Half. So today on King of the Dark: the strange case of Richard Bachman, and the question of what happens when a writer imagines his own double.

Our guest on the podcast today is Ibram X. Kendi, here to talk about his new book How to Be an Antiracist.  Kendi is a professor of history and international relations, and the founding director of American University's Antiracist Research and Policy Center.   In 2016, his book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America appeared, a galvanizing new look at racism that posited, in the author's words, a dual phenomenon — the simultaneous evolution of both racial progress and the advancement of racist ideas.  Engrossing and provocative, Stamped from the Beginning took among a number of laurels the 2016 National Book for nonfiction, and in the crisis-crowded years since its analysis has only come to seem more urgent.  Ibram X. Kendi joined us in the studio to talk about his powerful new work, a book that combines memoir and history, essayistic reflection and forceful propositions.

Welcome back to King of the Dark, our special summer series on the B&N Podcast, a journey across the incredible spectrum of Stephen King's fictional creations. Every week this summer, the writers Liz Braswell and Louis Peitzman join B&N's BIll Tipper in a quest to take on as many of Stephen King's most intriguing books as we can fit into a single thrill-packed season. Last week we talked about 1992's trapped-in-handcuffs fever dream, Gerald's Game. The same year, King published a very different story in the novel Dolores Claiborne, but one that maintained some peculiar connections with the story told in Gerald's Game. Dolores Claiborne was a formal departure by King — a long monologue told in the unique voice of the title character. Dolores is a 65-year-old widow, a resident of a tiny island community off the coast of Maine, and she's the suspect in the death of her employer. The story she unfolds is part crime thriller and part family mystery, and intersects unexpectedly with a solar eclipse that h

Today on the B&N Podcast, the author of the critically acclaimed debut novel The Tiger's Wife joins us to talk about her new book, Inland, which brings together two stories set in 19th century Texas and Arizona to produce a braided tale as rich and strange as the landscape in which it unfolds. As in The Tiger's Wife, Obreht has fused history, myth and a sense of enchantment, but Inland fully embraces the form of the Western and invites readers to sit down by the campfire for a story of privation and survival, immigrant dreams and American illusions, ghosts and money, camels and murder. Tea Obreht sat down with B&N's Miwa Messer in our studio to talk about her epic new novel.