The B&n Podcast

Welcome back to King of the Dark, our special summer series on the B&N Podcast devoted to the shadowy fictional universe of Stephen King. Last week, we did our best to scale the mountain of King's epic The Stand. This week, we're at the other end of the spectrum, reading a story set on as compact a stage as possible. Two episodes back, we talked about King's trapped-in-a-cabin thriller Misery — this week, we're taking on a novel with echoes of that 1986 classic, and some big differences. We're talking about 1992's Gerald's Game, and though it contains no Pennywise, Wendigo or other cosmic monster, we found in it horror aplenty. The plot is bracingly simple: Jessie and her husband Gerald have gone to their lakeside cottage for some secluded time away — but when play in bed with handcuffs turns into something more aggressive, Jessie kicks Gerald in self-defense, he suffers a heart attack and dies. Jessie is left in a nightmarish situation, unable to escape the handcuffs or communicate with the outside worl

Today's episode is a fascinating and timely conversation that comes to us courtesy of Barnes & Noble's Discover Great New Writers program, featuring Kiese Laymon the author of Heavy: an American Memoir, and Shane Bauer, the author of American Prison: A Reporter's Undercover Journey into the Business of Punishment. Heavy and American Prison were, respectively, the first and second place recipients of the 2018 Discover Great New Writers Award for Nonfiction, and both are works that urgently grapple with the state of America today, winning deep praise from critics and readers alike. In Heavy, Laymon takes readers with him on an unforgettable journey from his Mississippi childhood to life as a university professor and acclaimed writer - an odyssey in which racism, sexual violence, trauma and other monstrosities of 21st-century America are challenged by love and a spirit of questing intelligence. And in American Prison, investigative journalist Shane Bauer sought out the real experience of Americans living in

Welcome back to King of the Dark, our special summer series on the B&N Podcast devoted to the imagined worlds of Stephen King. Every week this summer Liz Braswell and Louis Peitzman join Bill Tipper on this odyssey through an American master's bookshelf. We're taking on some of his biggest books — more or less in the order they were published, and we've arrived at week eight of our journey, and what may be the most monumental of our destinations so far. In 1978, Stephen King published a post-plague-thriller-adventure-epic titled The Stand; it drew on his longstanding ambition to write his own, American-set fantasy epic in the vein of The Lord of the Rings, and the sprawling plus work took in a huge cast of characters, a story that combined science fiction and fantasy to stage a battle between the forces of light and darkness, playing out in a decimated American west. It was a hit — But King's original manuscript was hundreds of pages longer — and in 1990, the "Complete and Uncut" edition was published, f

Our guest on today's episode is the writer Karl Marlantes, who burst onto the literary scene in 2010 with his critically acclaimed, bestselling novel Matterhorn, the story of a company of soldiers who build, abandon and retake a firebase in Vietnam. He followed that with the bestselling nonfiction work What It is Like to Go to War. Now, Marlantes has returned to fiction with Deep River, drawing on his family's own history as political refugees from their native Finland who made their way in the logging community of the Pacific Northwest at the turn of the 20th century. Deep River is a story of siblings, of family and survival, love and ambition set in a natural world of mythic grandeur. Marlantes talked with B&N's Miwa Messer about the true stories that inspired this epic tale -- but first, she asked him to go back in time to his unusual arrival on the publishing scene, after years of writing, with Matterhorn.

Welcome back to King of the Dark, our special summer series on the B&N Podcast devoted to Stephen King's monumental career. Every week this summer, Liz Braswell, Louis Peitzman and Bill Tipper pick one of King's bestsellers for a deep dive. King famously sets much of his fiction in his home state of Maine, but that's not true of this week's book, 1987's bestselling, award-winning Misery, which unfolds in a small house in a remote area in Colorado.  Bestselling writer Paul Sheldon has finally shaken himself free of the long-running, saccharine character -- Misery Chastain -- who has powered his successful career.  Paul has killed off his beloved heroine in the pages of his last novel, and written the bracing literary work he's dreamed of. But an auto wreck in the mountains leaves him badly wounded, and he wakes up in the house of Annie Wilkes, a nurse who has pulled him from his car. She says she's Paul's "number one fan" -- but what happens when she finds out Misery is dead will change everything. The re

Today's episode features an overflowing cornucopia of amazing voices from the worlds of fantasy and science fiction, all gathered up in live recordings at this year's San Diego Comic Con, just a few days ago. Our main event is an all-star panel of writers talking about the increasingly unstable boundaries between the news and the worlds they dream up -- and the equally strange borderlands between writers and fans. B&N's science fiction and fantasy expert James Killen is joined by writers Charlie Jane Anders , Cory Doctorow, Sarah Gailey, Seanan McGuire and Annalee Newitz for a everything from writing in a world on fire, handling the wild energy of fandom and more. But before we get there, were going to take a brief stop on the convention floor as , B&N's Joel Cunningham talks with novelists Ann Leckie and Rebecca Roanhorse, both of whom are experiencing the madness of Comic Con for the first time. (And we're just going to tell you now: you need to stick around to the end to hear Seanan McGuire exp

Today we've got the first of two special podcast episodes we recorded live at this year's San Diego Comic Con, amid the costumes, the new-movie hype, and the overwhelming euphoria of thousands of fans coming together to collectively geek out. And there is perhaps no one thing that represents the unlikely, hilarious and often beautiful spirit of SDCC than The Adventure Zone. The Adventure Zone, simply put, is a hit podcast which began when three brothers -- Justin, Travis and Griffin McElroy -- convinced their father, Clint, to join them in a freewheeling game of Dungeons & Dragons. The subsequent campaign has spun out over multiple seasons of the podcast and a hilarious epic was born. Last summer, the McElroys teamed up with comics artist Carey Piestch to release the first graphic novel adaptation of The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins. Now, they're back with the second installment: Murder on the Rockport Limited. Yes, it's a murder mystery set on a train. Yes, it's still Dungeons and Dragons. How

Welcome back to King of the Dark, our special summer series on the B&N Podcast devoted to the strange alternate universe created by Stephen King. Every week this summer, Liz Braswell, Louis Peitzman and Bill Tipper dive into one of King's bestsellers -- some of us are reading for the first time, and some of us are revisiting well-known places. This week, we're stopping in the fictional town of Derry, Maine, home to the  tale Stephen King has given his shortest title. But as a book, It is anything but short. First published in 1986, it's a miniature epic of friendship and peril, forgetting and remembering, terror and courage. The evil force that a group of kids who call themselves the Losers has to face down takes as many shapes and forms as they have fears, but the signature character of It is, of course, Pennywise -- a monstrous clown whose first appearance, in a Derry storm drain, is surely one of the signature moments in horror. When we sat down, Bill asked Liz and Louis if they thought IT was the rea

Today on the B&N Podcast George Takei joins us to talk about They Called Us Enemy, the harrowing true story of the author's childhood experience of imprisonment, along with his family, in the infamous prison camps in which thousands of Japanese-Americans were incarcerated during the second World War. Takei is of course known to millions of fans worldwide for his portrayal of Mr. Sulu in the legendary TV series Star Trek as well as the series of films that followed; but he's know to many others for his presence on social media, where he mixes humor and activism. He's made the awareness of the story of Japanese Americans in the camps a particular cause -- and in this new book, collaboration with illustrator Harmony Becker and co-writers writers Justin Eisinger and Steven Scott, Takei takes readers with devastating directness into the experience of a child whose world is about to be transformed by nightmarish events. It's a powerful, immediate work, and as George Takei  noted when he joined us in the studio

The Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of The Underground Railroad returns to the B&N Podcast for a conversation about his brand new novel The Nickel Boys, a riveting story of injustice, friendship, resistance and survival that turns on the experience of two boys incarcerated in a Florida institution, and its reverberating effects on their lives. It's a story that has never been more timely, from a bestselling writer with a unique ability to bring hidden, painful aspects of America past and present into new focus. Colson Whitehead joins B&N's Miwa Messer to talk about the true story that was the inspiration for the novel, the battle between optimism and pessimism in his own worldview, and how he learns from the characters he brings to life.

Welcome to King of the Dark, our summer-long road trip through Stephen King's America. We've arrived at Episode Five, and Louis Peitzman and Liz Braswell are back, this time to talk with Bill Tipper about what may be the most potent misspelling in horror, Stephen King's 1983 novel Pet Sematary, a book that the author himself has called one of his darkest. Pet Sematary was inspired, King has said, by his own experience living near a dangerous highway, which raised fears for his young son's safety and caused the local kids, who had lost beloved pets to speeding trucks, to created a homemade graveyard that was the basis the more sinister one in the book. What he delivered to readers was a story of grief, loss -- and an absolutely bone-chilling master class in horror. We also hear from our special guest, award-winning TV critic Emily Nussbaum, who told us about discovering the allure of Stephen King by accident, and her own young attempt at writing fiction in his style. Nussbaum recently dropped in on the B&

Many readers know Marjorie Liu from her New York Times bestsellers in the Hunter Kiss series and the Dirk and Steele urban fantasy series, but she is also a prolific and masterful writer of comics, including X-23, Black Widow and the Star Wars Han Solo miniseries.  But it's with Monstress, created in partnership with the artist Sana Takaeda, that Liu has brought her readers into an extraordinary new world, a massive and lush epic fantasy to rival anything in prose, covering topics like slavery, war and race, set against a background of monsters and mythology.  She joins B&N's James Killen in this episode to talk about her award-winning comic and the obsessions behind her magnificent imagination.

Welcome to Episode 4 of King of the Dark, our ongoing weekly series of excursions into the parallel universe that is the world of author Stephen King.  Every week Bill Tipper, Liz Braswell and Louis Peitzman tour some of Stephen King's most astounding creations, moving in a not-quite-straight line from his early bestsellers like Carrie and The Shining, through the 1980s and 1990s and right up to the present day.  For today's episode, we're talking about King's 1982 collection of four novellas, Different Seasons.  If that title doesn't ring a bell, consider that three out of the four were adapted as feature films: "Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption" became the Academy Award-nominated 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption. "The Body" became Rob Reiner's 1986 film Stand By Me, starring a young River Pheonix and Will Wheaton.  And "Apt Pupil" was adapted into a dark suspense film of the same name featuring Sir Ian MacKellan.  Different Seasons might be one of King's less well known titles — but its stories have

On today's episode we're joined by Linda Holmes, the host of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour to talk about her sparkling new novel Evvie Drake Starts Over. Evvie has lost her husband unexpectedly— but what she finds herself mourning is something very different from what friends and family understand; and when a baseball star struggling with his own demons arrives in her small Maine town, what unfolds between the two of them is as unexpected, authentic, and delightful as the voice that Holmes brings to her public radio audience. She joined us in the studio just as Evvie Drake Starts Over hit the bookshelves — and instantly became one of the summer’s must read books — to talk about her unusual career arc, the nature of the yips, and why Moonlighting matters.

With the golden age of television has come a golden age of great writing about television. As Emily Nussbaum points out in her new book I Like to Watch: Arguing My Way, through the TV Revolutions, television has always had a uniquely intimate role in our homes and lives, since the technology was first introduced. And the television of the last two decades has become steadily more artistically ambitious and technologically enabled to permeate our culture, it's seemed all the more necessary to talk about it: what did that last cut to black mean? Is the character we've been following since the beginning of this series turning into the villain instead of the hero? As Pulitzer-prize winning TV critic for the New Yorker, Nussbaum has entered into that conversation with a kind of joyful aplomb, making her regular columns — and her presence on Twitter — less a courtroom where judgment is rendered and more like an arena in which the competing and conflicting impressions and emotions raised by last night's episode (or

Welcome to episode 3 of King of the Dark, our special series celebrating and exploring the worlds of Stephen King.  Every week on this summer-long series we're opening a different door in the haunted mansion of Stephen King's imagination.   This week on the program our regular guests Liz Braswell and Louis Peitzman join B&N's Bill Tipper to talk about King's 1979 novel The Dead Zone. It's the story of Johnny Smith, whose strange clairvoyant abilities bring him into a confrontation with a threat to the fate of the entire world — a threat only he can perceive.  We'll talk about its political obsessions, including a cameo by a future U.S. President, the way it looks to nuclear war as the ultimate horror, and how it once again takes us into the territory of a classic horror short story.     We're also joined by special guest Linda Holmes, the host of NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour and author of the new novel Evvie Drake Starts Over: she dropped in to talk about her affection for Stephen King's short stories,

When you are reading a Neal Stephenson novel you know you're going to get two kinds of experience in one book. Whether it's in a work like his revolutionary science fiction novel Snow Crash, his era-jumping adventure-slash-code epic Cryptonomicon, or his swashbuckling historical trilogy The Baroque Cycle, Stephenson brings high-wire thought experiments about the nature of technology and human society to life via engrossing, turn-off-your-phone-until-it's over feats of storytelling. Stephenson's books can look intimidatingly hefty on arrival — and his new novel, Fall: Or, Dodge in Hell — is no exception. But I'm not only speaking for myself when I say that for many readers, a few pages in is all it takes to make the ending of a Stephenson novel come all too soon. Fall is vintage Stephenson, a book stuffed with ideas about death and the afterlife, about real and virtual realities, the way social media-driven information is fragmenting our world. It's also a tale of gods and monsters, shape shifters and heroes,

Entrepreneur, Artist, Tastemaker, and now author Bobby Hundreds — AKA Bobby Kim joins us to talk about This is Not a T-Shirt, his electric new memoir about growing up in Southern California, loving punk and skate culture, his turn from law school to the street wear that he loved, and how celebrating artists and creators became the calling card for The Hundreds, the now iconic street wear business that has made its commitment to "having something to say" and "people over product" the flag Bobby Hundreds proudly flies. This is Not a T-Shirt is also a candid look at how street wear thrives by crossing boundaries of race and class — making it a business that is constantly engaging with the most significant issues of the moment — and one that has, among other things, spawned a fascinating and wildly successful book club. Bobby Hundreds sat down in our studio with Miwa Messer to talk about art, commerce, and his passage from rebellious teen to steward of a classic business and brand.

We're back with Episode 2 of King of the Dark, our special summer series exploring the worlds of Stephen King. We started our journey last week with King's iconic debut novel Carrie. This week, Liz Braswell, Louis Peitzman and Bill Tipper have packed up for a trip to the Overlook Hotel, and try to answer quite a few questions, including: does a haunted resort pick its victims selectively, or will it settle for anyone who books a room? Are psychic children fascinating or just spooky? And what's the scare factor in being attacked by topiary animals? Plus, a conversation with Melissa Albert, author of The Hazel Wood, about being exposed to a great writer... a little too early.

As the groundbreaking editor in chief of Teen Vogue, Elaine Welteroth reinvented the fashion magazine, putting the big issues of the moment — class, race, equality, opportunity, and the changing political scene — at the heart of how her publication spoke to young readers. This bold approach brought Welteroth and her magazine a legion of passionately engaged fans, and a reputation as one of the most intriguing voices of her generation. Her powerful new book, More than Enough: Claiming Space for Who You Are (Not Matter What They Say) draws on her own life experiences to serve as inspiration, guide, and reflection for those who are undervalued and underestimated. She joined B&N's Miwa Messer in the studio for a talk about what it takes — and what it means — to fight to make one's own voice heard.