The B&n Podcast

If you've listened to the B&N Podcast  you know that every episode we take a kind of a deep dive into one writer's book -- the world they explore, the story they have to tell, and how their own experiences and struggles have fed their story. But there are some writers whose effect on us is so big that talking about a single book seems like it just cracks the door open into a world that's begging to be explored in real depth. Writers whose creations have escaped the boundaries of any one story, or even the world of a series, and whose imaginations have become tangled up a little with our own. When Stephen King's Carrie arrived in 1974 readers couldn't have known that the creator of that gripping story of small-town cruelty and unspeakable revenge would go on to be the single most influential fiction writer of his time. But from 2019 that impact is unmistakeable. It's not just that books like Carrie, The Shining, It and Misery became both blockbuster books and enduring stories on the screen. King uses tales

"Writing your own story is perhaps the truest enactment of the American dream." Today on the B&N Podcast, we're talking with Ocean Vuong, the author of the remarkable new novel On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous. It's the debut work of fiction from a writer already celebrated for his work as a poet, but this poignant novel, written in the form of a young man's letter to his mother, has captivated readers and critics, making it one of the most talked-about books of 2019. He joined B&N's Miwa Messer for a conversation about this unique story of family, loss, survival, and falling in love.

In her many bestselling novels, from Good in Bed to Who Do You Love and In Her Shoes, Jennifer Weiner's characters are wildly various in background and temperament, but there's one feature  -- besides the author's wry humor -- they share:  they tell the truth, willingly or otherwise, to the people they love.  In Weiner's sparkling new novel Mrs. Everything, she traces the lives of Detroit sisters Jo and Bethie from their 1950s childhood to the present day, and their divergent paths are connected by the undeniable truth of their bond with one another.  The author joined B&N's Miwa Messer in the studio to talk about her own family, what it means when your mother might see herself in your fiction, and her determination to tell stories that reflect the truth of women's experience.

In today's episode we're joined by a writer who has come since his early days in journalism become one of the signature voices of American conservative opinion. For more than thirty years, George Will's views — framed in reference to works of 18th century philosophy and the action on the modern baseball diamond — appeared in a biweekly Newsweek column that became part of the reading life of millions. The recipient of a 1977 Pulitzer prize for political commentary, Will has like many of his peers made the leap from newsprint to small screen, but he's also the prolific author of books on politics and philosophy such as Statecraft as Soulcraft, and The Pursuit of Virtue and Other Tory Notions, but also multiple books on the sport he loves, most notably his bestseller Men at Work: the Craft of Baseball. But Will's new book The Conservative Sensibility is, he told us, something of his life's work, and he sat down a few weeks before the publication of The Conservative Sensibility to talk with us about what, exactl

On today's episode we're joined by the polymathic writer Jared Diamond for a conversation about his new book Upheaval: How Nations Cope with Crisis and Change. Diamond is a professor of geography at UCLA, and the author of bestsellers including Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail and Succeed and The World Until Yesterday. Diamond began his academic career in the field of physiology, studying the biology of membranes, but he went on to author studies in ecology and ornithology, specializing in the birds of New Guinea. But it's in his third career — studying environmental history and the forces that shape human societies — that has brought him worldwide attention. He joined us in the studio for an talk about his new book, which takes a novel approach to the question of how modern countries have faced moments of identity crisis — and what brought them through to the other side.

Today on the podcast, we've asked the writer Rick Atkinson to take us with him on a journey back almost two and a half centuries into the past — to Lexington and Concord, the ride of Paul Revere, the Battle of New York, and George Washington's Crossing of the Delaware. These are names and places we know from grade school history, famous paintings, or even Schoolhouse Rock. But to revisit the events of the Revolutionary War through the eyes of Rick Atkinson's painstaking research and bold storytelling is a revelation. If you've read Atkinson's bestselling, award-winning Liberation trilogy, which traced in three books the fight against the Axis in Europe, you've experienced Atkinson's unique talent for weaving together the experiences of soldiers on the battlefield and ordinary people caught in the terror of war with the strategies of generals and diplomats. With The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777, his opening volume of a Revolutionary War trilogy, Atkinson brings th

In 2016 blogger and writer Mark Manson published a book based on some of the advice he'd been giving on his blog, and he gave it the eye-catching title The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck . And if you haven't read it or seen in a bookstore, you can fill that last bit of the title pretty easily. This unexpectedly brash guide to living a radically honest life became an instant New York Times Bestseller and a global phenomenon. And no wonder, since behind that attention-getting title Manson authored a potent meditation on a society defined by anxiety and the mirage of contemporary happiness. Now, Manson returns with a new book that offers a familiar approach but a new wrinkled. With Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope, Manson looks more deeply at the sources for modern discontent and takes readers on a tour of ideas both ancient and strikingly modern, ideas that add up to nothing less than a philosophy of life. Mark Manson spoke to us recently by phone about finding himself in possession of most writers dre

If you've read one of Chelsea Handler's many bestselling books — Are You there Vodka, It's Me, Chelsea, or My Horizontal Life, or Lies That Chelsea Handler Told Me — or seen her irreverent take on talk show hosting on shows like Chelsea Lately, Netflix's Chelsea, or on her recent documentary series Chelsea Does — you might think you know what you're getting with comedian and cultural commentator Chelsea Handler. Boundary-smashing, can-she-say-that jokes, a withering and unapologetic focus on the illusions around which we construct our lives, and a commitment to deflating pretension wherever she finds it. But in her new book Life Will Be the Death of Me... and You Too!, Handler shatters expectations again, with a memoir touched off by a sense of emotional crisis that leads to a journey of self-discovery, and a reconsideration of everything she thought she knew about herself and how to live her life. In it, Handler talks openly about the trauma of losing a beloved family member as a child, her long struggles w

That's the bestselling author David Baldacci, joining us to talk about his latest thriller, Redemption, the fifth novel featuring Detective Amos Decker and his astonishing powers of memory. I'm Bill Tipper and today on the podcast we're joined by one of masters of the art of the thriller, who has been enthralling readers since his 1996 debut Absolute Power. The author of dozens of bestsellers and multiple series, Baldacci has taken readers from the mean streets to the Oval Office and back again, but there's a special place in readers' heart for his returning hero Amos Decker, a detective whose tragedy-haunted life and dogged sense of duty mean that each of his cases takes on a deeply personal dimension -- and that's never been more the case than in Redemption, as Decker's visit to a loved one's graveside is transformed by an encounter with a case out of his past. David Baldacci spoke with us about his latest twist-filled novel, and how his childhood in a storytelling family shaped the writer he is today.

Admiral William H. McRaven is the former commander of US Special Operations and the author of the new memoir Sea Stories,  which brings to life the stories and lessons from a fascinating career as a Navy Seal and leader of special operations forces around the world. In the bestselling Make Your Bed, Admiral McRaven unveiled lessons in leadership and success harvested from critical moments in his education, training and experience in the crucible of warfare. Now, with his new book Sea Stories, the Admiral looks back over his action packed life, from thrill-seeking outings as an irrepressible child to his career where an ordinary workday might include a hostage rescue or the takedown of a terrorist cell. We were lucky enough to have the Admiral himself drop into our studio a short while before Sea Stories published, and it wasn't too hard to get him to tell us one or two in person.

f you've ever heard the name Frederick Law Olmstead, it's probably because of his work as  the co-creator of New York City's Central Park. But long before that career a young Olmstead was a journalist, and in 1852 he was hired by a still-young New York Times to tour the American South -- to meet and interview people, write up his impressions of cities, towns and slave-labor plantations -- and to write dispatches for readers about the part of the country that was coming to represent the other side of a political divide from northeastern readers. Enter journalist and author Tony Horwitz, and his new book Spying on the South. In books like his groundbreaking Confederates in the Attic and Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid that Sparked the Civil War, Horwitz has already mapped our national obsession with the conflict that tore the U.S. in two. When Horwitz rediscovered Olmstead's writings, he decided to set out on his own journey --one that takes us back into the fraught 1850s that Olmstead chronicles, and

In this special bonus episode we chat with rapper, actor, activist and author Common about his new memoir, Let Love Have the Last Word.  As a celebrated and Grammy winning hiphop artist, Common's musical career has woven together his message-driven lyrics with a wide-ranging musical palette. His work onscreen has brought him into memorable roles in films including Selma, American Gangster, The Hate U Give and Jennifer Fox's The Tale.  Common's lyrics — as well as his previous memoir, the bestseller One Day It'll All Make Sense — have always taken on self-examination as a key subject matter, and Let Love Have the Last Word takes this theme even further, writing in a spirit of vulnerability and directness about the challenges of being the parent and partner he wants to be, his responsibilities to others around him, and what it means to be a working artist while also living a life guided by love.  He also opens up about a painful episode of childhood abuse — an episode he only recent came to confront in his own

Since his marvelous 1968 book The Johnstown Flood, and through National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winning works like The Path Between the Seas, Mornings on Horseback, and John Adams, McCullough has brought his brilliantly illuminated pieces of the American story together like segments of a stained glass window. At 85 years old, David McCullough could be expected to want to rest on his laurels. But his brand new book The Pioneers is bursting with the energy and curiosity of its subjects. It's the story of the early settlers of the then freshly-acquired piece of America called the Northwest Territory, in the era just after the War of Independence had been won. It's the story of courage and community, risk and determination, and how the pioneers made a critical decision about the nature of the place they were going to build — a decision that would have enormous effects on the country in the decades to come. To talk about The Pioneers, we asked if we could visit David McCullough at his home in Massachusetts,

 Today on the podcast we're joined by bestselling novelist Sarah Blake for a conversation about family, secrets, money and the power of the past over the present. The bestselling author of The Postmistress returns with her dazzling new epic The Guest Book, a story of three generations of the Milton clan, a decision on one night in 1936 that reverberates down the decades, and a history that threatens to unravel the myths that have sustained them over the years. Sarah Blake joins Barnes & Noble's Miwa Messer in the studio to talk about her novel, her cast of compelling characters -- and the stories, real and imaginary, we use to hold families together.

In this episode we're joined by the writer Kristen Roupenian for a conversation about her haunting, scary, funny, and incisive collection of short stories You Know You Want This. In a dozen potent tales, Roupenian conjures both visceral horror and the laughter of revelation in works which often walk the line between wickedly dark fantasy-- and clear-eyed examinations of sexuality, gender, power and obsession in a world that is unmistakably and often uncomfortably our own. The result is an absolutely thrilling debut and the arrival of a dynamic new voice in fiction. Many readers were first introduced to Roupenian through her story "Cat Person" which appeared in the New Yorker in December 2017 and immediately became a viral sensation. That story now takes its place among the twelve in this collection, where it feels entirely and freshly at home. The author spoke to Bill Tipper by phone about her inspirations, the connection between humor and horror, and what it was like to have her fiction light up the Interne

Today we have a bonus episode of the podcast with a very special guest. Many of the writers we speak with on the podcast are people who have made their names in the worlds of fiction, journalism or memoir, but today we're speaking with a writer who was working on changing the world long before she started thinking in terms of books. Philanthropist, businesswoman and global advocate for women and girls, Melinda Gates is the co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation and the founder of Pivotal Ventures, a company working to drive social progress for women in the United States. She joined us on the phone to talk about her new book The Moment of Lift: How Empowering Women Changes the World. It combines a memoir of Gates's work to address the challenges that face ordinary women around the globe and an audacious analysis of how a change in the way we think about advocacy and women's rights can unlock startling possibility for change. She spoke to us on the phone from her office in Seattle just before The

Ian McEwan is the author of such celebrated novels as Atonement, The Children Act, Saturday, and On Chesil Beach and the Man Booker prize-winning Amsterdam. His fiction regularly engages with complex scientific and ethical issues, and 2008 Time Magazine named him one of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945." His new novel Machines Like Me takes place in a re-imagined 1980s England, one in which rapid technological advances have created artificial people — fully resembling living humans, but available to have their personalities set by their owners. It's a story with echoes of works like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and even Shakespeare's The Tempest — and one that engages deeply with the life and work of the computing pioneer Alan Turing. Ian McEwan took some time just before his novel's American publication to talk with Bill Tipper from his home in the UK. We asked him to begin by talking about the seed of this audacious new work.

On this episode we're joined by New York Times columnist, radio and television commentator and bestselling author David Brooks, talking about his new book The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life. Brooks is the bestselling author of books including Bobos in Paradise, Patio Man, The Social Animal and The Road to Character. In his past works, he has unfolded observations on the state of contemporary society that draw simultaneously on social science, philosophy and a journalist’s daily charting of the cultural scene; and with his previous book The Road to Character he put a particular emphasis on the nature of virtue in 21st century America. With The Second Mountain, Brooks has offered what may be his most personal work to date, discussing his own struggles with personal relationships and religious faith, and his belief that in order to find fulfillment, we have to turn radically toward community. He joined us in the studio to talk about the difference between happiness and joy, the challenge of writing

Today on the B&N Podcast Damon Young joins us to talk about his new book What Doesn’t Kill You Make You Blacker — a reflection on life as a black man in 21st-century America that's by turns arrestingly honest, deeply incisive, and wonderfully funny.  Young came to prominence as a commentator on culture and society through his role as the cofounder and editor in chief of the website VerySmartBrothers; since then he's become a senior editor at The Root, as well a writer for many print and online publications. What Doesn’t Kill You Make You Blacker is Damon Young's first book, and he sat down with Barnes & Noble's Miwa Messer to talk about the stories that he uses to shape a memoir that's already one of the year's most significant publishing events.     **A note for listeners about the language in today's interview: At points, Damon Young quotes strongly offensive language used by others. Parents may find those sections inappropriate for children.**

Martha Hall Kelly's runaway 2016 bestseller Lilac Girls captivated the world with the braided stories of three women -- one American, one German, one Polish -- who witness the tumultuous events of the 1940s and 1950s. Readers who dove into that story will be overjoyed to return to Martha Hall Kelly's fiction with her new book Lost Roses, the latest Barnes & Noble Book Club selection. Lost Roses introduces Eliza Ferriday, mother to Caroline Ferriday from Lilac Girls, and travels back a generation in time to tell the story of Russian emigres and New York Society during the First World War -- as only Martha Hall Kelly can. In this episode, Kelly joins Miwa Messer in the studio to talk about the inspiration behind her sweeping new novel.