The B&n Podcast

To kick off 2019, Beth Comstock, the author of Imagine it Forward: Courage, Creativity and the Power of Change, joins us for conversation perfect for sparking fresh ideas, taking on new challenges in life and work, and getting creative in the New Year.  Comstock tells the story of how her early dreams of being a science journalist led her into an unexpected career taking one of the world's biggest and most powerful corporations, General Electric, into a new era of technology innovation  --  in the process landing her on both the Fortune and Forbes lists of the World’s Most Powerful women. In her fascinating book, Comstock examines the power of creativity in the workplace, the very real difficulties corporations have with seeing things differently, and the ways each of us can change the direction of our lives to do the work that we find inspiring. The author joined us in the studio to talk about what she's learned – and why not all her lessons have come from success.

We're getting close to the end of 2018, and whether you're doing last-minute gift-buying, looking for a great book for holiday down time, or maybe just stocking up your bookshelf for the coming year, this is the perfect time to be reminded about some of the books that stood out in a year full of wonderful reading. So we invited one of the internet's most beloved critics and book recommenders, Maris Kreizman, to join us for a conversation about her year in reading. Maris is the author of the groundbreaking literary-TV mashup Slaughterhouse 90210, and is one of the most widely read observers of the literary scene, contributing to Buzzfeed, New York magazine, and most recently on Twitter (@mariskriezman) making very personal book recommendations for all who ask: and she gave us some of her favorites in the studio.

In book after book, bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver brings all the pleasure of a sweeping fictional landscape to novels that engage fearlessly with vexing social issues.  In her new novel Unsheltered, the struggles of a 21st-century family wrestling with potential financial ruin is woven together with the story of their family's fascinating past and a lost Utopian experiment.  Kingsolver joins Miwa Messer to talk about her timely new book, and our urgent need for stories in an age of anxiety.

On this episode we sit down with Kate Morton, the author of international bestsellers including The House at Riverton and The Lake House.  Morton is a writer who weaves her fascinations with the past and her love of the mysterious into engrossing sagas of family secrets, atmospheric historic settings, and unexpected revelations. The Australian novelist joins us to talk about her latest book, The Clockmaker's Daughter, a story that turns on the events of one summer in 1862, as a group of talented and headstrong artists gather in an English mansion with a peculiar legacy — but the outcome is tragedy and an enigmatic disappearance, with echoes that will travel down the decades to come.

Today we're joined by Australian novelist Liane Moriarty for a talk about where the stories that enthrall us come from.  Moriarty is perhaps best known for her wildly popular novel Big Little Lies, a story of secrets, scandal and potential murder among a set of elementary school parents, which became a celebrated HBO series starring Reese Witherspoon and Nicole Kidman.  But readers of her multiple bestsellers have relished the author's razor wit and storytelling genius since her debut novel, Three Wishes.  With her latest book, Nine Perfect Strangers, Moriarity once again proves that humor, a fascinating setting – in this case a secluded resort – and some cunningly wrought surprises yields the kind of reading that earns the description addictive.  We were eager to hear just how she does it, so B&N's Miwa Messer caught Moriarty on the phone in between stops on her tour for Nine Perfect Strangers, for a talk about what inspired her new book.

Nobody tells a story quite like the author of Big Stone Gap, Milk Glass Moon, Lucia Lucia and many others — and there are few authors who create characters so beloved as hers are.  Whether she's crafting a contemporary story for young adults or a weaving a family saga that stretches back decades, Adriana Trigiani draws deeply on her Italian-American family life and small-town Appalachian roots to deliver stories of ordinary people whose quests for fulfillment in love, work, and art deepen into epics of the everyday.  Trigiani sat down in our studio with Barnes & Noble's Miwa Messer just before the publication of her brand new novel Tony's Wife, to talk about her fiction, her education work in her native Appalachia, and the books that inspire her.

After Markus Zusak's award-winning 2005 novel The Book Thief became an international bestseller, his legions of readers were eager for the next book from the Australian novelist. Their patience has finally been rewarded with Bridge of Clay, the epic-scale story of an Australian family wrestling with inherited traumas and unpredictable tragedy, a clan of brothers as thick as thieves and as prone to fighting as — well, any household of young men. And when we say "epic scale" by the way, we mean it: Bridge of Clay is a book steeped in the stories of Achilles, Hector, Paris and Odysseus. When he joined us in the podcast studio, Markus Zusak talked about the challenge of writing a novel with a structure he calls "tidal."

It's hard to believe that The Barefoot Contessa cookbook was published as recently as 1999, because its author, Ina Garten, has become so indispensable to home cooks around the country and the world. Garten brings together devotion to brilliant flavor, a natural and profoundly personal elegance, and an understanding of that special sustaining community that emerges around a shared meal. If there's one thing that sets Ina Garten's books apart from others, it's their savvy sense of what kind of gentle guidance will let those of us struggling along at home feel ready to leap into new cooking challenge, and in her new book Cook Like a Pro she offers insights into the methods and tricks that she and others use to make the most out of every item in the refrigerator and every tool in the kitchen. So, with Thanksgiving just around the corner, what better time, we thought, then to sit down with the master herself?

This episode features a very special conversation, as the podcast's former Executive Producer James Mustich takes a turn in the guest chair, joining us to talk about the marvelous work he spent years – mostly nights and weekends – composing. 1000 Books to Read Before You Die is, as its subtitle notes, a life-changing list, but it's a lot more than that. Each entry gets its own gemlike mini-essay, a quick peek at why Mustich thinks a particular book deserves your time, and from Absalom, Absalom! to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the subjects, styles and moods are all over the map. In this episode we take a look inside this celebration of reading and the endless universes the bookshelf offers us to explore.

Heloise and Abelard, Beatrice and Benedick, Catherine and Heathcliff: move over, famous lovers of history and literature, and make way for Megan Mullally and Nick Offerman.  The stars of hit TV shows like Will & Grace and Parks and Recreation are maybe the most passionate  — and almost certainly the funniest — real-life couple in Hollywood.  The secrets of their partnership are unfolded with the sort of deadpan hilarity their fans have come to expect from their performances in their new book The Greatest Love Story Ever Told.  But here’s something you may not know:  Mullally and Offerman are both passionate readers as well, and so we asked them to record a special episode of the B&N Podcast in which they interview one another about their mutual love affair with books.  The result is a meeting of a very unique book club, with only two members — and we get to listen in.

This week on the B&N Podcast, the bestselling author Lee Child returns to our studio to talk about his 23rd adventure with Jack Reacher, one in which Child's hero finds himself in a rural New England town that looms large in his own family's past. But nothing about Laconia, New Hampshire is exactly as its seems, and what Reacher encounters here takes him into some very creepy territory, as Past Tense provides a few chills along with familiar thrills – nothing that Reacher can’t, in the end, handle. When Lee Child joined us to talk about his remarkable run of page-turners, beloved by fans and critics alike, he revealed why part of the fun of writing Reacher stories is the confounding oddness of his hero – and why a single three-word sentence that crops up again and again is a theme that his readers have learned to look for.

Jill Lepore has illuminated the life of Benjamin Franklin's sister Jane and uncovered the revolutionary origins of Wonder Woman in her bestselling, award-winning works of history.  With her new book These Truths the historian and staff writer at The New Yorker takes on the whole enchilada — the story of America from Columbus to… just about now, telling the stories along the way of the people who struggled to make their voices heard and their votes count.  She joins us in the studio to talk about what drove her to try to capture  a restless nation between two covers — and what she thinks we can learn from studying it.

Happy Halloween! On today’s appropriately spooky episode we talk with Joseph Fink, who has introduced millions of listeners and readers to the delightfully eerie goings-on in a very strange southwestern town through the hit podcast Welcome to Night Vale, and the bestselling book of the same name.  In his thrilling new novel Alice Isn't Dead, Joseph Fink has given us a story outside of the Night Vale universe but fully partaking of its spirit, a work that combines horror and fast-paced suspense in the story of a woman searching for her wife, whose disappearance seems disturbingly connected to news reports of major tragedies across the country.  Fink joined B&N Science Fiction and Fantasy blog editor Joel Cunningham in our studio, to talk about his love of horror films, the books of his childhood, and what he sets out to do for listeners — and readers — with every creation.

If you're writing about the titans of baseball there's one figure both daunting and irresistible: the Babe, the Big Bam, the Sultan of Swat.  The Bambino.  Babe Ruth was one of was one of 20th century America's first real media stars;, but his young life has resisted biographers. With The Big Fella, Babe Ruth and the World He Created, the bestselling writer Jane Leavy has blown away the myths surrounding the Babe, and in the process brought into focus not just his greatness on the baseball diamond, but his similarly outsize role in the making of the world of fame, celebrity, and mass media that we still inhabit today.  She joined us in the podcast studio to talk about the singular challenge of writing about the Big Fella.

As a teenager, Rupi Kaur discovered performance poetry as a way of expressing her emotional life, but it was when she began to move her autobiographical verse to Instagram, her poems about coming of age, trauma, abuse, broken relationships, body image and coming to love oneself resonated powerfully with readers around the globe. Her two bestselling collections to date  -- have been translated into more than 30 languages and sold more than 4 million copies worldwide, and her Instagram following is 2.7 million strong and growing -- making her one of the most-read poets of our time. Rupi Kaur joins Miwa Messer in the B&N Podcast studio on the occasion of a new B&N Exclusive Edition of the sun and her flowers to talk about her family and background, the strange experience of unexpected fame, and writing at the intersection of the deeply personal and unabashedly political.

In the early 1990s, a young pharmaceutical salesman in Washington DC sent a to a literary agent a manuscript about a pair of lovers separated by class and by war.  Picked out of the slush pile by the agent, the book was published in 1996 and immediately leapt to the top of the New York Times bestseller list. The Notebook — later adapted for film — launched the literary career of Nicholas Sparks, whose stories of love, loss, long-kept secrets and buried longing have made him one of the most widely-read authors of our time.  The author of 20 bestselling novels joined us in the podcast studio to talk about his latest work of fiction, Every Breath, a story that crosses the ocean from Africa to North Carolina, and which hinges on a very unusual and quite real place — a mailbox in the middle of nowhere.  

Michael Beschloss is one of the most  acclaimed writers on the American presidency, the author of multiple bestsellers including The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945, Presidential Courage: Brave Leaders and How they Changed America, 1789-1989, and Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life with John F. Kennedy.  A frequent commentator on the PBS NewsHour and the NBC News Presidential Historian, Beschloss joined us in the studio to talk about his new book Presidents of War: The Epic Story from 1807 to Modern Times — and what his look at the most fraught aspect of presidential power can teach us today.

Kate Atkinson is the internationally bestselling author of eleven books including the award-winning international bestseller Life After Life, the Whitbread-award winning Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and four sublime novels featuring the cases of private investigator Jackson Brodie.  Atkinson's storytelling abilities are like no other writer's — her novels combine curl-up-in-an-armchair transporting pleasure with a penchant for unexpected revelations and disjunctions that keep the reader ever more transfixedly wondering what new shift in perspective is coming.  Her latest novel, Transcription, is an almost perfect marriage of writer and subject,  a story of spies and teacups, Nazi traitors and double agents, sexism in the workplace and secrets that lie dormant for decades before returning to life.  The result is an exploration of loyalty and identity, a meditation on the stories we tell ourselves about who we are — and a great deal of fun.  We sat down with Kate Atkinson to talk about Transcription, her d

Readers of the bestselling novelist Jodi Picoult know that her specialty lies in telling stories that examine ethical and social issues of deep complexity and great urgency, in a tradition that stretches back to Louisa May Alcott and Charles Dickens. She joins us in this episode to talk about her riveting new novel A Spark of Light, the nail-biting story of a hostage situation in a clinic that provides reproductive health services to women — among them, abortions.  She talked with us about the novel's unusual structure, how she researched one of the most hotly contested issues that divides Americans — and what she learned about the issue along the way.

The prolific writer V.E. Schwab is a storyteller and world builder, the author of the celebrated, bestselling Shades of Magic series, an enthralling saga of multiple Londons, inter-world intrigue, princes and pirates, and danger at every turn that begs to be binge-read.  But her first novel for adults was a Vicious, a novel of superheroes that upended conventions and offered a story of antiheroes and revenge that proved anything but comic-book flat.  This month she returns to the world of Vicious with the eagerly-awaited Vengeful.  She spoke via phone with James Killen about the addictively inventive worlds she creates, and why villains make the most interesting characters.