In this episode, I talk to Charlie Jane about her latest and most personal novel yet. Written during the pandemic, partly as a way of processing her own father's death and her mother's subsequent isolation, Lessons in Magic and Disaster is about a 20-something graduate student in English Literature who teaches her grieving mother how to do magic...with unexpected consequences. In our conversation, we talk about the hidden history of the 18th century novel, LGBTQ activism in the 70s and 80s, the role of community in writing, and so much more.

To learn more about Charlie Jane, or to order a copy of Lessons in Magic and Disaster, visit charliejaneanders.com.

Special Guest: Charlie Jane Anders.

Five years later, Joshi has published two sequels to The Henna Artist and a new standalone novel, Six Days in Bombay, a coming-of-age novel about an Anglo-Indian nurse who travels Europe to carry out the final wishes of one of her patients. In our conversation, we talk about her whirlwind success, her fascination with the years leading up to India's independence from Britain, the artist who inspired her latest story, and her next project.

Our conversation spans Capes' early success as a novelist, her experience in the foster care system, how she brings levity to difficult topics, and more.

In the 2010s, while teaching at a residency in a highly wooded part of Tenessee, Jones was inspired to write a horror story about an insidious species of ticks that carry a horrifying deadly disease. That story became a novel, rooted in the climate crisis, in which Jones explored not just the horror of the ticks themselves, but how the inequities baked into our existing socioeconomic system might look in the face of a serious existential threat.

In this episode, I talk to Muriel about her debut novel, How to Fall in Love in a Time of Unnameable Disaster, which came out this past October. It follows Mira, a 20-something queer woman living in a New York City beset by weekly acid rainstorms, as she moves in with her mother and grieves the death of her girlfriend, who refused to leave the deteriorating apartment they both shared.

In this interview, I talk to Lev about the politics of Camelot, the difficulty of seeing the themes that are present in your own work, and the difficulty of tracking changes across a 700-page tome.

Special Guest: Lev Grossman.

Special Guest: Katya Apekina.

This month's conversation covers a range of topics, from Cheryl's process in writing and editing her novel to the purpose of art — literary and otherwise — in her life to the influence of her professional experiences as a social worker on the kinds of stories she seeks to tell.

Special Guest: Cheryl Harawitz.

Special Guest: Joss Lake.

In our conversation, we talk about the real-life inspirations for Disorientation and the strangeness of the label "absurd" to describe a novel about these very real experiences. We also talk about the value of anger in writing and healing.

Special Guest: Isaac Fellman.

In this episode, I talk to Jeff about his newest novel, Hummingbird Salamander, which comes out on early next week. It follows a security analyst named Jane as she tries to unravel the mystery of a taxidermied extinct hummingbird gifted to her by an ecoterrorist.

I talk to Austin about the enduring appeal of the Brontës, creating characters out of real people, and the 19th century women who never got to tell their stories.

We talk about Gabbert's interest in these topics, the relationship between her poetry and her essays, and getting burned out on empathy.

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Elisa Gabbert is the author of five collections of poetry, essays, and criticism: The Unreality of Memory & Other Essays, out now from FSG Originals and Atlantic UK; The Word Pretty (Black Ocean, 2018); L’Heure Bleue, or the Judy Poems (Black Ocean, 2016); The Self Unstable (Black Ocean, 2013); and The French Exit (Birds LLC, 2010). The Unreality of Memory and The Word Pretty were both named a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and The Self Unstable was chosen by New Yorker magazine as one of the best books of 2013. Gabbert writes a regular poetry column for the New York Times, and her work has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine and Book Review, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian Long Read, the London Review of Books, A Public Space, the Paris Review Daily, American Poetry Review, and many other venues.

In this live online event, produced for Kepler's Literary Foundation, we discuss the difference between writing for adults and writing for children, the joy of creating voices and personalities for each of the talking animals, Lev's favorite kids' books, and the feedback his kids gave him on the book.

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Lev Grossman is a writer and journalist best known for the New York Times-bestselling Magicians trilogy, a series of urban fantasy novels that were adapted into a television show by the same name. In addition to those novels and The Silver Arrow, he has written two other books, Warp and Codex. His essays and criticism have also been published in Vanity Fair, the Believer, the Village Voice, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Salon, Slate, Wired, Entertainment Weekly, the Week, Buzzfeed, NPR, and Lingua Franca. He served as the lead technology writer and book critic for Time magazine for nearly 15 years, from 2002 to 2016.

Special Guest: Lev Grossman.

Over the course of this hour, we talk about depictions of coming out and conversion therapy in media, the importance of solidarity, and the difficulty of talking honestly about conversion therapy when so many people believe it to be a thing of the past.

Adam Sass is a self-professed gay geek. Though this is his first novel, his short story “98% Graves” was nominated by Writer’s Digest for Best Science Fiction Story in 2015. In addition to his writing, he is a recurring co-host on the popular Buffy the Vampire Slayer podcast Slayerfest98, alongside such special guests as Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. producer Drew Z. Greenberg and_ RuPaul’s Drag Race_ winner Trixie Mattel. He lives in North Carolina with his husband and their dachshunds.

Special Guest: Adam Sass.

In her debut novel, You Exist Too Much, Arafat explores that feeling of unbelonging through an unnamed narrator who disappears into romantic relationships and leaves when her partners begin to see her. We talk in this interview about the ways she explored those themes in her novel, her own experiences of growing up in a diaspora, and her narrator's difficult relationship with her mother.

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ZAINA ARAFAT is a Palestinian-American journalist and fiction writer whose work centers the Arab diaspora. Her stories and essays have appeared in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, NPR, and many other publications.

In his debut novel, Sharks in the Time of Saviors, Washburn follows the Hawai'ian-Filipino Flores family as they navigate the changing physical and socioeconomic landscape in Hawai'i. The story of the Flores family is set against the backdrop of Hawai'ian myth: when the youngest child is saved from drowning by sharks, his parents come to believe he has been chosen for a special purpose. That belief shapes the way the family functions and the pressues each of the Flores children feel.

Sharks in the Time of Saviors received rave reviews from the New York Times, the L.A. Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and a slew of other top publications when it was released this past March. In our conversation, we talk about the difference between the Hawai'i that lives in the collective imagination of mainlanders and the Hawai'i of Washburn's youth, the Flores family's dynamic in the context of the traumas they've suffered, and genre.

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KAWAI STRONG WASHBURN was born and raised on the Hāmākua coast of the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, where he read loads of books, lived breathed slept soccer, played saxophone, and did all sorts of dangerous things on concrete and in the water.

He currently lives in Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he is a husband and father (two firecracker daughters), and writes fiction. He occasionally does somewhat dangerous things on rock faces.

Special Guest: Kawai Strong Washburn.

My conversation with Lilah touches on writing for a younger audience, including educational content in ways that feel organic and entertaining, and how stories can help kids develop and solve problems they encounter in their lives.

Special Guest: Lilah Sturges.