Web Extra: The Invention of Everything Else
Samantha Hunt reads from the end of her novel.
View ArticleNicholson Baker
According to Nicholson Baker, we’ve got World War II all wrong. For his new book Human Smoke, Baker scoured newspaper articles, interviews, and accounts of atrocities, and he tells Kurt that the case...
View ArticleThe Dalai Lama and Me
The Dalai Lama has lived most of his life in exile outside his Tibet, which has been controlled by China since just after the communist revolution. He’s become a kind of superstar in the West, not by...
View ArticleStephen L. Carter
He's a professor of Constitutional Law at Yale and a commentator on race and religion in America, and also the author of the bestselling murder mystery The Emperor of Ocean Park. His book, New England...
View ArticleMurder on the Lower East Side
Kurt and Richard Price wander through the gritty-turned-hipster neighborhood at the center of Price's novel Lush Life. Cultures clash violently in the book -- they visit the scene of the crime.
View ArticleIsabel Fonseca
In the novel, Attachment, a wife assumes her husband’s identity and begins an email correspondence with his lover. Kurt asks Isabel Fonseca what it’s like to write about infidelity when she’s in a...
View ArticleBirthmark
Last year, the screenwriter/director/actress Miranda July published a collection of short stories called No One Belongs Here More Than You, and she joined us to read the story “Birthmark.” With...
View ArticlePorochista Khakpour
She was three years old in 1980, when her family fled post-revolutionary Iran. Porochista Khakpour is 30 now, and her memories are woven into her lyrical, witty debut novel, Sons and Other Flammable...
View ArticleNam Le
Born in Vietnam, raised in Australia, and a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Nam Le's fiction is as global as he is. His new book of short stories The Boat is a startling collection of voices....
View ArticleIrina Reyn
For her first novel, What Happened to Anna K., Irina Reyn took Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and wrote a modern update set among Russian immigrants in Queens. A Soviet émigré who arrived in the U.S. at age...
View ArticleSarah Vowell
The Puritans came to America full of ideals and lofty aspirations. Four hundred years later, candidates like Sarah Palin still sing their tune. Writer Sarah Vowell, author of the new book The Wordy...
View ArticleRoy Blount, Jr.
Roy Blount Jr. has written at least twenty books and dozens of essays, so his lifetime word count is surely in the millions. His latest book is Alphabet Juice, a kind of shaggy encyclopedia of how...
View ArticleChimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Like Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Adichie is an award-winning Nigerian author whose writing has brought her country's history to global audiences. She tells Kurt why Achebe has played such a large role in...
View ArticleChinua Achebe
The author of Things Fall Apart has been called the father of a generation of writers. His enduring novel has been translated into 50 languages, has sold 10 million copies, and is required reading in...
View ArticleMarlon James
Marlon James's new novel The Book of Night Women is set on a Jamaican sugar plantation at the turn of the 19th century. It follows slave rebellion, but is also a coming-of-age story of Lilith, the...
View ArticleMiranda July
Miranda July became an indie darling with the 2005 film "Me and You and Everyone We Know." She's also a performance artist, sculptor, and writer. She reads the story "This Person" from her...
View ArticleElizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Olive Kitteridge, a collection of short stories connected by the cantankerous title character. Strout reads from the collection and tells...
View ArticleChimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Chimamanda Adichie is an award-winning Nigerian author whose writing has brought Nigerian history to global audiences. She explains the role Achebe has played in her work, and what it is like being...
View ArticleChinua Achebe
He has been called the father of a generation of writers. First published at the dawn of Nigeria’s independence, Things Fall Apart has been translated into 50 languages, has sold 10 million copies, and...
View ArticleCurtis Sittenfeld
The writer of American Wife and Prep thought she had the secret formula for getting work done: she didn't live in New York, didn't write a blog, and didn't have kids - until her daughter was born. She...
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