< Back Wanting Radiance Karen Salyer McElmurray June 29, 2021 Today I talked to Karen Salyer McElmurray about her novel Wanting Radiance (UP of Kentucky, 2020). Fifteen-year-old Miracelle Loving hears the gunshot that kills her mother, and runs to hold her while she dies. She spends the next two decades roaming, fortune telling and picking up odd jobs. Then, as if in a dream, she hears her mother’s voice urging her to seek answers about where she came from. Miracelle finds love, but isn’t ready for it, and she finds a possible path, but doesn’t recognize it. She embarks on a solitary journey that no amount of fortune telling can prepare her for and discovers a home she never knew, a father she never met, and a grandfather she didn’t know existed. Perhaps the most important thing she learns is that she can’t love another person if she doesn’t love herself. Karen Salyer McElmurray earned an MFA in Fiction Writing from the University of Virginia, an MA in Creative Writing from Hollins University, and a PhD from the University of Georgia, where she studied American Literature and Fiction Writing. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back The Good Luck Stone Heather Bell Adams February 23, 2021 Heather Bell Adams’ first novel, Maranatha Road (West Virginia University Press 2017), won the gold medal for the Southeast region in the Independent Publisher Book Awards and was selected for Deep South Magazine’s Fall/Winter Reading List. Her short fiction, which has won the James Still Fiction Prize and Carrie McCray Memorial Literary Award, appears in The Thomas Wolfe Review , Atticus Review , Pembroke Magazine , Broad River Review , The Petigru Review , Pisgah Review , and elsewhere. Originally from Hendersonville, NC, Heather lives in Raleigh with her husband and son. She works as a lawyer and volunteers on the Raleigh Review fiction staff. She loves hot yoga and does not love cooking. The Good Luck Stone (Haywire Books, 2020) appears on Summer Reading Lists for Deep South Magazine , Writer’s Bone , The Big Other and Buzz Feed. The story opens in Savannah, Ga with ninety- year-old Audrey Thorpe living in her historic mansion on palm-tree-lined Victory Drive, determined to retain her independence. When her health begins to fade and she stumbles at a fund-raising event, her granddaughter hires fellow mom Laurel to be a part-time caregiver. Laurel and Audrey seem to bond—until Audrey disappears. As the story moves between the verdant jungles of the war-torn Philippines, where Audrey served as a nurse, and glittering modern-day Savannah, friendships new and old are tested. Along the way, Audrey grapples with one of life’s heart-wrenching truths: You can only outrun your secrets for so long. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back A Terrible Country Keith Gessen November 13, 2018 The only job Andrei Kaplan has been able to find since completing his doctorate, is teaching an online, poorly-paid course. So, he agrees to fly to Moscow when his brother promises him a round-trip ticket, hockey games, and his old bedroom with free WiFi in exchange for taking care of their aging grandmother. Andrei imagines the scholarly article he’ll write based on his grandmother’s stories of Soviet intrigue. He imagines himself protesting the Putin regime in the morning, playing hockey in the afternoon, and keeping his grandmother company in the evening. But his Russian is rusty, finding a place to play hockey is difficult, and the grandmother has dementia. As Keith Gessen explains in his wonderful novel A Terrible Country (Viking, 2018), Russia turns out to be something different than he expected. Keith Gessen is the founding editor of the literary journal n+1 and author of All the Sad Young Literary Men . He is also the editor of three nonfiction books and the translator, from Russian, of a collection of short stories, a book of poems, and Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich’s oral history, Voices from Chernobyl . A contributor to The New Yorker and The London Review of Books , Gessen teaches journalism at Columbia and lives in New York with his wife and sons. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back The Extraordinary Brad Schaeffer August 9, 2022 The Extraordinary by Brad Schaeffer (Post Hill Press 2021) tells the story of a family that is forced to confront both autism and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Fourteen-year-old Wes is unable to communicate with anyone except his father, who calls him an Ex (extraordinary). Most others are Ords (ordinary). Wes’s father is a captain in the Marine Corp and returns home broken in body and spirit after a third tour in Iraq. Wes has no idea how to adapt to this new version of his father. He needs order – his day is regimented, and he follows a timed sequence that includes watching the entire movie version of Sound of Music every morning. Wes’s relationship with his mother and two siblings is constrained and sometimes confusing – he only feels love from his father. This is a lovely and emotional tale about how a family can be easily torn and not so easily put back together. Brad Schaeffer was born in Baltimore, MD but grew up in a suburb of Chicago. After attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, he lived in Chicago where he embarked on his dual career as both a commodities trader and author/novelist. He currently resides in New Jersey. His prolific and eclectic writing can be found in the pages of the Wall Street Journal, New York Daily News, National Review, Daily Wire , and other well-read publications. His interests, as reflected in his articles, encompass a wide swath from business, to science, education, the arts, history, politics, social issues, and general day-to-day living. He is also an accomplished guitarist and pianist and can be found playing in local New Jersey clubs with one of several rock bands in which he has played over the years. He is the author of Of Another Time and Place (2018), which takes place in World War II Europe. It is a study of the conflicts that good men confront when compelled by national loyalty and indoctrination to fight for morally reprehensible causes. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Night Came With Many Stars Simon Van Booy December 21, 2021 Night Came With Many Stars (Godine, 2021) ebbs and flows with people who only take or destroy, balanced by those who give or heal. And everything centers on a family. A Kentucky father treats Carol, his thirteen-year-old motherless daughter like a servant up to the moment he loses her in a poker game. It’s 1933, and Carol’s aching heart begins a novel of stories filled with heartache or joy that weaves back and forth across decades. Carol gets rescued on the side of the road and finds a home with two women who help pregnant teenagers, a woman survives a botched self-induced abortion, a Black family saves a starving white boy, and Carol’s grandson wins money playing poker. In this beautifully-written novel, characters are defined by what they do, not by what they are. Simon Van Booy is the award-winning and best-selling author of fifteen books that include: The Secret Lives of People in Love (short-listed for the Vilcek Prize), Love Begins in Winter (awarded the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award), Everything Beautiful Began After, The Illusion of Separateness, Tales of Accidental Genius, Father's Day, The Sadness of Beautiful Things (short-listed for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize), two novels for children, Gertie Milk & The Keeper of Lost Things and Gertie Milk & The Great Keeper Rescue, along with three anthologies of philosophy, Why We Fight, Why Our Decisions Don't Matter and Why We Need Love. He has has written for The New York Times, The Financial Times, The Guardian, The Times, National Public Radio, the BBC, and the Chinese edition of ELLE. His books have been translated into many languages and optioned for film. In 2013, he founded Writers for Children, a project which helps young people build confidence in their storytelling abilities through annual awards. He lives in New York with his wife and daughter. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Life Sentences Billy O'Callaghan March 22, 2022 Life Sentences (Godine, 2022) tells three interconnected stories about a family in his home country of Ireland. In lyrical, moving prose, with characters that reach across the years, Billy O’Callaghan describes births, deaths, war, and the life of his family. The book begins in the 1920’s with Jeremiah, who survived as a soldier in the Great War. He’s drunk and jailed on the night before his sister’s funeral to prevent him from killing his sister’s husband. “Life had its struggles,” he says as he muses about his family and experiences, “but we bore them in the way that our kind always do.” The second part goes back to the 1880’s, and Jer’s mother, Nancy, recounts being the only member of her family to survive the Great Potato Famine. Starving, she left her tiny island home to find work on the mainland and was wooed by Michael Egan, the man who fathered her two children and haunted her for years. The third section is in the voice of Nellie, Jer’s youngest daughter, who is nearing the end of her life. This is a beautifully written novel about family, home, poverty, loss, and the struggle to live in a difficult world. Billy O’Callaghan, from Cork, Ireland, is the author of four short story collections (In Exile , In Too Deep , The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind , and The Boatman ) and the novels The Dead House and My Coney Island Baby . His work has been translated into a dozen languages and earned him numerous honours, including four Bursary Awards for Literature from the Arts Council of Ireland and, in 2013, a Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Award for the Short Story of the Year, as well as shortlistings for the COSTA Award and the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award. His short stories have appeared in such literary journals and magazines around the world as: Agni, the Chattahoochee Review, the Kenyon Review, London Magazine, Los Angeles Review, Narrative Magazine, Ploughshares, the Saturday Evening Post and Winter Papers. A new novel, The Paper Man , will be published in the UK and Ireland by Jonathan Cape in 2023. When Billy isn’t reading or writing, he’s a big fan of Liverpool Football Club (called soccer in the U.S.). Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back The Tenth Muse Catherine Chung January 12, 2021 Katherine recalls being young and friendless. While growing up in the 40’ and 50’s, she remembers when her mother packed up and left, her father remarried, and she was left to focus on her studies – she was an exceptional mathematician. But she’d been wrong about her family – she later learned that the woman who gave birth to her had been murdered by the Nazis during WWII. In graduate school pursuing a doctorate in mathematics, Katherine gets involved with her brilliant teacher and travels to Germany for a year of research and introspection. She follows a few clues about her mother, most with dead ends, and discovers snippets of the truth. Nothing is as it seems, and she is nearly derailed time and again. The Tenth Muse (HarperCollins, 2019) is an engrossing tale about identity and the passion for knowledge. Catherine Chung earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics at the University of Chicago and an MFA at Cornell University. She has worked at a think tank and has gotten encouragement from a number of foundations and family members. Recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and a Director’s Visitorship at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. she was a Granta New Voice and won an Honorable Mention for the PEN/Hemingway Award with her first novel, Forgotten Country , which was a Booklist, Bookpage , and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2012. Chung has published work in The New York Time s, The Rumpus, and Granta . She lives in New York City. Before the pandemic, she loved traveling, skiing, hiking, and eating foods prepared by other people. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Conversation with Johnny Anthony Valerio May 25, 2021 Back in 1997, when Anthony Valerio’s Conversation with Johnny was first published, the world hadn’t yet seen The Godfather, The Sopranos, or Goodfellas. In this slim volume, Valerio explores two distinct Italian American stereotypes: the dashing man about town and the successful gangster. Nicholas, the descendant of parents who emigrated to America, goes back to the old Italian New York neighborhood where Johnny, the old but still powerful gangster resides, surrounded by acolytes and luxury. The source of Johnny’s power and wealth is assumed to be crime, but he is is a caring and nurturing godfather, listening closely as Nicholas cries about his married, lover calling it quits. He is also a ruthless don who can shower Nicholas with wealth, get him a job as a maître-d at a famous restaurant, or create a retirement home for Italian American Writers. But he can’t promise Nicholas an Italian-American culture that focuses on solely on art as if organized crime never happened. Anthony Valerio is the author of 12 books of fiction and non-fiction. As a book editor in major publishing houses, including McGraw-Hill, he was fortunate to have edited great writers such as Toni Cade Bambara, Shel Silverstein and others. His short stories have appeared in the Paris Review and have been published in anthologies by Random House, the Viking Press, and William Morrow. He has taught undergrad and post-grad writing at New York University, City University of New York, and Wesleyan University, and he has been a fiction judge at PEN's Prison Writing Committee. He works every day, is a jazz afficionado, and a passionate golfer who tries to get out in nature and on the links. About Anthony Valerio’s work, his friend and legendary children’s book author, the late Shel Silvertein said: "He knows his craft: he gets in, tells his story and gets out. It’s what good writing should be." Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Black Cloud Rising David Wright Faladé June 14, 2022 In Black Cloud Rising (Grove Press 2022), author and scholar David Wright Faladé tells the story of Richard Etheridge, who towards the end of the Civil War joined America’s first and only “African Brigade.” Later recognized as a state hero, Etheridge is a young man when he joins the brigade in late 1863. Led by the one-armed General Edward Augustus Wild and Captain Alonzo G. Draper, the mission is to flush out rebel guerrillas, “bushwackers,” who continue to fight in Union-won territory. Their other mission is to prove that freed slaves can be trusted as combat soldiers. Set mostly in the swampy barrier islands of northeastern North Carolina, Richard is the son of the master of the house and a black slave. As children, he played with his cousins Patrick (Paddy) and Sarah, until they learned that he was a slave, and they the masters. The Etheridge family sign loyalty to the Union, but Paddy joins the Confederate Partisan Rangers. As the African Brigade moves forward, their raids free those still being held as slaves, and Richard moves closer to reuniting with his childhood love, Fanny. This is a novel about identity, integrity, and the fight for human dignity. David Wright Faladé is a Professor of English at the University of Illinois and the Mary Ellen von der Heyden Fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Raised in the Texas panhandle, he’s the recipient of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award, and has written for the New Yorker, the Village Voice, the Southern Review, Newsday, and more. Faladé is co-author (with Luc Bouchard) of the young adult novel Away Running and coauthor (with David Zoby) of the nonfiction book Fire on the Beach: Recovering the Lost Story of Richard Etheridge and the Pea Island Lifesavers (a New Yorker Notable Selection and the St Louis-Post Dispatch Best Book of 2021). Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Side Effects of Wanting Mary Salisbury February 14, 2023 In Side Effects of Wanting (Main Street Rag, 2022), author Mary Salisbury spent nearly twenty years gathering together the pieces of humanity she saw reflected in the lives around her and distilled them into a poetically written, beautifully curated short story collection. In this debut, small-town stories speak of love and belonging, longing and regret. The people who populate these tales yearn for companionship and comfort, but face the trauma of fractured relationships and the ache of not quite becoming the person they hoped to be. Mary Salisbury’s short fiction and essays have been published in Fiction Southeast , The Whitefish Review , Flash Fiction Magazine , Cutthroat: A Journal of the Arts , and Cutthroat’s Truth to Power . Her chapbooks Come What May and Scarlet Rain Boots were published by Finishing Line Press , and her poetry has appeared in Calyx: A Journal of Art and Literature by Women . Salisbury is an Oregon Literary Arts Fellowship recipient and a graduate of Pacific University’s MFA in Writing Program. She is passionate about spending time with her two grandchildren. Monroe is almost four and Roscoe is one and a half—they play hide and seek and read picture books together. She lives in Portland, Oregon. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back The Dependents Katharine Dion January 22, 2020 Gene is newly widowed and haunted by his memories. As he bumbles through long days, he questions his wife Maida’s sudden death, his daughter’s motives, and the enduring and meaningful friendship of best friends Ed and Gayle Donnelly. He tries to resurrect the good memories of the two couples raising children in a New Hampshire town and vacationing together every summer at a lake house owned by the Donnellys. He tried to come to terms about his relationship with his only daughter, Dary, who has chosen to raise a fatherless child, has made her home on the other side of the country, and who challenges Gene’s happy memories of everything that happened in their lives. She even challenges his view of her mother. Moving between Gene’s fraught current life and memories of his childhood, coming of age, courtship, marriage, and career, The Dependents (Back Bay Books, 2019) is a sensitive novel about love, parenthood, friendship, and finding contentment. Katharine Dion is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where she was awarded the Iowa Arts Fellowship. She is also a MacDowell Fellow and the recipient of a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation. In her early twenties, Dion founded a nonprofit organization called Peer Health Exchange that (still) trains college students to teach a comprehensive health curriculum in public high schools. And she has spent two summers living in a Zen monastery working as a cook. Dion’s introduction to Buddhism came from living several summers at Tassajara, a monastery in the Ventana Wilderness; she is lay ordained in the Soto Zen lineage and helps people meet the grief of ecological destruction as a Buddhist Ecochaplain . She was born in Oakland and lives in Emeryville, California. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next

< Back Hotel Cuba Aaron Hamburger May 16, 2023 Today I talked to Aaron Hamburger about his new novel Hotel Cuba (Harper Perennial, 2023). Two sisters fleeing the horror of the Soviet Revolution and aftermath of WW1 are disappointed when American policy prevents them from joining their older sister in New York. Older, practical sister Pearl knows they must leave the old world to survive and buys tickets to Cuba. Frieda, the younger sister, immediately starts complaining and longs to join her boyfriend from home who is now in Detroit. Havana is filled with rich Americans escaping Prohibition and poor Cubans selling fun, pleasure, and booze, but Pearl and Frieda are sheltered, penniless Jewish girls. After Frieda manages to get off the island, Pearl, who raised her baby sister starting at age nine, does whatever she has to do to escape “Hotel Cuba.” Aaron Hamburger is the author of a story collection titled THE VIEW FROM STALIN’S HEAD which was awarded the Rome Prize by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and nominated for a Violet Quill Award. He has also written three novels: FAITH FOR BEGINNERS, nominated for a Lambda Literary Award, NIRVANA IS HERE, winner of a Bronze Medal from the 2019 Foreword Reviews Indies Book Awards, and HOTEL CUBA, published by Harper Perennial in 2023. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Village Voice, Tin House, Michigan Quarterly Review, Subtropics, Crazyhorse, Boulevard, Poets & Writers, Tablet, O, the Oprah Magazine, Out, The Massachusetts Review, The Bennington Review, Nerve, Time Out, Details, and The Forward. He has also won fellowships from Yaddo, Djerassi, the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation as well as first prize in the Dornstein Contest for Young Jewish Writers, and his short fiction and creative non-fiction have received special mentions in the Pushcart Prizes. Hamburger has taught creative writing at Columbia University, George Washington University, New York University, Brooklyn College, and the Stonecoast MFA Program. In addition to writing and reading, he is an avid tennis player and baker. He actually has a babka recipe published in a new children's book by Leslea Newman. Also, every year he throws a holiday cookie blowout and bakes thousands of cookies for family and friends. Listen to Episode Buy Book Previous Next