Bonnie Jo Campbell’s The Waters follows the interwoven and often complicated lives of a family of women inhabiting an island in a Michigan swamp. Campbell joins us to talk about the challenges in crafting this novel, matching her unique characters with an equally intriguing setting, small-town storytelling and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured […]

Many standup comedians have made the amusing joke/observation that us creative humans in the Western world don’t hesitate to remake movies or songs but we never remake books. The most famous variation on the gag—after expressing that sentiment, the comedian mentions that they’re writing a word-for-word remake of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. […]

My favorite thing George R.R. Martin has ever said (barring the moment he exclaims, “Here comes Benjen Stark!”) is his response when asked his approach on writing female characters: “I’ve always considered women to be people.” What a novel concept! Yet the worlds of sci-fi and fantasy (the former being a genre more or less […]

Just when you thought you’d tired of postapocalyptic fiction, someone comes along and dazzles you with an intimate portrait of life after the end of the world, and you’re ready to pry open the old Y2K shelter again. Dazzling is the only way to describe Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, detailing the outbreak of […]

“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,–often the surfeit of our own behavior,–we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion…an admirable evasion of… man, to lay his goatish disposition to the […]