Before I wrote a novel inspired by Moby-Dick, I spent almost 20 years avoiding Herman Melville’s hulking classic. I first encountered Melville through his delightfully odd story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” when I was 16. But reading 200,000 words about whaling? I preferred not to. Moby-Dick became one of those novels I laughed about never having […]

“We all shape our stories in some way, we all try to emerge as the hero of them…” Author of Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann, takes on mutiny and shipwreck in the shocking true story of The Wager. Grann joined us on the show to talk about wading through archival research, his adventure to the sites […]

“I love finishing reading a book and thinking, I feel privileged to have read that, I feel dignified. I feel like that book sort of thought of me as sacred … I want to write the kind of books that I most love to read.” From Paul Harding, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Tinkers, comes […]

“I start with the emotion. I don’t know what the story is. I don’t know who the characters are necessarily. I’m working on very little like, I’m thinking, ‘oh, well, the way this light looks through a window’, or something— very few details here and there. But I don’t know what happens in this story.” […]