Sara Levine on 'Treasure Island!!!'
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Sara Levine joins me to discuss her novel 'Treasure Island!!!' When a college graduate with a history of hapless jobs (ice cream scooper, gift wrapper, laziest ever part-time clerk at The Pet Library) reads Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island, she is dumbstruck by the timid design of her life. Convinced that Stevenson's book is cosmically intended for her, she redesigns her life according to its Core Values: boldness, resolution, independence, and horn-blowing. The New York Times raves, "A rollicking tale, shameless, funny and intelligent."
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Johannes Lichtman on 'Calling Ukraine'
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Johannes Lichtman joins me to discuss his novel "Calling Ukraine." National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and author of Such Good Work Johannes Lichtman returns with a novel that is strikingly relevant to our times—about an American who takes a job in Ukraine in 2018, only to find that his struggle to understand the customs and culture is eclipsed by a romantic entanglement with deadly consequences.
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Lauren Oliver on 'Panic'
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Lauren Oliver joins me to discuss her novel 'Panic.' Heather never thought she would compete in Panic, a legendary game played by graduating seniors, where the stakes are high and the payoff is even higher. She’d never thought of herself as fearless, the kind of person who would fight to stand out. But when she finds something, and someone, to fight for, she will discover that she is braver than she ever thought. Dodge has never been afraid of Panic. His secret will fuel him, and get him all the way through the game, he’s sure of it. But what he doesn't know is that he’s not the only...
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Lincoln Michel on 'The Body Scout'
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Lincoln Michel joins me to discuss his novel 'The Body Scout.'
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Teddy Wayne on 'Apartment'
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Teddy Wayne joins me to discuss his novel 'Apartment.'
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Carmen Maria Machado on 'In the Dream House'
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Carmen Maria Machado joins me to discuss her memoir 'In the Dream House.'
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Ryan Chapman on 'Riots I Have Known'
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Ryan Chapman joins me to discuss his debut novel 'Riots I Have Known.'
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Namwali Serpell on 'The Old Drift'
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1904. On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from Victoria Falls, there is a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. In a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles the fates of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. This sets off a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families as they collide and converge over the course of the century.
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Nathan Englander on 'Kaddish.com'
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Nathan Englander joins me to discuss his new novel 'Kaddish.com.'
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Sam Lipsyte on 'Hark'
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Sam Lipsyte joins Stephen to discuss his new novel 'Hark.'
info_outlineTeddy Wayne joins me to discuss his novel 'Apartment.'
In 1996, the unnamed narrator of Teddy Wayne’s Apartment is attending the MFA writing program at Columbia on his father’s dime and living in an illegal sublet of a rent-stabilized apartment. Feeling guilty about his good fortune, he offers his spare bedroom--rent-free--to Billy, a talented, charismatic classmate from the Midwest eking out a hand-to-mouth existence in Manhattan.
The narrator’s rapport with Billy develops into the friendship he’s never had due to a lifetime of holding people at arm’s length, hovering at the periphery, feeling “fundamentally defective.” But their living arrangement, not to mention their radically different upbringings, breeds tensions neither man could predict. Interrogating the origins of our contemporary political divide and its ties to masculinity and class, Apartment is a gutting portrait of one of New York’s many lost, disconnected souls by a writer with an uncommon aptitude for embodying them.