fiction/non/fiction

Acclaimed fiction writer and essayist Edwidge Danticat joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss her new essay collection We’re Alone. Danticat reflects on misinformation and xenophobic rhetoric, such as Trump’s false 2024 debate claim about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, a

Fiction writer Yiming Ma joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss his new novel These Memories Do Not Belong To Us. Ma, who was born in Shanghai and visited China frequently after immigrating to the U.S. and Canada, talks about how terrifyingly easy it can be to live in a society in which censo

Journalist Caleb Gayle joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss his new book Black Moses: A Saga of Ambition and the Fight for a Black State, which recounts the efforts of Edward McCabe, a Black settler who became a prominent politician in the late 1800s and spearheaded a mission to establish a

Writer Omar El Akkad joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss his recent nonfiction book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, which was just nominated for the National Book Award in nonfiction. El Akkad talks about developing the arc of the book, which addresses how Israel’s g

Novelist Jessica Francis Kane joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss her new novel Fonseca, which fictionalizes writer Penelope Fitzgerald’s 1952 trip to Mexico. Kane talks about imagining Fitzgerald in her mid-thirties, before she had become a novelist, when she was living a financially prec

Fiction writer and editor Patrick Ryan joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss his debut novel, Buckeye, which traces two generations of two Midwestern families connected by a secret. Ryan recalls the coincidental conversation that informed his portrayal of one character’s experiences with dis