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Debut novelist — and WNYC host — Tiffany Hanssen joins me to talk writing violence, humanizing morally complex characters, and injecting humor into a dark story.

Debut novelist Anna Nordberg joins me to talk about escalating stakes in scene-setting, being pigeon-holed into a genre, and how to transmogrify your own personal grief into a work of art.

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner joins me to discuss his debut book Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist. How did Lin-Manuel Miranda, the sweet, sensitive son of Puerto Rican parents from an immigrant neighborhood in Manhattan, rise to become the preeminent musical storyteller of the 21st century? Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist is his incredible story as never told before, tracing Miranda's path from an often isolated child to the winner of multiple Tonys and Grammys for his Broadway hits Hamilton and In the Heights; a global chart-topping sensation for his songs in Disney's Moana and Encanto; and the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Genius Grant.

Lincoln Michel joins me to discuss his second novel Metallic Realms. Perennially single, socially awkward, and drowning in debt, Michael Lincoln finds his life has turned out nothing like the intergalactic lives of the pulp heroes of his youth. But these are pedestrian concerns—he has a higher calling, and that is to preserve for all posterity the greatest series in the history of the written word: The Star Rot Chronicles. Written collectively by Michael's best (and perhaps only) friend Taras K. Castle and his misfit science fiction writing group, the Orb 4, the stories follow Captain Baldwin and his fearless crew on their mind-bending adventures across the Metallic Realms, from solar whales swallowing suns at the edge of spacetime to extraterrestrial romances and interstellar wars. These masterpieces have gone tragically unpublished—until now. But the most urgent story Michael must tell takes place in the more intimate (if no less dramatic) confines of literary Brooklyn. Behind the greatest universe ever created, there are the all-too-mortal people who wrote it. As Michael chronicles the personal melodramas of the Orb 4 as well as the fun house reflections in their fiction, the line between real and unreal becomes dangerously thin, and the true reasons for the group's fallout begin to emerge. As he labors away in hiding, Michael has just one mission: to bring the Metallic Realms to the world. No matter the cost.

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."

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.

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 one with a secret. Everyone has something to play for.

Lincoln Michel joins me to discuss his novel 'The Body Scout.' In the future you can have any body you want—as long as you can afford it. But in a New York ravaged by climate change and repeat pandemics, Kobo is barely scraping by. He scouts the latest in gene-edited talent for Big Pharma-owned baseball teams, but his own cybernetics are a decade out of date and twin sister loan sharks are banging down his door. Things couldn't get much worse. Then his brother—Monsanto Mets slugger J.J. Zunz—is murdered at home plate.

Teddy 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.

Carmen Maria Machado joins me to discuss her memoir 'In the Dream House.' 'In the Dream House' is Machado's wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. That struggle gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope―the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman―through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles.

Ryan Chapman joins me to discuss his debut novel 'Riots I Have Known.' An unnamed Sri Lankan inmate has barricaded himself inside a prison computer lab in Dutchess County, New York. A riot rages outside, incited by a poem published in The Holding Pen, the house literary journal. This, our narrator's final Editor's Letter, is his confession. An official accounting of events, as they happened.

Namwali Serpell joins me to discuss her debut novel 'The Old Drift.' 1904. On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic 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. As the generations pass, their lives—their triumphs, errors, losses and hopes—emerge through a panorama of history, fairytale, romance and science fiction.

Nathan Englander joins me to discuss his new novel 'Kaddish.com.' Larry is the secular son in a family of Orthodox Brooklyn Jews.  When his father dies, it's his responsibility to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months.  To the horror and dismay of his sister, Larry refuses—imperiling the fate of his father's soul. To appease her, Larry hatches an ingenious if cynical plan, hiring a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to recite the prayer and shepherd his father's soul safely to rest. But after a religious awakening, Larry realizes that he may have sacrificed too much.

Sam Lipsyte joins Stephen to discuss his new novel 'Hark.' In an America convulsed by political upheaval, cultural discord, environmental collapse, and spiritual confusion, many folks are searching for peace, salvation, and—perhaps most immediately—just a little damn focus. Enter Hark Morner, an unwitting guru whose technique of "Mental Archery"—a combination of mindfulness, mythology, fake history, yoga, and, well, archery—is set to captivate the masses and raise him to near-messiah status.

Lauren Wilkinson joins Stephen to discuss her debut novel 'American Spy'. It's 1986, the heart of the Cold War, and Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer with the FBI. She's brilliant, but she's also a young black woman working in an old boys' club. Her career has stalled out, she's overlooked for every high-profile squad, and her days are filled with monotonous paperwork. So when she's given the opportunity to join a shadowy task force aimed at undermining Thomas Sankara, the charismatic revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose Communist ideology has made him a target for American intervention, she says yes. 'American Spy' has won starred and rave reviews in every publication from Kirkus to Time. Publisher's Weekly writes, "[This] unflinching, incendiary debut combines the espionage novels of John le Carré with the racial complexity of Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man.'"