Hey just a quick addendum on this week's redux, I am out of town this week and enjoying the sweatiest summer of all time with my kids, but I wanted to revisit a fantastic episode with now National Book Award Winner, Sir Walter Raleigh Award for Fiction Winner, Pushcart Prize nominee, NAACP Image Award nominee, and Carnegie Medals For Excellence Longlist nominee Jason Mott. Congrats! Enjoy, I’ll catch you next week with some fresh writerly wisdom.

New York Times bestselling author, Jason Mott, took a timeout to talk with me about the high-wire act of building Hell of a Book, talking about race in America, and NOT working with Brad Pitt.

Jason is the author of The Returned, a New York Times bestseller that was turned into a TV series that ran for two seasons.

His fourth novel is titled Hell of a Book, and is described as a "... funny and honest [work of fiction] that goes to the heart of racism, police violence, and the hidden costs exacted upon Black Americans, and America as a whole."

The book has been named to dozens of "Must Read" lists for 2021 including Entertainment Weekly, The NY Post, GMA, USA Today, Fortune's 21 Most Anticipated Books Coming out in the Second Half of 2021 and more. Charles Yu, author of National Book Award winner Interior Chinatown called the book, "Playful, searching, raw and necessary..."

Jason has BFA in fiction and an MFA in Poetry, both from the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. His poetry and fiction have appeared in various literary journals.

Stay calm and write on ...

Discover The Writer Files Extra

Get 'The Writer Files' Podcast Delivered Straight to Your Inbox

If you’re a fan of The Writer Files, please "Follow" us to automatically see new interviews.

In this file Jason Mott and I discussed:

What it's like to write a book in your head for a decade
Why he dared to dream to become a writer
How to build a technically complex novel, draft by draft
His study and love of film noir
And why writers need to be nicer to themselves

Show Notes:

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices