The Greenlight Bookstore Podcast

Content warning: This episode discusses suicide and death. Reporter Katie Engelhart discusses her compassionate and thoughtful new book The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die with author Larissa MacFarquhar (author of Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help).  Their discussion eschews judgement while conveying all sides of the assisted suicide movement, including the state of healthcare in the US, disability rights, mental disorders, and dementia, as well as the journalistic ethics of writing about death and dying. (Recorded March 15, 2021)

Greenlight neighbor Rumaan Alam (Leave the World Behind) talks with returning favorite Hala Alyan about her new novel The Arsonist's City, a rich family story which is also a love letter to Beirut.  The two writers discuss the challenges of writing in the pandemic and their own writing routines as well as the differences between writing prose and poetry, while exploring how the book portrays Arab women, cities, and sexuality in fresh ways. (Recorded March 9, 2021)

Greenlight neighbor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan interviews bestselling author Carol Edgarian about her cinematic and adventurous novel Vera, set during the 1906 San Francisco earthquake.  Their conversation delves into the history of the event and the parallels of a society teetering on disaster and fraught with political corruption, and the possibilities of fiction to explore -- and extrapolate from -- real life. (Recorded March 8, 2021)

Duende District bookstore owner Angela Spring is the guest host for this special event with Naima Coster presenting her new book What’s Mine and Yours in conversation with National Book Award winning author Elizabeth Acevedo.  The participants' mutual admiration is evident in their warm and brilliant craft- and character-driven discussion about the novel, a sweeping story of legacy, identity, the American family, and the ways that race affects even our most intimate relationships. (Recorded March 4, 2021)

To celebrate the launch of her highly anticipated biography Tom Stoppard: A Life, venerated biographer Hermione Lee interviews Stoppard himself in an affectionate and witty accompaniment to the book.  The biographer and the playwright -- both knighted by the British crown -- talk through Stoppard's life from his childhood in Darjeeling, his experiences in the New York and London theatre worlds, and his most recent play Leopoldstadt, which delves into his own Jewish European heritage in new ways. Their rich and multi-faceted conversation also addresses the relationship between biographer and subject, and the ways in which we act or inhabit our own lives. (Recorded February 24, 2021)

Priyanka Champaneri presents her new book The City of Good Death, winner of the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing, in conversation with a past winner of the prize, Grace Talusan.  In their discussion of Priyanka's novel set in Varanasi, India, a tale full of memory, ritual, and the uncanny, the two authors talk about personal and cultural superstitions and the obligations and rewards of fiction. (Recorded February 23, 2021)

Marie Arnold talks with award-winning middle grade author Zoraida Córdova about Arnold's debut middle grade novel, The Year I Flew Away.  The book’s main character makes a deal with a witch to be popular and "American", and Marie and Zoraida's hilarious and moving discussion encompasses Haitian and Ecuadorian magic traditions, the challenges of depicting the experience of immigration, and the American foods of the authors’ 1990s childhoods in Brooklyn and Queens. (Recorded February 9, 2021)

Booker Prize-winning author Ben Okri launches his timely new collection of stories, Prayer for the Living, in conversation with novelist and essayist Porochista Khakpour. Their passionate and poetic conversation touches on the spiritual, political, aesthetic and emotional aspects of writing fiction, and in particular the tension for non-white writers between the freedom to write about universal human ideas and the demand that they represent their specific cultural context. Their conversation unveils the power and necessity of storytelling in our time; as Okri says, "We as the human race are in the Last Chance Saloon of our great narrative... we're holding the bowl of the future in our hands and it's very, very fragile." (Recorded February 4, 2021)

Journalist Clover Hope talks about the women who have shaped the music, power, and reach of rap in her new book, The Motherlode: 100+ Women Who Made Hip Hop, along with the book's illustrator Rachelle Baker and critic Briana Younger.  Hope and Baker talk about the choices they made in representing the style, humor, agency, and influence of women rappers across the US, the progress in recognition for female artists, and what is still to be learned -- and unlearned -- in representation. (Recorded February 3, 2021)

Gabrielle Korn, former editor-in-chief of Nylon, discusses her new essay collection Everybody (Else) Is Perfect: How I Survived Hypocrisy, Beauty, Clicks, and Likes with Whembley Sewell, editor-in-chief of Them.  Along with discussions of editor vs. writer mindsets and the taboos around discussing money, especially for women, their conversation focuses on the queer elements of the book: the many moments of coming out, visibility and tokenism in the workplace and in the media landscape, and the necessity of self-affirmation. (Recorded January 27, 2021)