Poured Over

"I knew that after writing this sweeping family portrait that goes over about 40 years in the Bain family's history, that for my next novel, I wanted to write something that was very focused, that was quite propulsive, and quite edited in the scope and the time that we spend with the characters. And so, for me, it was about romance. It's about that love between these two young men." Douglas Stuart has charmed more than a million and a half readers with his National Booker Award and Booker Prize-winning debut novel, Shuggie Bain. Douglas joins us on the show to talk about his incredible new novel, Young Mungo, optimism, writing about the working class and being gay, masculinity, love, mobility, Margaret Thatcher's legacy, the importance of having a plan before you sit down to write, the writers who inspire him, and much more with Poured Over's host, Miwa Messer. And we end the episode with a TBR Topoff segment featuring Margie and Marc. Featured Books: Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart How Late It Was, How Late by James Kelman Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy Poured Over is hosted and produced by Miwa Messer. This episode was mixed by Chris Gillespie. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays). A full transcript of this show is available here.

"You know, beauty is such an interesting term. I think it's really important how vast and complex it is … we call people beautiful, I call my dog beautiful every day. I call food I eat beautiful, I call bitter, bitter coffee, beautiful, I call an idea beautiful. A mathematical concept can be beautiful, a sunset, the natural world, a performance, a song, certainly works of art, but … I've heard myself say, What a beautiful attempt, a failed attempt, but a beautiful or like a beautiful mistake, what a beautiful mistake that was, a beautiful error or a beautiful cutting remark even, so it's such an interesting term, because we can use it in so many ways." Easy Beauty is Chloé Cooper Jones' first book, and it's an incredibly smart and provocative combination of memoir, travel essay and philosophical treatise on beauty and our experience with beauty, and it's out now. Chloé joins us on the show to talk about what beauty looks and feels like to her, how it feels to live in a body that people stare at (and touch without invitation), how we talk and think about disability, vulnerability and self-acceptance, and so much more with Poured Over's host, Miwa Messer. And we end the episode with a TBR Topoff segment featuring Margie and Marc. Featured Books: Easy Beauty by Chloé Cooper Jones Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer. This episode was mixed by Chris Gillespie. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays). A full transcript of the show is available here.

"True Biz is an ASL idiom. It doesn't have one direct translation into English, but a few of the things that it could mean: seriously, literally. Real talk is one that I think gets used a lot. No kidding. Like, if someone says like, No, you made that up, no true biz, you know, and I thought that it was a good title for the book, because it doesn't quite translate directly into English." We've been fans of Sara Nović since her page-turning, coming-of-age debut, Girl at War. Sara's back with a new novel, True Biz, which she calls both a "coming-of-age and a coming-of-middle-age" story set at a school for the Deaf. She joins us on the show to talk about CODA's Oscars, Deaf culture and degrees of Deaf experience, punk rock, the fluidity of ASL and how best to represent it on the printed page, giving her Deaf characters agency and the space to be real teenagers, writing joy into her story and much more with Poured Over's host, Miwa Messer. And we end the episode with a TBR Topoff segment featuring Margie and Marc. Featured Books: True Biz by Sara Nović Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng Everything I Never Told You by Celeste Ng Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer. This episode was mixed by Chris Gillespie. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays). A full transcript of this episode is available here.

"I really wrote it for me, I didn't think anything would come about — I wanted something that could bring me a bit of joy, where Asian American characters could live their lives and do something as fun and ridiculous as robbing art museums across the world." Grace D. Li loves a caper flick, and now she's written Portrait of a Thief, a caper novel with a very fun Chinese American cast. Grace joins us on the show to talk about the true story that inspired her debut, the Chinese diaspora, calling Texas home, the movies that inspired her fiction, the books she's reading and recommending now, being a medical student who writes fiction on the side, and much more with Poured Over's host, Miwa Messer. And we end the episode with a TBR Topoff segment featuring Margie and Marc. Featured Books: Portrait of a Thief by Grace D. Li Chemistry by Weike Wang Joan is OKAY by Weike Wang The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka Searching for Sylvie Lee by Jean Kwok Fault Lines by Emily Itami Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays). A full transcript of this episode is available here.

"In the end, all the good ideas and sort of fancy craft approaches get you absolutely nothing if there's no emotional content. That's what it is. I mean, fiction is about going inside other people's minds and consciousnesses and looking through their eyes and living their lives in a way and that's all about emotions." Jennifer Egan challenged the way many of us thought about how (but not why) we tell stories in A Visit from the Goon Squad—which went on to win the Pulitzer. She joins us on our 100th episode of the show to talk about her latest, The Candy House, which she describes as a "sibling novel" to Goon Squad, along with truth and time and space and memory and nostalgia, the interplay between tech and story (including finding poetry in elliptical, 140-character tweets), finding inspiration in slightly unexpected places like baseball and Dungeons + Dragons, returning to characters she never really left (including the peripheral ones), and much more with Poured Over's host, Miwa Messer. Featured Books: The Candy House by Jennifer Egan A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan Manhattan Beach by Jennifer Egan In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust The Three Pigs by David Weisner The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, introduction by Jennifer Egan Prince Caspian by C.S. Lewis The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe by CS Lewis The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app. A complete transcript of this episode is available here.

"I love being immersed in the grand project of a novel. When I was a kid, I was drawn to books about secret worlds, like The Secret Garden, or The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe where you disappear to the back of a wardrobe…" How many times have you re-read Emily St. John Mandel's genre-blending novels Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel? Emily joins us on the show to talk about her latest novel Sea of Tranquility — our April 2022 Barnes & Noble Book Club pick­ — along with what she loves most about writing, breaking the rules of time + space, how character development makes an imaginary world real, the writers and books who inspire her, and more with Poured Over's host, Miwa Messer. And we end the episode with a TBR Topoff segment featuring Margie and Marc. Featured Books: Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel The Singer's Gun by Emily St. John Mandel Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu The Executioner's Song by Normal Mailer Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky White Teeth by Zadie Smith Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays). A full transcript of this episode is available here.

"…Cynical as he is of the world that he encounters, he's also pretty cynical and critical of himself. And that manifests itself in that sense of humor that you're talking about not a light-hearted sense of humor, but a very cynical and dark sense of humor, a sense of the absurd." Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer and The Committed (now out in paperback), among other books, joins us on the show to riff on the return of his unnamed narrator, why he followed his prize-winning spy thriller with a crime novel set in 1980s Paris, how his novels are in conversation with Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, the American canon, his literary inspirations and much more with Poured Over's host, Miwa Messer. Featured Books: Native Speaker by Chang-rae Lee American Spy by Lauren Wilkerson The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John Le Carré The Land at the End of the World by António Lobo Antunes Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison The Quiet American by Graham Greene Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. Follow us her for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays.) A full transcript of the show is available here.

"As you might imagine, over the years, many people heard stories about my family. And they said, Hey, why don't you write a memoir? I really wasn't very interested in writing a memoir as I perceived a memoir to be, so the idea of spending years working on a book about the issues in my immediate family, which I grew up with, and was intimately familiar with, it felt like I would be locked in a closet with that somehow. And then I became sort of interested in looking backward..." Maud Newton used to believe her research into her family's genealogy was just a distraction from the novel she'd been working on. Not so. Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation is just out, and Maud joins us on the show to talk about where her curiosity took her, DNA sleuthing, facing her family's legacies (genetic + historical + behavioral), epigenetics, what Harry Crews taught her about writing, and much more with Poured Over's host, Miwa Messer. Featured book: Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation by Maud Newton And a few of the books that Maud mentions in hers: Where I Was From by Joan Didion The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee by David Treuer The Gene by Siddhartha Mukherjee On the Origin of Species by Charles Darwin The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould The Mistress's Daughter by AM Homes Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity and Love by Dani Shapiro Touched with Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison The Collected Schizophrenias by Esmé Weijun Wang Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth by Sarah Smarsh Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora by Emily Raboteau Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer Poured Over is produced and hosted Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays.)

"They're not all villains and all heroes, I think a lot of people are very morally gray…" The atmospheric and haunting Wild and Wicked Things is a beautifully written tale of queer love in an alternative post-WWI England that invokes the glittering world of Gatsby with a blend of blood magic and gothic mystique. Francesca May joins us on the show to talk about the appeal of The Great Gatsby, the power of community, the thin line between good and wicked, reinventing the ideals of class and privilege, spirit animals and so much more. Featured in this episode: Wild and Wicked Things by Francesca May The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald Practical Magic by Alice Hoffman Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier The Lighthouse by Fran Dorricott Rachel's Holiday by Marian Keyes For the Wolf by Hannah Whitten Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth The Lord Of The Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan This episode of Poured Over was hosted and produced by Elani Wilson and mixed by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes on Saturdays).

"We should call no future unthinkable and no future unimaginable. We have to be willing to think about the hard things and ready ourselves for them, we also have to free ourselves from the limitations of the present so that we can find refuge in the future that we want." Futurist and game designer Jane McGonigal wants to help you change your brain with her new book, Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything — Even Things That Seem Impossible Today, and she joins us on the show to talk about when the future starts, Dator's Law (any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous), normalcy bias, how our future selves are strangers to us, curiosity + empathy, mental time travel, the writers who inspire her, and much more with Poured Over's host, Miwa Messer. Featured in this episode: Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything — Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal Rebecca Solnit's books Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional bonus episodes Saturdays.)