fiction/non/fiction

Novelist Asali Solomon joins hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss accountability, the ongoing Congressional investigation into the January 6 insurrection, and her new novel. The Days of Afrekete, an Obama-era story, follows Liselle Belmont, a Black woman throwing a dinner party for her white husband, a politician who is suspected of corruption. As she considers her own personal and political choices, she flashes back to a lost love: her college girlfriend Selena. Solomon reads from the book and talks about depicting accountability and its lack, the intimate costs of being connected to power, and how Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Toni Morrison’s Sula, and Audre Lorde’s Zami influenced her storytelling. She also reflects on how reading the late bell hooks gave her a new vision of herself in the world.To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf.Selected readings:Asali Solomon The Days of Afrekete Disgruntled Get Down Killing the Donald Trump in Us: How to Be Less Like the Man We Elected to Lead Us Others: About | Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol Philadelphia keeps revisiting MOVE bombing history because we never truly learned it | Opinion Rashida Tlaib berates Mark Meadows for using black woman as 'a prop' at hearing - POLITICO Liz Cheney Takes Center Stage in Jan. 6 Inquiry - The New York Times Significant Other | The New Yorker House Seeks Contempt Charge Against Meadows in Jan. 6 Inquiry - The New York Times Meadows and the Band of Loyalists: How They Fought to Keep Trump in Power - The New York Times A Dinner Party About Lost Selves and Lost Chances - Electric Literature The Good Wife The West Wing Zami by Audre Lorde Sula by Toni Morrison Angela Davis Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf bell hooks  Black Looks Teaching to Transgress Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Acclaimed novelist Nadifa Mohamed joins hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss the crisis around migrants passing from Belarus into Poland and thus into the E.U. Mohamed analyzes the crisis, engineered by Russian-backed strongman Alexander Lukashenko, in the context of Europe’s historical antipathy toward immigration, and reads from her Booker Prize-shortlisted novel, The Fortune Men, the fictionalized account of a Somali immigrant named Mahmood Mattan, set in Cardiff, Wales during the 1950s. She discusses how attitudes toward immigration shaped Brexit and the U.K.’s draconian new Nationality and Borders Bill, which will potentially affect the lives of around six million people, including the novelist herself. To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf and Hayden Baker.Selected readings:Nadifa Mohamed The Fortune Men The Orchard of Lost Souls Black Mamba Boy Others: Bich Minh Nguyen on the Refugee Experience of Holiday Narratives (Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 2, Episode 7)  This Is Who We Are: Gish Jen and Peter Ho Davies on the Long History of Anti-Asian Racism in the US (Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 4, Episode 14)  #Families Belong Together: A Conversation with Edwidge Danticat and Cristina Henriquez (Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 1, Episode 20)  Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman The Mahabharata Double Dynamite  Quo Vadis The African Queen Anger boils as UK Parliament endorses ‘obscene’ nationality bill (Al Jazeera, Dec. 10) UK Parliament Business Legislation Parliamentary Bills Nationality and Borders Bill Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Author and editor of the New York Times Book Review Pamela Paul and New York Times journalist Cecilia Kang join hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to consider how social media and search engines have changed everyday life. First, Paul provides a nostalgia tour of pre-internet life, and reads from her new book, 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet, a wake-up call to identify the elements that might be worth saving. Then Kang, who has covered Facebook for 15 years, analyzes the globally dominant company’s relentless focus on growth, and reads from her new book with co-reporter Sheera Frenkel, An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination. Kang also considers the impact of information shared by former Facebook employee and whistleblower Frances Haugen.To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf and Hayden Baker.Selected readings:Pamela Paul Rectangle Time How to Raise a Reader My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony Pornified Parenting, Inc. By the Book: Writers on Literature and the Literary Life 100 Things We’ve Lost to the Internet Others: Baby Einstein Videos A Clockwork Orange David Foster Wallace Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon The Good Wife New York Times Book Review Talk of the Town, “Spring Rain” by John Updike  Washington Post Cecilia KangAn Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook’s Battle for DominationOthers: “Whistle-Blower Says Facebook Chooses ‘Profits Over Safety,’” by Cecilia Kang and Ryan Mac Buzzfeed NPR Times of London McClatchy Mark Zuckerberg “It’s Time to Break Up Facebook” by Chris Hughes Metaverse Roblox Sheera Frenkel “Network Free K.C.: The Free Network Foundation Takes on Google in Kansas City” by Whitney Terrell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this special episode, taped live at the Miami Book Fair, novelist Joshua Ferris joins hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss his new novel, A Calling for Charlie Barnes, which takes an often humorous look at the catastrophe of its protagonist’s life. When Charlie Barnes is simultaneously hit with a cancer diagnosis and the Great Recession, all he wants is to live within another story. Ferris talks about the lies we tell ourselves and the fictionalized accounts of the past that plague and define families.  To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf.Selected readings:Joshua Ferris A Calling for Charlie Barnes The Dinner Party: Stories To Rise Again at a Decent Hour The Unnamed Then We Came to the End  Others: Always on Display: An Interview with Joshua Ferris Interview with Joshua Ferris, 2008 PEN/Hemingway Award Winner The Duke of Deception: Memories of My Father by Geoffrey Wolff James B. Stewart, The New Yorker Capital by John Lanchester The Wall Street Journal Barron’s The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway  Investor’s Business Daily Job Openings and Labor Turnover Summary - 2021 M09 Results William Cohen “The Great American Bubble Machine” by Matt Taibbi Wallace Stevens John Ashbery Emily Dickinson The Washington Post Philip Roth Meyerowitz Stories, written and directed by Noah Baumbach Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this special episode, taped live at the Miami Book Fair, novelist Ha Jin joins hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss his new novel, A Song Everlasting, which explores the ways in which politics and art are intertwined from the point of view of a Chinese singer who makes his home in the U.S. After talking about the current tensions between China and Taiwan, Jin describes how the U.S. has had a negative influence on this conflict and depicts China as a strong but rapidly declining force. Then he speaks about how, like his main character, Tian, he believes that producing genuine art is the best way an artist can leave a lasting political influence.       To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/This podcast is produced by Hayden Baker and Anne Kniggendorf.Selected readings:Ha Jin  A Song Everlasting  The Banished Immortal  A Distant Center The Boat Rocker Alive  A Map of Betrayal  Nanjing Requiem A Good Fall The Writer as Migrant  A Free Life War Trash The Crazed Wreckage The Bridegroom Waiting In the Pond  Under the Red Flag Facing Shadows Ocean of Words Between Silences  Others: "Taiwan says tensions with China are at their worst in 4 decades" by Scott Neuman W.H. Auden  The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Novelist Julia Elliott and poet and writer DaMaris B. Hill join hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to consider the writing and face of rural America—particularly as it might look 30 years from now. First, Elliott talks about growing up as an outsider in her own South Carolina hometown, and reads from her debut novel The New and Improved Romie Flutch. Then, Hill, who was born in West Virginia, speaks to the diversity of rural spaces and reads a historical poem, “Beloved Weirdo,” from her forthcoming poetry collection Breath Better Spent: Living Black Girlhood. Hill also speaks about judging the Maya Angelou Book Award.To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/This podcast is produced by Hayden Baker and Anne Kniggendorf.Selected readings:DaMaris B. Hill A Bound Woman Is a Dangerous Thing: The Incarceration of African American Women from Harriet Tubman to Sandra Bland   The Fluid Boundaries of Suffrage and Jim Crow: Staking Claims in the American Heartland Breath Better Spent  Julia Elliott The New and Improved Romie Futch The Wilds  Others: Toni Morrison Gail Jones Octavia Butler Crystal Wilkinson Nikki Finney Denise Low The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead Gwendolyn Brooks Frank O’Hara Lucille Clifton Angela Davis “Talking to Maya Angelou’s Son About the New Award Named in Her Honor” by Anne Kniggendorf Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry by John Murillo Pilgrim Bell by Kaveh Akbar Postcolonial Love Poem by Natalie Diaz Sometimes I Never Suffered by Shane McCrae The Wild Fox of Yemen by Threa Almontaser Our Lies: Jenny Offill and James Plath on Conspiracy Theories in History and Literature (Season 4, Episode 8 of Fiction/Non/Fiction) Airships by Barry Hannah Geronimo Rex by Barry Hannah Westworld Paul West “The New and Improved Romie Futch” New York Times review by Lincoln Michel  Carson McCullers George Saunders Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell Leonora Carrington Meat Racket by Christopher Leonard Hunter S. Thompson David Cronenburg Black Boy by Richard Wright Langston Hughes Alice Walker Latino Writers Collective - Home Frank X Walker - Affrilachian Poet, Educator, Author of Black Box, Buffalo Dance: the Journey of York, and Affrilachia Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Novelist Elizabeth Wetmore and essayist and poet Kathryn Nuernberger join hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss Texas’s new abortion law. As the Lone Star State’s SB8 invites anyone to sue those “abetting” an abortion after six weeks of pregnancy, Roe v. Wade has never seemed more at risk. In this episode, Wetmore talks about the Southwest’s history of suppressing women’s rights to birth control and reads from her novel, Valentine, which takes place in Texas and depicts a cast of women struggling to navigate the aftermath of sexual violence and access to abortion in 1976. Then, Nuernberger reads from her essay collection, The Witch of Eye, and her poetry collection, RUE; she discusses midwives, witch trials, herbalism, torture, and how these subjects help us interpret the history of women’s reproductive rights.       To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf.Selected readings:Elizabeth Wetmore  Valentine "Women and Horses (1976)"  Kathryn Nuernberger The Witch of Eye RUE Brief Interviews with the Romantic Past  The End of Pink Rag & Bone   Others: SB8 “Abortion on the border: Legislation in Texas and criminalization in Chihuahua” by Veronica Martinez (La Verdad) and Victoria Rossi (El Paso Matters) "Abortion on the border: Activists stay resilient" by Veronica Martinez (La Verdad) and Victoria Rossi (El Paso Matters) “What It's Like to Run a Planned Parenthood in Texas” by Olga Khazan (The Atlantic, 2016)  “Why I Violated Texas's Extreme Abortion Ban” by Alan Braid (The Washington Post) Interventions for Women by Angela Hume  Eve's Herbs by John M. Riddle The Book of Difficult Fruit by Kate Lebo  Regarding the Pain of Others  by Susan Sontag  WTF, Texas? Lacy M. Johnson and Natalia Sylvester on Surviving the Recent Storm and Unraveling the Whitewashed Myth of Texas (Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 4, Episode 12)  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Novelists Nadia Hashimi and Helen Benedict join hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss the mistakes American writers and culture made in depicting the United States’ wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In the wake of the 20th anniversary of 9/11 and President Biden’s decision to pull U.S. troops out of Afghanistan, have American fiction and film truly confronted the cost of these wars, especially to civilians overseas? In this episode, Benedict discusses the persistent and problematic glamorization of conflict, and reads from her 2017 novel, Wolf Season, which is about the Iraq War and its aftermath. Then, Hashimi speaks about centering Afghan voices in her fiction and reads from her novel Sparks Like Stars, which begins in 1978 Kabul during the Saur Revolution.To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel, Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and our website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf.Selected readings:Nadia Hashimi Sparks Like Stars The Pearl that Broke Its Shell Helen Benedict Wolf Season Sand Queen Lonely Soldier “The Best Contemporary Iraqi Writing about War” (LitHub)  Others: The Storytellers of Empire, By Kamila Shamsie – Guernica Unbecoming by Anuradha Bhagwati   “A Former Marine Looks Back on Her Life in a Male-Dominated Military” by V.V. Ganeshananthan (New York Times) Elliot Ackerman and Anuradha Bhagwati on the Role of the Military in American Politics, Fiction/Non/Fiction, season two, episode 21 Charlie Wilson’s War Afghan Women are In Charge of Their Own Fate by Cheryl Benard “The Other Afghan Women” by Anand Gopal (New Yorker) “What Should a War Movie Do?” by Whitney Terrell (The New Republic) The Hurt Locker directed by Kathryn Bigelow Generation Kill by Evan Wright Karate Kid Matt Gallagher Teen Wolf Casualties of War directed by Brian De Palma The Messenger Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves and Miranda Seymour Corpse Exhibition by Hassan Blasim The Taliban indoctrinates kids with jihadist textbooks paid for by the U.S. Washington Post, 2014 Sylvester Stallone in First Blood (1982) Katey Schultz Jesse Goolsby Cara Hoffman Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Editor and publisher Brigid Hughes and writer Yiyun Li join co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about reading War and Peace over the course of 85 days with others around the world. The unusually broad and lively Twitter conversation, organized in 2020 by A Public Space and led by Li, is captured in the newly published volume Tolstoy Together. In this episode, Li discusses her love of Russian novels and describes what it was like reading War and Peace in sections at the ends of newspapers when she was growing up in Beijing. Hughes, who read the book for the first time during this project, explains how the community of readers who contributed to the online book club made the experience special.To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel and Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and don't miss our brand-new website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf.Selected readings:Yiyun Li Tolstoy Together Must I Go? Where Reasons End Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life Gold Boy, Emerald Girl A Thousand Years of Good Prayers Kinder Than Solitude The Vagrants  Brigid HughesA Public Space Others: The Translation Wars (The New Yorker) Her Private Space: On Brigid Hughes, Editor (LitHub) Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Lit Mags (and Likely More) (FnF episode) #APStogether : Events Infinite Happiness (originally published in A Public Space, by Jamel Brinkley) Cattle Haul (by Jesmyn Ward) War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky   The Raid and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy  Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky   Matt Gallagher Dewaine Farria Alexandra Schwartz ZZ Packer   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Writer Nawaaz Ahmed joins co-host V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss his debut novel, Radiant Fugitives, in this special live episode of the show held with Elliott Bay Books in Seattle, Washington. Ahmed’s book, set in California against the backdrop of Obama-era politics, explores how differences in faith and sexuality affect an Indian Muslim family when two estranged sisters—one a doctor more religiously observant than their parents, the other a political organizer who is lapsed, queer, recently divorced, and newly pregnant—reunite to support their ill mother. Ahmed also discusses his career shift from computer science to fiction, his decision to identify as a gay writer, and how these changes have strengthened his position as an activist.To hear the full episode, subscribe through iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app (include the forward slashes when searching). You can also listen by streaming from the player below. Check out video excerpts from our interviews at LitHub’s Virtual Book Channel and Fiction/Non/Fiction’s YouTube Channel, and don't miss our brand-new website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/This podcast is produced by Anne Kniggendorf.Selected readings: Nawaaz AhmedRadiant FugitivesOthers: The Quran Barack Obama Speeches “Endymion” by John Keats, Complete Poems “Yes We Can” Trikone   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices