fiction/non/fiction

New Atlantic staff writers Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer, authors of a recent article called “The Tech Oligarchy Arrives,” join host Whitney Terrell to talk about tech oligarchs’ influence over President Trump’s administration. They discuss the significance of prominent billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos attending Trump’s inauguration as visible supporters, how these tech leaders have changed their opinion of Trump over time, and the regulatory and legal benefits they may gain from their close association with the new administration. They also discuss Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency and the fallout from that group’s efforts to access Treasury data and dismantle USAID.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 versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/.This podcast is produced by Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan.Selected Readings:Ashley Parker & Michael Scherer The Tech Oligarchy Arrives |The Atlantic |January 20, 2025 Trump Advisers Stopped Musk From Hiring a Noncitizen at DOGE |The Atlantic |February 4, 2025 Trump Takes Over the Kennedy Center |The Atlantic | February 7, 2025 Trump’s Conquest of the Kennedy Center Is Accelerating |The Atlantic | February 8, 2025 Ashley Parker The Memo That Shocked the White House |The Atlantic | January 29, 2025Michael Scherer Why Meta Is Paying $25 Million to Settle a Trump Lawsuit |The Atlantic | January 29, 2025Others: DOGE task force gains access to U.S. Treasury Department data, payment systems |CBS News |February 3, 2025 Doge v USAid: how Elon Musk helped his acolytes infiltrate world’s biggest aid agency |The Guardian |February 5, 2025 Ending Illegal Discrimination And Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity – The White House |The White House |January 21, 2025 Meta Goes Full MAGA as it Kills Off DEI Programs |Daily Beast|January 10, 2025 The Tech Oligarchy Arrives |The Atlantic |January 20, 2025 Trump, a populist president, is flanked by tech billionaires at his inauguration | AP News | January 20, 2025 Zuckerberg Turns Facebook Full MAGA and Smears California Staff |Yahoo! News |January 7, 2025 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Essayist Thomas Dai joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss his new collection, Take My Name But Say It Slow, in which he writes about place and identity. Dai talks about the imperialist impulse behind Trump’s attempt to turn the Gulf of Mexico into the “Gulf of America,” the power of naming, and the appeal and uncertainty of mapping. He also reflects on the surprising history of border policing, queer cartographies, and the sometimes paradoxical relationship between inner self and physical space. Dai reads from Take My Name But Say It Slow.  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 versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/This podcast is produced by Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan.Selected Readings:Thomas DaiTake My Name But Say It SlowOthers National Archives, The Chinese Exclusion Act  “Queering the Map” Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon Peter Ho Davies, The Fortunes “Think There’s Nothing You Can Do to Stop ICE? Think Again.” | The Nation Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Acclaimed novelist and Director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop Lan Samantha Chang joins Fiction/Non/Fiction hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss the role that literary personas may–or may not–have played in recent revelations about Alice Munro, Neil Gaiman, and Cormac McCarthy. Chang discusses how writers often develop literary personas as their public profiles grow. Chang also discusses how personas can be both protective and damaging when they no longer align with the writer's true self, the impact of personas on writers' privacy and the industry's role in shaping and maintaining these personas. She reads from her novel All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost.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 versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/.This podcast is produced by Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan.Selected Readings:Lan Samantha Chang The Family Chao Hunger Inheritance All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost  Writers, Protect Your Inner Life |Lit Hub|August 7, 2017 Others: A Moveable Feast, Ernest Hemingway Erasure, Percival Everett Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6 Episode 40: “In Memory of Cormac McCarthy: Oscar Villalon on an Iconic Writer’s Life, Work, and Legacy” Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 7 Episode 19: “Jacinda Townsend and James Bernard Short on American Fiction”  James Alan McPherson Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 7 Episode 35: “Jonny Diamond on His Mother and Alice Munro”  The Dark Secrets Behind the Neil Gaiman Abuse Accusations|Vulture | January 13, 2025 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Novelist and former Huffington Post climate reporter Sarah S. Grossman joins Fiction/Non/Fiction co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to talk about the Los Angeles wildfires. Grossman, who lives in Los Angeles and whose 2024 novel A Fire So Wild centers on a wildfire in Northern California, discusses how communities are coming together to support each other in the wake of the devastation. She reflects on the damage to the historically Black neighborhood of Altadena; the fact that people are differently affected by climate change, even as wealth cannot completely shield anyone; the factors that contributed to the wildfires; and what it is like to prepare to evacuate, or, alternatively, to offer shelter to others. Grossman reads from A Fire So Wild.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 versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/.This podcast is produced by Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan.Selected Readings:Sarah S. Grossman A Fire So Wild The Antidote To Climate Dread | HuffPost Impact | The Huffington Post | Aug 25, 2021 More Americans Than Ever Understand Climate Change Is Real And Harmful | HuffPost Impact | The Huffington Post | Nov 18, 2021 Nearly 30% Of Americans Aren't Worried 'At All' About The Deadly Climate Crisis | The Huffington Post | April 19, 2022 Others: What happened on Friday, Jan. 17 Crews improved containment of the fires; some residents allowed to return | Los Angeles Times L.A. fires upend hard-won stability for the area’s homeless population | The Washington Post Mutual Aid LA Network (@mutualaidla) • Instagram Displaced Black Families GoFundMe Directory Safe Place for Youth  How Wildfires Came for City Streets | The New York Times Over 170,000 People Under Evacuation In LA County Wildfires | Inkl New wildfire concerns in Los Angeles: Strong winds could return next week. | USA Today Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Acclaimed novelist Charles Baxter joins Fiction/Non/Fiction hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss his recent novel Blood Test: A Comedy. Baxter talks about turning to humor in dark times, the burden of expectations, and writing a protagonist, Brock Hobson, who some readers love and others detest. He discusses how seeing websites and ads that predicted his likes and dislikes led to him inventing a fictional company, Geronomics, which predicts a certain future for Brock and is invested in that scenario playing out one way or another. Baxter also analyzes the craft of writing an antagonist who is a Trumper, but who is never explicitly identified as such. He reads from Blood Test.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 versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/.This podcast is produced by Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan.Selected Readings:Charles Baxter Blood Test: A Comedy Wonderlands: Essays on the Life of Literature Gryphon Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction There’s Something I Want You to Do The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot Shadow Play Others: Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 5 Episode 33: "The Politics of Craft: Charles Baxter on How His Essays on Writing Respond to a Changing World" Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 4 Episode 6: "Hope on the Horizon: Charles Baxter and Mike Alberti on Despair and Renewal in Fiction" Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 1 Episode 4: "We're All Russian, Now" Humboldt's Gift by Saul Bellows Oedipus Rex by Sophocles Macbeth by Shakespeare Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Following the ouster of former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, novelist Ream Shukairy joins Fiction/Non/Fiction co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss the country’s future. Shukairy, who grew up in California and spent summers in Syria, reflects on the long history of Syrian resistance to oppression, as well as how parts of her family emigrated. She also talks about how it feels to emerge from a culture of fear and surveillance, what it’s like to revisit what she previously wrote about Assad, and the places she wants to see when she returns to Syria for the first time in years. Shukairy reads from her young adult novel The Next New Syrian Girl.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 versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/.This podcast is produced by Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan.Selected Readings:Ream Shukairy The Next New Syrian Girl Six Truths and a Lie Others: Return to Homs For Sama The White Helmets (film) The White Helmets (organization) Last Men in Aleppo Cries from Syria Still Recording The Cave Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War by Leila Al-Shami and Robin Yassin-Kassab Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy by Yassin al-Haj Saleh Assad or We Burn the Country: How One Family’s Lust for Power Destroyed Syria by Sam Dagher  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Novelist Jacinda Townsend and writer James Bernard Short join co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about the movie American Fiction, which is based on the novel Erasure by Percival Everett. Townsend and Short discuss how the film addresses race in the publishing industry via its central character, Black author Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, who tries to make an ironic point by writing a book exploiting Black stereotypes and finds, to his dismay, that it’s received in earnest and a bestseller. Townsend and Short analyze director Cord Jefferson’s approach and the film’s themes of family dysfunction, freedom in storytelling, and the importance of portraying the complexity of Black lives. 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 versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.Jacinda Townsend Mother Country Saint Monkey James Bernard Short “Aqua Boogie” | Blood Orange Review “Rootwork” | Blood Orange Review “Flash, Back: Langston Hughes’ The Simple Shorts” | SmokeLong Quarterly Others: American Fiction (movie) | Official Trailer Erasure by Percival Everett An American Marriage by Tayari Jones Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward The Color Purple by Alice Walker Thelonious Monk Ralph Ellison Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison “The Little Man at Chehaw Station” by Ralph Ellison | The American Scholar, 1978 The Tuskegee Institute White Negroes by Lauren Michele Jackson “The White Negro” by Norman Mailer | Dissent, 1957 “Dragon Slayers” by Jerald Walker | The Iowa Review, 2006 “The Hidden Lesson of ‘American Fiction’” by John McWhorter | The New York Times Origin (movie) | Official Trailer Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 1, Episode 11, “Annihilation, Adaptation: What's It Really Like to Have Your Book Made Into a Movie” Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 2, Episode 11, “Brit Bennett and Emily Halpern on Screenwriting’s Tips for Fiction” Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6, Episode 33, “The Stakes of the Writers’ Strike: Benjamin Percy on the WGA Walkout, Streaming, and the Survival of Screenwriting” Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6, Episode 38, “Jacinda Townsend on Why Democrats Are Skeptical of President Biden—and How He Can Win Them Back” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In this holiday re-broadcast, Romance novelists Elle Everhart and Ellie Palmer join co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to talk about the genre’s increasing popularity. Everhart, the London-based author of the new book Hot Summer, featuring a protagonist who joins the cast of a reality show only to realize she’s interested in a fellow contestant, discusses coming to romance writing as a fourth grader fascinated by kissing, and wonders why as sales boom, the U.S.—but not the U.K.—is seeing more romance-specific bookstores. Palmer, the author of the new book Four Weekends and a Funeral, whose main character is a carrier of the BRCA1 mutation, recalls falling in love with the genre as she prepared for her own preventative double mastectomy. She reflects on how the genre’s structure promises positive endings for those who need them at challenging moments, and how the language of romance gave her a way to think about her own body and sexuality. Everhart reads from Hot Summer and Palmer reads from Four Weekends and a Funeral. 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 versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.Elle Everhart Hot Summer Wanderlust Ellie PalmerFour Weekends and a FuneralOthers "9 New Books We Recommend This Week" | May 4, 2023 | The New York Times  "Hot and Bothered: Four New Romance Novels" by Olivia Waite | August 7, 2020 | The New York Times Nora Ephron Nancy Meyers Mhairi McFarlane Beth O'Leary Talia Hibbert Bolu Babalola “A Romance Bookstore Boom” by Olivia Waite | The New York Times “Emily Henry is Proud to be Called a Romance Writer” by | The New York Times Olivia Waite Jodi Picoult Love Island Tropes & Trifles Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nearly three years after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, journalists and podcasters Tetyana Ogarkova and Volodymyr Yermolenko return to Fiction/Non/Fiction to tell hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell how Ukrainians view Donald Trump’s return to power in the U.S. They talk about the situation at the frontlines, the consequences of delayed aid, the urgent need for a swift and decisive response to Russian aggression, and continued Ukrainian resilience in the face of the existential threat of the war. 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 versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/.This podcast is produced by Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan.Selected Readings:Tetyana Ogarkova Ukraine Crisis Media Center L’Ukraine face à la guerre - Ukraine Crisis Media Center Volodymyr Yermolenko Internews Ukraine   Explaining Ukraine podcast Ukraine World Trump’s Election and Its Impact on Ukraine - with Nataliya Gumenyuk  Others: Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 5 Episode 15: Scott Anderson on What Russia’s Wars in Chechnya Tell Us about the Invasion of Ukraine Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6 Episode 51: Tetyana Ogarkova and Volodymyr Yermolenko on How Artists Are Responding to the War in Ukraine Fiction/Non/Fiction Season 6 Episode 2: How Dostoevsky’s Classic Has Shaped Russia’s War in Ukraine, with Explaining Ukraine’s Tetyana Ogarkova and Volodymyr Yermolenko Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

ProPublica reporter Molly Redden joins co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss her recent piece on impoundment, Donald Trump’s strategy to thwart Congressional spending priorities. Redden talks about how the presidential budget and Congressional appropriations work now, Trump’s claim that he has the authority to ignore what Congress wants to fund, what this could mean for those he perceives as enemies, and the possible role of the “nongovernmental Department of Government Efficiency,” co-led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. She explains the history of impoundment, Richard Nixon’s excessive use of the power to ignore projects he didn’t want to do, and how this led to a 1974 law restricting the option. She analyzes the likelihood that Trump will succeed in challenging the law and reflects on writing and reporting on seemingly outlandish schemes that are neither likely nor impossible. She reads from her article, “How Trump Plans to Seize the Power of the Purse From Congress.”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 versions of our interviews on the Fiction/Non/Fiction Instagram account, the Fiction/Non/Fiction YouTube Channel, and our show website: https://www.fnfpodcast.net/This episode of the podcast was produced by Anne Kniggendorf.Molly Redden“How Trump Plans to Seize the Power of the Purse from Congress” | ProPublica Others: “Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy: The DOGE Plan to Reform Government” | WSJ The Brownback Legacy: Tax cut push led to sharp backlash | Wichita Eagle | July 26, 2017 The Constitution of the United States Loving v. Virginia Impoundment Control Act Alien Enemies Act Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices