Aug 30, 2023

Maggie Downs is an award-winning journalist, travel writer, and the author of the memoir Braver Than You Think: Around the World on the Trip of My (Mother’s) Lifetime (Counterpoint Press).  Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Palm Springs Life, and McSweeney's and has...

Aug 27, 2023

Rebekah Bergman is the author of the debut novel The Museum of Human History, available from Tin House. It is the official August pick of the Otherppl Book Club.

Bergman's fiction has been published in Joyland, Tin House, The Masters Review anthology, and other journals. She lives in Rhode Island with her family.

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Aug 26, 2023

Today, a special episode remembering the life and work of Tom Hansen, who died this week of esophageal cancer. Hansen was born in Seattle and raised by adoptive parents in nearby Edmonds, Washington. A failed skateboarder, dishwasher, and punk rock guitarist, he turned to shooting and dealing smack. He later kicked his...

Aug 25, 2023

In today's flashback, an outtake from Episode 24, my conversation with biographer Charles Shields, author of And So It Goes— Kurt Vonnegut: A Life, available now in trade paperback from St. Martin's Press. It first aired on December 7, 2011.

Shields's other books include Mockingbird: A Portrait of Harper Lee, and I Am...

Aug 23, 2023

Maya Binyam is the author of the debut novel Hangman, available from Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

Binyam is a fiction writer and critic whose work has appeared in The Paris Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, New York, Bookforum, Columbia Journalism Review, The New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere....