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....

Aug 20, 2023

In today's 'Craftwork' episode, a conversation with Emily Rapp Black about "truth" in creative nonfiction.

Emily is the author of five books of creative nonfiction: Poster Child, The Still Point of the Turning World, which was a New York Times bestseller, Sanctuary, Frida Kahlo and My Left Leg, and I Would Die if I...

Aug 18, 2023

In today's flashback, an outtake from Episode 364, my conversation with Mat Johnson, author of the novel Invisible Things and other books.

Johnson is a Philip H. Knight Chair of the Humanities at the University of Oregon. His publications include the novels Loving Day and Pym, the nonfiction novella The Great Negro...