Episodes
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U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón recently edited and introduced You Are Here: Poetry in the Natural World, a collection of poems by writers like Joy Harjo and Jericho Brown that pays homage to landscapes across the United States. In today's episode, Limón joins NPR's Rachel Martin to play a game for the new podcast Wild Card. They discuss some pivotal moments in Limón's life marked by natural scenery, like a creek she played in growing up and a big realization she had about her fertility while swimming in the Chesapeake Bay — and go beyond that into conversations about grandparents, memory and mortality.
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Marcela Fuentes' debut novel, Malas, is set in a small town nestled on the border between Texas and Mexico. There, two vastly different women begin to uncover decades of secrets, town gossip and broken family histories wrapped up in rodeos, Chicano politics and a hardcore punk band. In today's episode, NPR's Isabella Gomez Sarmiento speaks with Fuentes about the complicated ideals of womanhood in Mexican-American culture and the way her protagonists struggle to live their truths.
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Jin Han, the narrator of R.O. Kwon's Exhibit, is a photographer going through it – both with her work and her husband. When she meets ballerina Lidija Jung, her world is turned upside down. Exhibit becomes a story about "what you might give up for what you want most," as Kwon tells NPR's Ayesha Rascoe. In today's episode, they discuss the nuances of wanting to give in to sexual desires even when they might be problematic for cultural perceptions and stereotypes of Asian women, and the way shame, religion and Korean womanhood function in both the book and Kwon's own life.
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Before she founded the riot grrrl movement of the 1990s, Kathleen Hanna was a teenager volunteering at a rape and domestic violence shelter in Olympia, Washington. In today's episode, the Bikini Kill and Le Tigre frontwoman tells NPR's Kelly McEvers how the anger and grief she absorbed there manifested into lyrics and performances that would take the punk and music scenes by storm. That story is at the heart of Hanna's memoir, Rebel Girl, which also grapples with setting boundaries, carrying the feminist torch of a generation and lending a hand to younger bands.
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There's a lot of tragedy that goes into watching your home erupt into a battlefield. But journalist Illia Ponomarenko says as the Russian military seized city after city in their latest invasion of Ukraine, people also came together in beautiful ways. His new memoir, I Will Show You How It Was, recounts what living – and covering – the war has been like so far. In today's episode, The Kyiv Independent co-founder speaks with NPR's Scott Simon about Ukrainians' willingness to fight for their country, what life is like in Bucha today and the unexpected way he met his girlfriend's parents.
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Today's episode is all about food – but not in the form of recipes. First, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Victor M. Valle speaks to Here & Now's Deepa Fernandes about The Poetics of Fire, his new book analyzing the history of chiles in Mesoamerican and Indigenous cuisine as a lens to understand Mexican-American and Chicano culture. Then, NPR's Scott Simon asks Michelle T. King about Chop Fry Watch Learn, a part-memoir, part-reported analysis of Taiwanese chef Fu Pei-mei's life and impact on Chinese food around the world.
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Across seven decades, Claire Messud's novel This Strange Eventful History follows generations of a family from a colonized Algeria to far stretches of the world after the country's independence, always grappling with the idea of identity and belonging and political upheaval. In today's episode, Messud speaks with NPR's Ari Shapiro about how she took inspiration from her own grandparents' story, and how looking back at their past sparked a desire in her to chronicle the world she grew up in for her own kids.
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When Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro went on the BBC program Desert Island Discs, he spoke about how much he loves the music of jazz singer Stacey Kent. In today's episode, Ishiguro and Kent tell NPR's Juana Summers how that mention led them to meet and embark on an artistic endeavor together – a new songbook called The Summer We Crossed Europe in the Rain, featuring lyrics by Ishiguro set to music composed by Kent's partner, Jim Tomlinson.
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Writer and filmmaker Miranda July says the popular imagination sort of drops off once a woman gets married and has kids. Her new novel All Fours turns that on its head – it's a story about an artist in her 40s who departs from her husband and child on a road trip that takes her to some very unexpected places. In today's episode, July speaks to NPR's Brittany Luse about the interviews she conducted with women going through perimenopause and menopause for this book, and the whisper network with her friends that fueled her protagonist's deep desire for something new.
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When Dick Goodwin reached his 80s, he asked his wife – historian Doris Kearns Goodwin – to finally open and sift through the hundreds of boxes he'd kept from his time as a presidential aide and speechwriter to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and as advisor to Robert Kennedy. What resulted is An Unfinished Love Story, a new book by Kearns Goodwin with a personal lens to the history of the 1960s. In today's episode, she speaks to NPR's Steve Inskeep about what she found in her husband's archives and what she learned revisiting that time period.
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Today's episode is about two massive stars: Whoopi Goldberg and Tom Selleck. First, Goldberg speaks with NPR's Ayesha Rascoe about her new memoir, Bits and Pieces, which touches on her relationship with her mother, the way she navigated beauty standards growing up, and what it means to grapple with grief over time. Then, Selleck joins NPR's Scott Simon to discuss You Never Know, his initial reluctance to take on his role in Magnum P.I. and his thoughts on being labeled a "mustachioed hunk."
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Years ago, Karla Tatiana Vasquez tried to search up a recipe for one of her favorite Salvadoran dishes, Salpicón Salvadoreño. The scarce results not only disappointed Vasquez, but created a new mission: to collect and preserve the recipes of the Salvadoran diaspora along with the stories of the women who've been passing them down for generations. In today's episode, NPR's A Martinez visits Vasquez's kitchen to discuss The SalviSoul Cookbook and the relationship between food, migration and trauma.
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A plane ticket to Paris, a vintage Dior dress and a spectacular first-ever oyster — these three things upend the life of Stella, the sheltered, cautious protagonist at the heart of The Paris Novel, a coming-of-age story about losing all inhibitions in one of the world's most romantic cities. In today's episode, author Ruth Reichl speaks with NPR's Scott Simon about indulging in life's simple pleasures, writing in honor of her late editor and choosing to set her story in the Paris of the 1980s.
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Racism is a major contributor to economic disparities in the U.S. – but in her new book, The White Bonus, writer Tracie McMillan crunches the numbers to understand just how much money white privilege can mean. In today's episode, she speaks with NPR's Michel Martin about the different families she profiled, the generations of economic policy she analyzed, and the rift created within her own family during the process of reporting this book .
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Caoilinn Hughes' novel The Alternatives revolves around the four Flattery sisters, each with a more impressive career or degree than the last, all with a profound grief for the parents they lost at a young age. When one of the sisters purposely goes off the grid, the other three are reunited in the Irish countryside in an attempt to find her. In today's episode, NPR's Andrew Limbong asks Hughes about crafting the witty dialogue between the sisters, writing side characters that jump off the page and getting feedback from her own siblings.
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In 2022, WNBA star Brittney Griner was detained by Russian authorities, convicted of drug charges and given a nine-year prison sentence. Her new memoir, Coming Home, details the conditions she was held in and her eventual return to the U.S. following a swap deal. In today's episode, NPR's Juana Summers asks Griner about the mental and physical toll she's still grappling with, reuniting with her wife and trying to forgive herself for what happened.
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As a parent, how do you navigate – and feel hope – raising kids through a pandemic, a climate crisis and with police brutality in the news? That's the question at the center of Emily Raboteau's new book, Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against 'The Apocalypse.' In today's episode, Raboteau tells Here & Now's Celeste Headlee what she learned about radical care, resilience and interdependence through the people she met in her community and in her travels, and how she thinks about parenting through personal and global hardships.
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The writer Colm Tóibín says he never meant to write a sequel to his 2009 novel Brooklyn. But an image came to him years later, of his protagonist from that book suddenly finding out her husband has had an affair that resulted in a pregnancy — and so he followed the story in Long Island. In today's episode, NPR's Mary Louise Kelly speaks with Tóibín about revisiting Eilis Lacey in her 40s and upending her domestic life.
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Chanel Miller's first book was a critically acclaimed memoir about her sexual assault and the following trial. But she always wanted to write and illustrate books for kids. In today's episode, Miller tells NPR's Andrew Limbong how moving to New York City and ingraining herself into her community inspired Magnolia Wu Unfolds It All, a new book about a young girl and her BFF traversing their neighborhood to return socks that were left behind at the laundromat to their owners.
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Real Americans, the new novel by Rachel Khong, spans generations and decades within a family to understand the ongoing struggle to make sense of race, class and identity in the United States. Like with any family story, there are secrets and confrontations and difficult conversations, too; that desire to fill in the gaps about where we come from and how it has shaped our lineage is at the center of today's interview with Khong and NPR's Juana Summers.
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