All Episodes

Francis Spufford on Blitz London, archangels, and the temptation to change history.

Madeleine Dunnigan on heated rivalries, women writing desire, and boyhood’s pressure systems

Jonathan Mahler on the 1980s New York that made Trump — and Michael Chabon’s comic-book Gotham

Laurie Gwen Shapiro on Amelia Earhart, Harriet the Spy, and the art of rewriting legend

Ada Calhoun on Ghostwriting, Thornton Wilder, and the audacity of desire

Geoff Dyer on Bad Food, Jazz Renegades, and the "Soviet Resignation" of Post-War Britain

Biographer Katherine Bucknell on Christopher Isherwood's Odyssey from Weimar Berlin to California

Legendary Publisher Edwin Frank in Praise of Rudyard Kipling — and Why the 20th Century Novel Matters

Jeanette Winterson on ghosts, tech bros, and what her success taught her about class in Britain

Jennifer Kabat on America's forgotten populist uprising and the politics of place

Ricky Ian Gordon's Odyssey of Sex, Drugs and Opera

YA author Rex Ogle on Life as a Poor Kid in a Land of Plenty

Helen Phillips on a mother's primal love, and the perfidy (and promise) of AI in her novel, Hum

Musician Orenda Fink on Glass Castles, Witchy Mothers, and Family Dysfunction

Jennifer Belle on complicated teenage girls, and writing with Madonna

Curtis Sittenfeld on writing comedy, and Jane Austen's headstrong heroines

Ada Zhang on the Lives of Others and stanning Eudora Welty

The Dead Presidents Society with Actor Dylan Baker

Ramit Sethi on money, pleasure, and finding moments of awe

Season Three is Coming: turn the page on a new chapter.

Between Dystopias: Marlon James and Hafizah Augustus Geter Live at Deep Water Lit Fest 23

DJ Taylor on George Orwell's literary genesis, and why the author of 1984 still matters

Christopher Bollen on Graham Greene, Agatha Christie, and the abiding pleasures of the whodunnit

Joanna Quinn, author of The Whalebone Theater, on secret gardens, complicated heroines, and procrastination.

Ari Shapiro on singing for Bono, cooking for Nina Totenberg, and what novels teach him.

Reading Stephen King with Sera Gamble, co-creator of the hit show, You.

Brooke Gladstone on her terrible waitressing, the future of media, and why Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita resonates today

Jerry Stahl on a bus trip to Auschwitz, his friendship with Anthony Bourdain, and Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust.

A Year in Reading with Joyce Maynard, Darcey Steinke, Edmund White, and John Waters

Marion Nestle on late starts, unhappy families and her war on food myths

Leila Taylor on Shirley Jackson's Haunted Houses, Black Goth, and Being a "Creepy Kid."

Lydia Millet on writing about goodness; and Mary Ruefle makes a cameo.

Orlando Figes on writing history, radioactive fungi, and why Madame Bovary is the greatest novel ever written

A.M. Homes on absurdity, satire, and the troubles of men

Jonathan Escoffery on tough guys, the joys of ackee, and writing the books we need to see in the world

Seán Hewitt, author of All Down Darkness Wide, on love, loss, and poetry

Michael Cunningham on originality in fiction, and realizing his destiny while bartending at a tiki bar

Director Anthony Fabian on Mrs Harris, talking cats, and Colum McCann's sexy resurrection of Nuryev

Douglas Stuart on love and war in 1980s Glasgow and Cromwell's England

Sondre Lerche on Marguerite Duras, and the alchemy of love

William Boyd on Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, and the art of the comic novel

Courtney Maum on riding out depression (literally), and the children's party that changed her life.

Melissa Gilbert on family secrets, escaping Hollywood, and L.A. noir

David Hare on not being a nice boy, the irrelevance of critics, and bourgeois marmalade

Season Two is coming: bookworms, are you ready?

Kevin Barry on reading Annie Dillard, and finding his voice through Saul Bellow

Meredith Talusan on Complex Women in Literature

Peeling an orange with rare food hunter Dan Saladino

Brendan Slocumb on time traveling with Anthony Doerr and Hanif Abdurraqib

Brian Broome on Mary Karr's The Liar's Club, and the art of writing memoir

Darcey Steinke on writing the female body and avoiding the paparazzi with Jackie O.

Joyce Maynard on memoir, Salinger, and the original Spider-verse

Becky Ann Baker on Somerset Maugham, and life as Lena Dunham's screen mom

John Birdsall: The Complicated Legacy of James Beard

Nic Stone: On Losing Her Religion, and Revisiting The Virgin Suicides

Alan Cumming: On Visiting Gore Vidal and Reading Jean Rhys

Sarah Waters: On the Brothers Grimm and Victorian Sex

John Waters: On the Serious Pleasures of a Bright Young Thing