A fun, spoiler-free conversation with Linden Lewis about her fabulous new novel The Second Rebel, the sequel to The First Sister, our first Speculative Fiction Monthly Pick. Linden joins us on the show to talk about Space Opera, world-building, scrapping full first drafts, giving yourself permission to write what you want to write, and more. Produced/Hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. Featured Books: The Second Rebel and The First Sister by Linden Lewis, Red Rising by Pierce Brown, The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang, The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood. Poured Over is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. New episodes drop every Tuesday and Thursday. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Grief, trauma and tragedy run through Kat Chow’s family tree, with everything coming together in 1980s Connecticut. Kat joins us on the show to talk about death and grief, ghosts and survival and debt, what it was like to report her own family’s story, taxidermy as metaphor, and more. Featured books: Seeing Ghosts by Kat Chow and Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala. Produced/Hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. Poured Over is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays.

If you were offered a life-changing do-over, would you take it? That’s the central question at the heart of Miranda Cowley Heller’s stunning debut novel, The Paper Palace. Miranda joins us on the show to talk about impossible choices, her love of Jane Austen, getting out of your own way, what poetry taught her about writing prose, and more. Featured books: The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller, Light Years by James Salter and 99 Stories of God by Joy Williams. Featured poets: Dorianne Laux, Sharon Olds, James Wright, Walt Whitman and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Produced/hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang.   Poured Over is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays.   Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays.

We stayed up impossibly late one night because we just had to know how Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s The Gods of Jade and Shadow ends. (Sleep is overrated when you need to know if a young woman can help the Mayan God of Death reclaim his throne in Jazz-era Mexico). We did it again with the creepy, unsettling Mexican Gothic, one of our favorite books last year, and again with The Beautiful Ones, our May 2021 Speculative Fiction Monthly Pick. Silvia joins us on the show to talk about her new noir, Velvet Was the Night, breaking convention and writing across genres for each of her books, the importance of storytelling, and more. Featured titles: Velvet was the Night and Mexican Gothic by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Bath Haus by P.J. Vernon. Hosted/Produced by Kat Sarfas and engineered by Harry Liang.   Poured Over is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays.   Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Vianne and Isabelle, Leni, Elsa: Millions of readers have fallen head-over-heels for the heroines of Kristin Hannah’s most recent blockbusters, each one an unforgettable literary page-turner combining character, story and emotional payoff. Kristin joins us on the show to take readers behind the scenes of three of her biggest books, her evolution as a writer and more. Featured books: The Four Winds, The Great Alone and The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah; We Begin at the End by Chris Whitaker (a B&N Book Club Pick); Lightning Strike by William Kent Krueger; The Nickel Boys and Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead; The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien; and Whose Names Are Unknown by Sanora Babb. Produced/Hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. Poured Over is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays.   Follow us here for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

Chicago, 1944. Aki Ito and her parents arrive in town, expecting to be met by Rose, their oldest daughter. But tragedy has struck, and now Aki Ito is determined to discover what happened to her sister in this historical thriller. Naomi Hirahara joins us on the show to discuss sisterhood and coming-of-age, Japanese-American Internment and the 100-442nd Infantry Battalion, and the influence Chester Himes, Walter Mosley and Barbara Neely had on her work — and more. Featured Books: Clark and Division and the Mas Arai series by Naomi Hirahara and Japanese Americans in Chicago, Illinois by Alice Kishiye Murata. Produced/Hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang.   Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Everyone has a secret to protect in a small Scottish Highlands town in Charlotte McConaghy’s new novel, Once There Were Wolves, the follow-up to her hit debut, Migrations (now in paperback). Charlotte joins us on the show to talk about writing literary fiction with crime elements, rewilding places and people, exploring empathy and hope through dark stories, and more. Featured books: Once There Were Wolves and Migrations by Charlotte McConaghy and The Overstory by Richard Powers. Produced/Hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. Poured Over is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. New episodes drop Tuesday and Thursday. Follow us here for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

Prepare to have your heart broken in all the best ways by Ash Davidson’s miraculous debut novel, Damnation Spring — our August Discover Pick. She joins us on the show to talk about starting with endings (and making big last-minute story changes); grounding her beautiful prose in real-life stories and first-person research; her love for her characters, and more. Featured Books: Damnation Spring by Ash Davidson, East of Eden by John Steinbeck, Angle of Repose by Wallace Stegner, The Round House by Louise Erdrich, How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C. Pam Zhang, and A Bitter Fog by Carol Von Strum. Produced/Hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. Poured Over is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays.

If you love reading pulse-pounding stories about fictional spies, you’ll love Ben Macintyre’s thrilling true (and bestselling) stories about real-world spies, like The Spy and the Traitor, A Spy Among Friends: Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, and Operation Mincemeat. His latest yes-this-is-absolutely-a-true-story (Ben has the documentation to prove it) book, Agent Sonya, has the pacing of a great novel and plenty of incredible details as the story cuts from Shanghai and Manchuria in the 1920s and 30s to Switzerland and the UK during WWII and into the Cold War (and beyond). Ben joins us on the show to talk about Ursula Burton — wife, mother and dedicated spy — John le Carré, and the joys of writing about espionage (Hint: It’s all about the hunt). Featured book: Agent Sonya by Ben Macintyre. Produced/Hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. Poured Over is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. New episodes drop every Tuesday and Thursday. Follow us here for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

James Baldwin died in 1987, but his work still speaks to us — as if it was written last year, or last month, or even last week. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. joins us on the show to discuss leaving the U.S. in order to write about Baldwin (and why Baldwin came back from Paris); why we’re reaching for Baldwin now, more than three decades after his death; what Baldwin has to teach us about the intersection of memory, history, identity and race — and more. Featured books: Begin Again: James Baldwin’s America and Its Urgent Lessons for Our Own by Eddie S. Glaude, Jr.; No Name in the Street, Nothing Personal and Nobody Knows My Name by James Baldwin. Produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. Poured Over is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify and Stitcher. New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays.

This is what we talk about when we talk about voice: Fern, Gwin and Jesenia are the heart of Carolyn Ferrell's acclaimed new novel, Dear Miss Metropolitan, and their voices are unforgettable. Their story is a story of trauma and grief and hope unlike any you've read before, though readers who love The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead won't want to miss this one. Carolyn joins us on the show to talk about her electrifying novel, the inspiration she draws from the work of Edward P. Jones, and more. Featured books: Dear Miss Metropolitan by Carolyn Ferrell, the short stories of Edward P. Jones, Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and Ill Will by Dan Chaon. Produced/hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

We've run out of superlatives to describe Helen Macdonald’s memoir, H is For Hawk. She’s followed her acclaimed bestseller — which showed many readers a new way of looking at the natural world — with a delightfully smart collection of essays in Vesper Flights, now out in paperback. Helen joins us on the show to talk about how birds’ nests changed her understanding of home, writing in hotel rooms, and what the natural world can teach us about building community and more. Featured books: Vesper Flights and H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George, Missionaries by Phil Klay, and Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. Produced/Hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

Fox & I, Catherine Raven’s tale of an intentional friendship with a wild red fox and how it changed her, is a kaleidoscopic meld of quiet observation, sharp reflection, wry humor and poetry. She joins us on the show to talk about empathy, what it means to be alone but not lonely, and other brilliant and surprising lessons she learned from her companion. Featured titles: Fox & I: An Uncommon Friendship by Catherine Raven, The Little Prince and Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Moby Dick by Herman Melville, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, The Wolf Hall trilogy by Hilary Mantel, All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, and The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery. Follow us here for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

Sam Kean is an eclectic writer with an affinity for scientific subjects and their weird and darker paths, and he has an inimitable knack for transforming this passionate interest into astonishing story, punctuated with humor and rife with the absurd in his books The Disappearing Spoon, The Violinist’s Thumb, Caesar’s Last Breath, The Tale of the Dueling Neurosurgeons and The Bastard Brigade. His latest book, The Icepick Surgeon, is a tale of scientists and doctors gone amok, crossing the line from experiment to crime, often wrong for all well-intentioned reasons, and what these stories reveal about historic times in which they took place. Sam Kean joins us on the show to talk about pirates, mad paleontologists, scientist-spies, and more. Featured books: The Icepick Surgeon by Sam Kean and Evolution Gone Wrong by Alex Bezzerides.   Follow Us here for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

Readers LOVE Matt Haig's charming, full of heart, and genuinely unputdownable novels The Midnight Library and How to Stop Time and made both of them bestsellers. Like many of us, Matt spent much of 2020 feeling a little anxious, a little frazzled--and looking for comfort, the subject of his latest work, The Book of Comfort. He joins us on the show to talk about hope, change and the importance of weird thinking. Featured books: The Comfort Book, The Midnight Library and Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne and the 1812 version of Grimm's Fairy Tales. Produced/Hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

We’re huge fans of S.A. Cosby’s pulse-pounding noir novels set in Red Hill County, VA—and we’re not alone: Dennis Lehane, Walter Mosley, Lee Child, Stephen King and Laura Lippman are too. But Blacktop Wasteland and Razorblade Tears are more than action-packed thrill rides where the bad guys are very bad and the good guys are doing the best they can with what they have. S.A. Cosby joins us on the show to talk about redemption, family, writers he loves, and making up lies to find the truth. Featured books: Razorblade Tears and Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby, A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley, and The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollack. Produced/Hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

Ayad Akhtar’s plays—Disgraced (Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama), The Who and the What, and Junk¬—and his novels, American Dervish and Homeland Elegies, are electrifying, unforgettable works of art that push audiences and readers to think about community and power, money and success, and what it means to be American. He joins us on the show to talk about the inspiration for the outrageous and wildly funny Homeland Elegies (now available in paperback), Shakespeare and more. Featured books: Homeland Elegies, American Dervish, Disgraced and Junk by Ayad Akhtar; Ravelstein and The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow; Hadji Murat by Leo Tolstoy; Henry IV Part One and Part Two and Coriolanus by William Shakespeare; and Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth. Produced/Hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

We’re not the only readers who adore Casey McQuiston’s super-fun, hilarious—and bestselling—love stories. She joins us on the show to talk about using astrology to help with character development (and more), writing rom-coms during the pandemic, the magical power of true love, Tik Tok and more. Featured titles: Red, White and Royal Blue and One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston, Malibu Rising by Taylor Jenkins Reid, She’s Too Pretty to Burn by Wendy Heard, How to Find a Princess by Alyssa Cole, The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo, Somebody’s Daughter by Ashley C. Ford, Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir and I’ll Be Gone in the Dark by Mary McNamara. Produced/Hosted by Elani Wilson and engineered by Harry Liang.   Follow us here for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

Kiese Laymon — memoirist, essayist, novelist — is one of the most extraordinary and exciting writers working today. Best known for his acclaimed memoir Heavy, he recently bought back the rights to his first two books, the essay collection How to Slowly Kill Yourselves and Others in America and the picaresque coming-of-age novel, Long Division, so he could revise them and send them back into the world as they’re meant to be. He joins us on the show to talk about language and memory, rewriting and rereading. Featured Books: Long Division, How to Slowly Kill Yourselves and Others in America and Heavy by Kiese Laymon, Punch Me Up to the Gods by Brian Broome, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deeshaw Philyaw, Gorilla, My Love by Toni Cade Bambara, and Corregidora by Gayl Jones, Sing, Unburied Sing by Jesmyn Ward and There There by Tommy Orange. Produced/Hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays.

Writer Gerry Allen is trapped at home after a bad fall, isolated in his swank apartment high over Baltimore Harbor — and the strange calls and letters he’s getting won’t stop. Laura Lippman’s killer new novel Dream Girl is a nod to a classic Agatha Christie locked-room mystery with a twisty plot, crackling dialogue, and lots of literary fun. Featured Books: Dream Girl, Lady in the Lake and My Life as a Villainess by Laura Lippman, Misery by Stephen King, Zuckerman Unbound by Philip Roth, Circe by Madeline Miller, Still Here: The Madcap, Nervy, Singular Life of Elaine Stritch by Alexandra Jacobs, and What If It’s Us by Becky Albertalli and Adam Silvera. Produced/Hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes every Tuesday and Thursday.

We fell head over heels for Mostly Dead Things, Kristen Arnett’s wonderful, darkly comic debut novel about family (and taxidermy) set in central Florida — and we’ve been waiting, waiting, waiting for her latest novel, With Teeth, which we tore through as soon as it arrived. Kristen joins us on the show to talk about the family dynamics at the center of With Teeth, queerness on and off the page, nostalgia and more. Featured books: With Teeth by Kristen Arnett, Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Diaz, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls by T. Kira Madden, Edinburgh by Alexander Chee, Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters, Memorial by Bryan Washington, Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor, and Bastard Out of Carolina by Dorothy Allison. Produced/Hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes Tuesdays and Thursdays.

You don't have to be an avid fly fisher to appreciate John Maclean's beautiful new book HOME WATERS, but it will certainly inspire you to spend more time outside. A former Washington correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, with a second career writing books about wildfire, John now splits his time between DC and his family’s cabin on Seeley Lake in Montana. And if you’ve read John’s father’s book, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, you know that cabin, and the Blackfoot River, and John’s Uncle Paul — though you won’t know Uncle Paul’s whole story, until you read HOME WATERS. Featured books: Home Waters by John Maclean, A River Runs Through It by Norman Maclean, Ernest Hemingway's short story, The Big Two-Hearted River (included in his collection In Our Time), and a Sherlock Holmes omnibus. Produced/Hosted by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

You might know Danielle Henderson as the creator of the legendary feminist Ryan Gosling meme (which she later turned into a book); or from her most excellent recaps of Scandal and other shows for Vulture; her work as a television writer; or as the co-host of the screamingly funny movie podcast, I SAW WHAT YOU DID. Danielle’s memoir, THE UGLY CRY, is the unforgettable, darkly comic, true story of her unconventional childhood in the 80s — it’s a complex and wry do-I-laugh-or-do-I-cry memoir, and Danielle’s sublime writing is smart and sharp and not to be missed, but just wait until you meet her wise, horror-movie loving grandmother. Featured books: The Ugly Cry by Danielle Henderson, Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris and Running with Scissors by Augusten Burroughs. Hosted and produced by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays. 

HOW THE WORD IS PASSED is one of our most anticipated books for June 2021 — it’s a powerful portrait of America today, built from our history and Clint Smith’s incredible insight. Writer for @TheAtlantic, teacher and Doctor, Clint Smith is also a poet (Counting Descent) and the host of @thecrashcourse Black American History. Our interview with Clint runs a little longer than usual because there’s so much shared ground to cover. Featured books: How the Word is Passed by Clint Smith, Long Division by Kiese Laymon, The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Dalila Harris, and The Secret Lives of Church Ladies by Deesha Philyaw. Hosted and produced by Miwa Messer and engineered by Harry Liang. Follow us here for new episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays.