(playful music) (bell dings) (playful music continues) - I am Rachel Howzell Hall, and this is "What Fire Brings."

(somber music) The story is about a woman who goes to Topanga Canyon, in the Santa Monica Mountains of Los Angeles, to find a woman who is missing.

And she is pretending to be a writer at this writer's residency, but she is looking for a missing woman.

(somber music) - Topanga is an unbelievably strong character in this book.

Without it, we had this conversation the other day on a panel.

When you have setting as a character, what does that actually mean?

And it means that if you take the setting away, the story collapses.

- Right.

- It can only be set where it's set.

- And it can only be set in Topanga or someplace like that where there's all this beautiful.

It's a beautiful forest, the Santa Monica Mountains.

And you know, we have mountain lions in the middle of Los Angeles.

You know, we have all this wildlife.

So, I wanted to take the story of a place where I didn't really know it because it's hard to get there.

It's this two-lane highway with boulders and trees and cliffs, and you wanna look, but you don't because then you're like, fly off the side of the hill and then you're dead.

And what good is that?

So, I wanted somewhere that was close enough and yet, you're a world away.

What does that do to someone who, you know, is going up there under false pre pretenses anyway?

And who doesn't really know anything about living with mountain lions on a day-to-day basis?

The story started a long time ago before I even put pen to paper.

I read Dennis Lehane's "Shutter Island," which I loved.

- My absolute favorite story.

- Then I saw Christopher Nolan's 'Memento'.

So, it's like, ooh, memory.

And how do you remember things and who gets to remember what?

It's like, oh, I wanna write a story about memory, about trauma, about, you know, arriving to a place and not knowing exactly why you're there or even who you are.

(mysterious music) - I'm Alma Katsu and this is "The Fervor."

It's set at the end of World War II.

And there's a mysterious disease that's going through the internment camps that causes people to get incredibly aggressive and fight each other, and then they usually pass away.

And so some of the residents of one of the internment camps is trying to get to the bottom of this.

And at the same time, we're seeing in the outside world that the contagion is starting to leak into the general public.

(excited music) - You've taken some of history's most frightening moments.

You're talking about the Titanic sinking and the Donner Party, and you've turned these into horror novels.

And I wonder is the mindset, okay, these are horrible events, I'm now gonna make them scarier?

- Well, you know, I didn't expect to be the Irwin Allen of, you know, writing historical novels.

But the Donner Party story did very well.

And they were like, okay, what natural, I mean, what disaster are you gonna pick next?

So, what's bigger disaster in the public's mind than the Titanic?

The real change came when we came to The Fervor.

Publishing industry, you know, knowledge was that audiences were getting a little bit tired of a lot of historical periods.

So, they said, at the time, World War II stories were very popular.

And because my family has a personal connection to the internment, I thought that, you know, that was a great story to try to bring to life.

(excited music) - I love to ask this of horror writers.

What scares you?

- So, almost nothing scares me 'cause I worked genocides and mass atrocities.

And I saw real horror, right?

What people have really done to other people.

And that's what I mean, life can be really horrible.

And that's what I try to show, like, especially in the horror novels, it's not the monster that's gonna get you, it's the monster in the human that's gonna get you.

- I'm S.A. Cosby, author of "All the Sinners Bleed."

"All The Sinners Bleed" is the story of Titus Crown.

He's the first Black sheriff in a small southern town.

And then on the one year anniversary of his election, there's a terrible tragedy at the school.

And this tragedy unearthed an even deeper and more disturbing crime.

- I've heard you talk about how you love to pile on your characters.

Will you talk about how, Titus in particular, but even all the other characters in this book?

Yeah.

I mean, you've created this unbelievable cast in this small town, this small county that are larger than life, but wow.

Do they get beaten down?

- Oh yeah.

Somebody, a friend of mine who's a writer, I don't know if it's his original quote, he said, "Writing is putting your character in a tree and then throwing rocks at him."

And I think there was times where I was throwing bricks at Titus and cinder blocks and, you know, whole bags of gravel.

But he took it because he can bear the weight.

And but also, like you said, the other characters, his deputies, his father, his brother, there's all these characters that are dealing with so many complex issues.

But for me, the thing that binds them, the thing that elevates the book is that they love each other.

(solemn music) - [J.T.]

Talk to me about building, these towns that you set your books in.

- Well, I mean, I grew up there, so like, you know, I just changed the names so nobody would get mad at me.

But I think the small town in America, whether it's in the rural south or rural Midwest, is a microcosm of the rest of the country.

You know, you have people who are tolerant, you have people who are progressive people, conservative.

You have people who are hard to like, hard to love, but they're all in it together.

I wanted people to see, you know, the things that I love about being a southerner and also the things that I detest.

I think the South is sort of like that relationship you have with family.

I can talk about it, you would better not say anything about it.

But I think because I'm here and because I'm a part of it, I can discuss it in a way that I think maybe someone who didn't grow up here maybe can't or doesn't understand it as intrinsically as somebody who did grow up here does.

- I'm Eli Cranor, and this is "Broiler."

You've got Luke Jackson, who's a plant manager.

You've got his wife, Mimi Jackson.

He's trying to move up the ladder in this business.

And because he is doing that, he's upping the production rate.

He's making it even harder and harder on his workers.

Then you have Gabriela Menchaca and you have Edwin Saucedo.

Because of Luke pushing and pushing and pushing and pushing for more and more and more, it sets off a chain of events that cause those four people to just come crashing together.

(dramatic music) - It's a story of four people who are really in their own ways on the edge of desperation.

And I wonder what it is about desperation that just makes for great setting and character.

- Mm.

If you really boil it down, this book is about, the chicken processing industry in Arkansas, and it's really about motherhood and more specifically miscarriage.

As I went on tour for this book, I was having to talk about those things, my wife got to go with me on the first leg of it.

And so I was trying to tell some of our experiences and then I was trying to compare it to, you know, chicken processing.

And she goes, "Eli, you're missing one word.

Like there's one word that connects those two worlds.

Desperation."

We were desperate when we were entering those stages of our parenthood.

These workers are desperate, you know, it's a desperate industry for... And so, yeah, you nailed it.

Desperation is really the word of the book.

(dramatic music) My wife is always my first reader, and so she usually just gives me a thumbs up or a thumbs down.

You know, it either passes the test or it doesn't pass the test.

But for this one, it was so much more than that.

It was making sure that those details of miscarriage, new motherhood, that they were at least ringing true to her experience and our experience.

'Cause you can't write to everybody's experience.

But I'll tell you what came of that, trying to write through that pain and then sharing it with my wife, it was almost like therapy.

- It's almost cathartic.

- It was so cathartic for both of us.

- Hi, I'm Sloane Crosley, and this is "Grief is for People."

(solemn music) It's the story of what happened in 2019.

I left my apartment for one hour and came back to find all my jewelry missing.

I was burglarized.

And then exactly one month later, my best friend died by suicide.

And it's about me struggling to figure out where these losses fit together and struggled to find the reasoning of why he took his own life.

(solemn music) - I wanna talk about the jewelry itself and what it meant to you and how it shaped your life.

Because I think it's fascinating that was your entry point to talk about Russell's death.

- Well, Russell, a lot of the book, there's a part where I struggle with, I think is this... What do my friend and I have in common, and what makes us different?

He loved objects and not in a superficial way.

He loved the history behind them.

It was almost like his house was like an orphanage for, you know, lost weird things, which makes him sound like a hoarder.

But he loved the flea market, you know, he loved that kind of thing.

He loved collecting items.

And so there was this month, like I said, between when the burglary happened and when he died and he was trying to help me find the jewelry.

So, they are really interconnected in this funny way.

And then the saddest part without giving away too much of the book, is at some point we're out for drinks.

And I was griping to him, and this is the last night I saw him.

About, you know, maybe I had a lead on where the jewelry might be, maybe I didn't.

And the last thing he said to me when he walked me back to my apartment door is he said, "Well, if it makes you feel any better, you can't take it with you when you go."

And then he walked off into the dark, and that was the last time I saw him.

So his story and my story, even though it's much smaller and more of a keyhole into the room, that is his life, they're connected.

- Hi, my name is Nghi Vo and this is "The City in Glass."

It is about the end of the world, and it is about finding out who you are after the end because if you survive the end of the world, it is your duty and your privilege to make the new one.

And this book takes a step towards maybe demonstrating how someone does it.

(techno music) - So, who knew a demon could teach us so much about love?

- Probably not me, I just wrote the book.

- You were the one that started this idea, but who knew that a demon could have the capability to love?

- Well, here's the thing.

When I think about demons, I think about passion.

I think about defiance.

I think about getting your own way no matter what.

And I think about blazing a path through a world that doesn't love you very much.

And when I thought about who I wanted defending a city, it was a demon.

- Made sense then.

So, in "The City of Glass," you flip the narrative.

You know, when we think about demons stereotypically because we don't wanna stereotype demons.

- Absolutely not.

They're bigger than we are.

- That's right.

We think about creatures that haunt, deceive, that's the stereotype.

But in this book, the demon vitrine is deeply in love with the city of Azril and its people.

What is it about fantasy that compels you so much to write it?

- Because if I can have robot horses and demons and angels and dragons and ghosts, why wouldn't I?

So far, no one has stopped me and said, "Oh, you can't do that."

They're like, "No, go get that.

Go figure that one out."

- I wondered if you thought that there was a target audience for this book.

- Oh, no, that sounds like something that sounds like Tordotcom's problem.

- (laughs) Sounds like a publisher problem.

- If they bought it, if they're putting press behind it, that, I'm going to let them figure that out.

Like I don't read my own reviews, but apparently, one of the reviews that my agent sent to me was five stars, and the only thing written underneath it was, "WTF."

I'm like, I guess it's for that person.

- Hi, my name is Prisca Dorcas Mojica Rodriguez, and I'm the author of "Tias and Primas."

(lively music) I'm really interested in this concept of democratizing knowledge.

So, like theory that you learn in academia.

How do we translate that for Latinas and how do they see themselves reflected in it?

And so, I've just embarked on a few strategies for it in my books and it was just like embodying all these intense theoretical terms in real people.

(gentle music) - Talk to me a little bit about your personal experience growing up in Nicaragua and how that has made that into this book.

- I grew up really close to my mom's family.

There's like a saying, "Sons leave, daughters stay forever."

And so she modeled that by, we were always at my maternal grandmother's house.

I grew up raised by her sisters, and they're very prominent in this book.

There are people, I could like tell you how they smell, how they laugh, the fold in their neck, but then we moved to the US and it was really stark.

It was sharp, the switch of being around so many people who are so invested in you to feeling really isolated.

And so, also, I write the book from that place of grief.

(somber music) - [J.T.]

How does this explore some of the themes from your previous work?

- It has a lot of the same, like I talk about colorism, European standards of beauty, I talk about fat phobia in my first book, which I talk about, there's a whole chapter on that, perfectionism.

Just like the ways that women are socialized, you know, like the silent and emotional labor that we put into keeping these families together.

And so yeah, it's a lot of the same topics.

It is, for me, a different strategy for writing that stuff out.

- I'm Jayne Anne Phillips, and this is "Night Watch."

It starts nine years after the Civil War, in 1874.

It's a family story about a mother and daughter, and they're going on a journey to the Transallegheny Lunatic Asylum.

I wanted to go back and write about our own civil war in a way that was very, very deeply personal.

It was about the effects on the populace, the civilians, as well as the soldiers.

We all encounter trauma in our lives, but part of the nature of the book is that these constant journeys continue.

People are trying to find their families again, and they persist despite all.

(rousing music) - The major setting in this book is an asylum, a mental institution.

And I have to admit, I had no idea that there were even such things in 1874.

When you started looking into doing this book, did you know this already?

- Well, I grew up about 20 minutes from Weston West Virginia, which is where the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum was built.

It was the first major allocation of funds that Virginia had ever made in the state.

There were no roads, there were no canals, there was nothing.

So that was a piece of the book that I really wanted to emphasize.

Many people don't know about moral treatment, which was a kind of humane treatment for the mentally ill.

In 1852, Thomas Story Kirkbride was the most powerful psychiatrist in America, and he wrote a book about how to build asylums.

And every state at that time was encouraged to build one of these vast Kirkbride buildings for their state.

And the irony at the heart of "Night Watch" is that within the asylum, moral treatment reigned.

And it was a place of healing, whereas the world outside was a very brutal world.

- I'm Renee Watson, and this is "Skin & Bones."

(mysterious music) "Skin & Bones" is about Lena, who is on the eve of getting married.

She's 40 years old.

She lives in Portland, Oregon.

And the book is about what one generation passes down to the next in regards to beauty, love, forgiveness, and faith.

And I got the idea from watching a child mimicking a conversation that she overheard, and all the adults in the room were like, "Where'd you get that language from?"

And it was very clear that she had gotten it from the adults that were in her life.

And so I just thought, "Huh, what are young people listening to and hearing and what are they picking up from us and how can we be more aware and intentional about what we're passing down to them?"

- All the women in her life are a source of love, but also a source of conflict.

- Yeah.

- Can you talk more about that?

- Well, relationships are complicated and I really wanted to explore that friction between sticking with it.

When you love someone, but they've disappointed you, they've hurt you.

How do you forgive and have difficult conversations and not just cancel people or say, "Well, we're no longer friends, you're not in my life anymore because we disagree on something."

- You say in the book, we're told to forgive, but they don't teach us how.

- Yeah.

- I mean, how do we forgive?

- Forgiveness isn't a one time thing.

Like it's something you have to nurture and grow and I can say, "I forgive you" and then I gotta do the work to actually forgive you.

And that's hard work.

So I think it includes listening and grace and being honest that you're hurt.

I think sometimes, I don't care.

Whatever.

- You're fine.

- It's fine.

And you're not fine.

And that's okay to not be fine.

And I think the person who's done the offense also has to practice patience and understanding that I'm not the mistake that I made, but I also need to give this person time to forgive me and to heal.

Healing takes time.

And so I think you can forgive someone and still be in a process of healing and that that's just a lot of work.

- I am Adam Ross and this is my novel "Playworld."

"Playworld" is the story about Griffin Hurt, who at the beginning of the novel, is a 14-year-old child actor living in New York.

The novel spans a really bad year in the life of this boy and also in the life of his family that reverberate beyond the frame of the novel for the rest of Griffin's life.

(gentle music) - [J.T.]

It's on the back cover, so it's not a spoiler.

- [Adam] Sure.

- His parent's friend Naomi, who is their age, falls in love with him.

And it's a sexual awakening, it seems like almost for her as well throughout the book.

- [Adam] Yes.

- Let's talk about how impossible it is for a young boy who knows nothing about the world, to have a woman like that who's preying on him in many ways.

- Part of what I'm really trying to describe was this period of time and an era of parenting, right?

Where we had so much independence as children, we had so much freedom.

It wasn't that you were seen but not heard in that era.

And it wasn't like Charlie Brown Peanuts where the adults were around you going like, "Wah, wah, wah wah."

- Wah, wah, wah, wah.

- But that your encounters with adults could be adults could be so absent and then so out of nowhere, suddenly, intense and overwhelming.

And so the relationship that Griffin has with Naomi is one that on a certain level, like he desperately needs, because he suffers from a lack of attention.

So when Griffin's encounter with certain adults in the novel, whether it's Naomi and his subsequent relationship with her, whether it's his wrestling coach, he doesn't have the protection of the adults around him.

- Hey, this is Andre Dubus III and we're talking about my book, "Ghost Dogs: On Killers and Kin."

(lively music) - [Jeremy] Some writers choose to write fiction because you can protect your secrets, but still write about them.

- [Andre] Yeah.

- But in nonfiction essays, such as what you've written in "Ghost Dogs," you have to bear your soul.

So why do it?

- Well, I'm kind of a boundaryless guy.

I mean, I'll ask you how much you make, how's your prostate, I mean I ask these kind of questions of people.

- I appreciate that.

I'm a fellow question asker, So I get it.

- I'm deeply interested in people and I tend to be pretty transparent.

I don't know, I love the essay form.

If you speak French, you know that the word essaye means to try or to attempt and the word essay comes from that verb.

And so each essay is an attempt to make some sense of something that you've gone through.

What I discovered early in my writing life is I do a lot better creatively, Jeremy, when I go far afield from my own life circumstance.

But every now and then, you know, I'd finish something, it takes me three to five years to write a novel say, and there'd be an experience in my life that I really felt I need to explore with language and that'd be an essay.

(upbeat music) - I do wanna ask you finally about your children and how that changed you as a writer.

I wonder what you think it does to men and our writing when we become fathers?

- My true life began when I became a dad.

I mean, and I've been a dad for 31 1/2 years.

All I can say is that it opened my heart in a way that I don't know if my heart would've ever opened otherwise.

And my first feeling as I lay eyes on our first child is, "Oh, it's you."

Like I recognized him from another life or other lives.

I've never felt more joy than I've felt being a father.

And I've had some wonderful experiences outside of fatherhood and I've never felt more fear.

You know that line from Hemingway?

When you have a child, the world forever takes a hostage.

- Right.

- Forever and ever.

But look how much love you have.

I can't get over it.

- Hi, my name is Andrew Maraniss and I'm the author of "Strong Inside: Perry Wallace and the Collision of Race and Sports in the South," 10th Anniversary edition.

At the most basic level, this is a biography of Perry Wallace, who is the first Black basketball player in the SEC.

But what it's really about is examining racism and the civil rights movement through the eyes of a Black teenager in the 1960s.

And then seeing the impact that this person had as a pioneer on a larger community.

- How does he describe his treatment playing for the SEC playing in the SEC when he was, what was the worst he encountered?

- So his sophomore year, he becomes the first black player ever to play a game in Oxford.

Perry was hit intentionally with an elbow bleeding from his nose.

He's dizzy, he can't see out of one of his eyes.

The referees don't even call a foul.

And so it's not until the ball rolls out of bounds that the student manager is able to come out to assist Perry.

And he said the crowd stood and cheered the fact that Perry was injured and was bleeding.

They both felt this like wetness on their back of their neck and fans were spitting on them and dumping cokes on them.

But what he said was the most difficult part of that experience was what happened at halftime, actually.

And this gets to this idea of Perry saying that it wasn't being treated poorly that was the hardest part, it was not being treated at all.

And so in the locker room, he's sitting on the training table with a bag of ice on his face.

All the other players, all the coaches, the student managers and trainers run back onto the court and they leave Perry on that training table by himself.

And he knows he's gonna have to walk back through that tunnel out onto the court where these fans have been harassing him the whole first half.

(gentle music) - What draws you to this?

What draws you to this intersection of sports and justice?

- I think what sports does it is exposes inequity and hypocrisy in ways that are so blatant because we're told that sports is a level playing field.

You know, and all that matters is your talent, right?

But then we see in so many of these cases that I write about, well, that's not exactly true.

- Yeah.

- I'm Signe Pike and this is "The Shadowed Land," a retelling of the Arthurian legend based on new scholarship also around a historical figure.

Ling Goeth, who was an actual queen in Scotland in the early sixth century.

(lively music) - Why did you choose to focus on her as a character as you're bringing in all of the other legendary and historical characters?

- I think for me, it was always about Ling worth.

Discovering her, and that she was a real historical figure, married to a historical king.

That her brother happened to be, her twin brother, happened to be the man who inspired the legend of Merlin was an afterthought for me because the life that she lived and the events that she went through from the coming of Christianity to the increased aggression of the Anglo-Saxons that were moving into the eastern coast of Scotland at the time, she experienced such a life of pain and beauty and upheaval that I knew from the beginning that I wanted to tell her story.

And the fact that Arturian characters were tangential to her was just an added bonus to me.

(lively music) As you know, a lot of people assume that these books are fantasy because they deal with the Arthurian canon.

And I make a big point in my author's note to talk about how these are historical fiction and why.

Just because we're writing about pre-Christian religion does not mean that this is fantasy.

Everything, especially in "The Shadowed Land," we're talking about weather work.

People have believed they could influence the weather almost in every culture across humanity.

And so this is actually a really ancient tradition.

It just so happens that Scotland is one of those really special places where a lot of those traditions, as you know, when you go visit, they last and they last.

It was exciting moment for me to be able to take weather working and plunk it into these books and really weave it in to show people what ancient Celtic thought would really have been like.

(playful music)