Poured Over: Nicholas Dawidoff on The Other Side of Prospect
“When I came back, I was thinking about how to tell the story. And I wanted to meet people who…
Miwa Messer
Miwa Messer is the creator, executive producer and host of our podcast, Poured Over, a show for readers who pore over details, obsess over sentences and ideas and stories and character — readers who ask a lot of questions, just like her, a career bookseller who’s always reading.
Poured Over: George Saunders on Liberation Day
“By making a certain voice, then I’m going to force myself to do new things in that story. The voice…
Listen Up! November 2022 on Poured Over
Time flies when you have great books to read—and a terrific literary podcast to keep you company. This November we’re…
Poured Over: Constance Wu on Making a Scene
“I was always in a play, always in rehearsals. And if I wasn’t in a play, I was counting the…
Poured Over: Lydia Millet on Dinosaurs: A Novel
“There’s kind of aspect of melancholy that I love as a reader…But I can’t write a book that I wouldn’t…
Poured Over: Sequoia Nagamatsu on How High We Go in the Dark
“I think this the knee-jerk reaction to pandemic literature—that I think a lot of readers might have as well, I…
Poured Over: Morgan Talty on Night of the Living Rez
“I want to tell stories. I hate the whole don’t tell, show mantra because it’s not true—it has its like…
Poured Over: Celeste Ng on Our Missing Hearts
“He thinks of himself as a character in a fairy tale in a way who’s going on a quest. And…
Poured Over: Jess Kidd on The Night Ship
“I want to escape into these like incredible, immersive situations, really. But I think I try and balance this kind…
National Book Awards Finalists 2022
[Drumroll, please!] The National Book Foundation has announced the five finalists in each of five categories for the 2022 National…
Poured Over: Sarah Thankam Mathews on All This Could Be Different
“So you know, something that is a big part of my project…is actually this idea that we deserve pleasure. I…
Poured Over: Laura Warrell on Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm
“I feel like very often when we have stories about womanizing characters, whether we piece those stories out, so we…
Poured Over: Hafizah Augustus Geter on The Black Period
“I did nothing but read the entire time I was writing this….literally every waking moment, I was doing some type…
Poured Over: Bobby Finger on The Old Place
“Ever since we left, when I was 13, it’s a place that I think about constantly. I think about it…
Poured Over: Andrew Sean Greer on Less is Lost
“I already had a kind of Don Quixote set up in mind. And so I was like, Wouldn’t it be…
Listen Up! October 2022 on Poured Over
Without a doubt, October’s peak Spooky Season—AND the perfect time to curl up with a great book. As always, we’re…
Poured Over: Saeed Jones on Alive at the End of the World
“This book feels very much…drawing from the Black Saints: Whitney Houston, Paul Mooney, Little Richard, Luther Vandross, almost my own…
Poured Over: Abdulrazak Gurnah on Afterlives
“Well, home is a complicated concept….So you’ve shaken me awake at three o’clock in the morning. Where’s home? I’ll say…
Poured Over: Ian McEwan on Lessons
“I’m heading into my mid 70s and I really want to just get into a novel and live inside it.…
Poured Over: Jonathan Escoffery, Yiyun Li and Ling Ma on The Art of Fiction
“I start with the emotion. I don’t know what the story is. I don’t know who the characters are necessarily.…