Listen Up! October 2023 on Poured Over
Nights are getting longer and days are getting darker, and the reading is always good…
We’re featuring some of our favorite writers on Poured Over this month, including bestselling storytellers we’ve read since we were young (and continue to read years later), National Book Award winners, former Discover Debut Author picks, and more.
Fair to say generations of readers have found their way to story (and stayed) thanks to Jacqueline Woodson (Brown Girl Dreaming) and Rick Riordan (The Lightning Thief). Jacqueline joins us on the show to talk about Remember Us, her new novel for middle readers and Another Brooklyn, a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction and an indelible, elegiac novel she wrote for adults. Rick Riordan surprised everyone (including himself) with a 6th Percy Jackson novel, The Chalice of the Gods, and he joined us on the show to talk about Percy, Disney+, Celtic Mythology and his Rick Riordan Presents imprint.
Jonathan Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude) goes back home and back in time in his latest, Brooklyn Crime Story. Benjamin Labatut (When We Cease to Understand the World) tells a story of science and discovery in The Maniac. We’ve been waiting for new work from acclaimed authors Jesmyn Ward (Sing, Unburied, Sing) and Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake). Ward’s new novel, Let Us Descend, is a taut and poetic story of family and freedom and home. Lahiri wrote her luminous new collection, Roman Stories, in Italian before translating it back into English — and transporting readers. Over a decade ago, Justin Torres (We the Animals) lost an early draft of the manuscript that became his showstopper of a second novel, Blackouts, that asks us who gets to tell stories and why. Former Discover Debut Author pick Bryan Washington (Memorial) returns to Houston in Family Meal, a novel about love and beauty and grief. Bestselling author Jean Kwok (Searching for Sylvia Lee) returns with a pulse-pounding story of marriage and motherhood in The Leftover Woman. Pauls Toutonghi cuts across time and countries in The Refugee Ocean, and we close out the month with Hazardous Spirits, a gothic novel from Anbara Salam; Organ Meats, a wild new novel from former Discover Debut Author K-ming Chang (Bestiary); and The Berry Pickers, a debut novel about love and loss and family by Amanda Peters.
And we have wonderful new nonfiction as well. Poet Safiya Sinclair (Cannibal) joins us to talk about her gorgeous memoir, How to Say Babylon. (Fans of Educated by Tara Westover will want to stat this one ASAP.) Documentary filmmaker (Vincent Who? and Dear Corky) and co-founder of the Asian American Writers Workshop Curtis Chin takes us to 1980s Detroit in his memoir, Everything I Learned, I Learned in a Chinese Restaurant. Sy Montgomery (The Soul of an Octopus) teams up with illustrator Matt Patterson for Of Time and Turtles, a beguiling work of memoir and natural science. Former B&N Monthly Nonfiction pick Margaret Renkl (Late Migrations) delivers a shimmering new memoir of family and place (again with illustrations from her brother), in The Comfort of Crows.