Poured Over: Leila Mottley on Nightcrawling
“I really wanted to depict the ways that young Black girls are made adults by a culture that sees us…
This is a show for readers who pore over details, obsess over sentences, ideas, stories and characters. Follow us here or on your favorite podcast app for surprising riffs, candid conversations, a few laughs, and more from big name authors and those on their way to being big names. We’re on Apple Podcasts and Spotify; and you can find video editions of most episodes on our YouTube channel.
“I really wanted to depict the ways that young Black girls are made adults by a culture that sees us…
“Tracy never went away. So yes, you can say I’m bringing her back, but the culture kept her in circulation…
“I missed it so much. And definitely didn’t get it or appreciate the specialness of it, or this particular beauty…
Our podcast, Poured Over, is a show for readers who pore over details, obsess over sentences and ideas and stories…
“I was very, very unintentionally smart in that I started it as a short story, I genuinely believed it was…
“I didn’t want it to be just very overwhelming dark book. I mean, it has so much tragedy that I…
“And I had to actually give up and say, Okay, maybe I’ll go to the grave not having written a…
“I’m always coming back to Chicasetta, in the same way that Ernest Gaines always comes back to Bayonne parish. And…
“I had a dream about them. I have like these really cinematic dreams. And I woke up from this one.…
“…You have to have so much primary source material that you are drowning, you think you can never get through…
“That was really what I wanted to get at. The relationships that you have with the people who you love…
We’re kicking off Pride Month with one of our absolute favorite writers, David Levithan—we have a B&N Exclusive Edition of…
“But then when I read that Raymond Carver said he didn’t have the ability to write, you know, a full…
“For me, part of the fun of coming-of-age novels, both reading and writing is getting to have that adult perspective…
“I was thinking about caretaking. And I was thinking about mothers because I lost my mom last year, but just…
“…It’s like if Tim Burton decorated Versailles for Halloween…” Heather Walter’s queer retelling of Sleeping Beauty kicked off with Malice,…
“For me, the novel form is the greatest expression because it has that room, that latitude to really explore for…
“And the title, of course, has this double meaning, the financial meaning of trust, and let’s call it, emotional meaning…
“I grew up hearing The Ramayana over lunch. My grandma would tell me little bits and pieces to me and my younger…
“And so then, I felt like that’s when I had to go back to the beginning of telling my story…