Author interviews archive

Jennifer Croft feeds the literary ecosystem

It’s common practice among many publishers to leave translators’ bylines off book covers—an act of erasure that reinforces the widely held belief that original texts are sacred and thus superior to any translation. Jennifer Croft, who is best known for her translations of Nobel Prize-winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk’s books, is challenging readers and critics to rethink this flawed paradigm.

“Our contemporary notion of authority depends upon the existence—still—of a single trustworthy individual. In literature, this figure is the author, the inimitable person who chooses and disposes words,” Croft writes in “Superlichen,” an essay published in Orion Magazine in 2023. “In this mystical-commercial understanding of literature, translators are necessarily suspect. They adulterate the truth, making it impossible to trust. When translators are truly necessary, they’re ideally neither seen nor heard. That way we can tell ourselves that the Original has remained mostly unscathed on its journey into English.”

But books thrive in translation. They reach new readership, and in some cases, the quality of the original text can even improve. Croft, who won the International Booker Prize in 2018 for her translation of Tokarczuk’s Flights, urges readers to consider translation to be co-creation, a labor of interdependent individuals who are building a completely new work of art.

“The translator is the one who writes every single word of the book that you end up reading,” Croft says, speaking from her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma, on a late December morning—the kind of gray day that’s well suited to a discussion about her puckish, unnerving debut novel. “The writer is obviously the person who’s behind everything, which in a way, of course, is true. But I feel like people aren’t fully grasping the essentially, fundamentally collaborative nature, that [a translated work] is a co-authored book. So I really wanted to show that playing out in an exaggerated, humorous way.”

“What is a faithful translation? What is your duty to a text and a person and a vision and also a readership?”

The Extinction of Irena Rey, which earned Croft a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2022, is the story of eight translators who are initially introduced not by name but by their languages of translation (English, Spanish, Serbian, etc.). It’s 2017, and they have convened at the idyllic home of (fictional) world-renowned Polish author Irena Rey. Her house resides at the edge of the Bialowieza Forest, a primeval wood spanning the border of Poland and Belarus. Over the course of the next several weeks, they will translate her presumed magnum opus, Grey Eminence.

Translators aren’t always in contact with an author while translating, but Irena prefers to be highly involved in the process. The translators are forbidden from translating other authors—except two Polish poets widely considered untranslatable—and they must follow Irena’s many house rules, which include no drinking, no eating meat and so on. It is full isolation, full adoration, full commitment to Irena’s genius. But suddenly, Irena vanishes, and the translators are left reeling.

Having lost their moral center, the translators move en masse from room to room, from forest to pub and back to Irena’s house, wondering if Irena’s dead and completely freaking out. It’s such an ominous, claustrophobic setup that the reader would be forgiven for not realizing at first just how funny it all is. There’s a lot of shrieking and kissing and running around with a frantic narrative pace that resembles an old episode of “Scooby-Doo.”

During the gang’s search for clues, they come across some postcards, which only serve to further confuse them. “Postcards are like translation,” Croft says. “There’s the inherent hybrid and potential for clashes between the one side that has the picture and the other side that has the message.” There’s also the potentially troubling political significance of the type of imagery that is selected to represent a place, which can be stereotypical or limiting, “and then it may end up forcing the place to become more like the postcard.”

Croft explains that when postcards were first introduced in the 1860s, they were a revolutionary innovation that allowed more people to send mail, which previously had been a luxury exclusive to the upper classes. “[But the elite] were horrified by the idea that the hired help would be able to read their words,” she says. “I love looking at old postcards, because sometimes you can sense there’s a code happening or a private reference that you just cannot possibly understand.”

The implications of obscured, divided or layered interpretations run rampant in Croft’s novel, which opens with a preface titled “Warning: A Note from the Translator.” We learn that the book is a work of autofiction by Spanish (whose real name is Emi), subsequently translated by English (real name Alexis). Alexis’ translator’s note is dismissive, even derisive, and her footnotes are deliciously scathing. As a translator, she’s doing the unthinkable: sharing her true feelings about the book and even illuminating choices made in the translation process. (For example, when Emi refers to her own “pubis,” Alexis adds the footnote, “Here I have preserved her ridiculous word.”) Their feud renders the story’s perspective so canted, so untrustworthy, that we have no idea which version of events to believe.

“What we do enriches the cultural ecosystem, the linguistic ecosystem. The original text doesn’t even really matter that much.”

Even without quarreling co-authors, autofiction as a genre is a thorny bramble between memoir and fiction, memory and embellishment. The genre is particularly popular with French- and Spanish-language readers. Croft’s first book, Homesick, is a work of autofiction that she wrote in Argentine Spanish while living in Argentina, and it was only sold to an English-language publisher under the condition that it be published as a memoir, presumably because American readers aren’t as comfortable with the gray areas between truth and fiction.

“[Homesick] was kind of inspired by my childhood but [is] definitely not a factual account,” Croft says. “I think that frustration of always talking about what is true and what is not probably fed into the writing of [Irena Rey]. I think also I may have rebelled and made it even more outlandish. Obviously I’ve never fought a duel in a forest.”

The duel is only one of the many ludicrous outcomes of the translators’ search for Irena. It’s also, importantly, between two women: Emi and Alexis. “I actually wrote my PhD dissertation about duels in 20th-century fiction. I was so frustrated that I couldn’t find a single example of a women’s duel, or even a duel between a man and a woman,” Croft says. “A classic dueling premise is to fight over an ethical question. In this case, English and Spanish are fighting—well, at least Spanish believes that they’re fighting over the nature of truth, essentially. What is a faithful translation? What is your duty to a text and a person and a vision and also a readership? How do you truthfully or faithfully convey a sacred message to the world?”

The duel occurs in the Bialowieza Forest, which serves as a classic source of menace and myth. Forests exist in fiction to haunt us, and this one feeds off a history of violence, with corpses from World War II providing nutrients for a fungal network that subsequently feeds the trees and understory, which then feed the deer that feed the Polish villagers, and so on. In fact, the original title for the novel was Amadou, the name of a fungus that parasitically infects trees, serving as an essential decomposer in the forest, and which can also be used as both tinder and fabric.

“Obviously I’m an advocate for translation, and I love translators,” Croft says. “But I also wanted to think about the potentially darker side of translation in a lot of different ways, which goes hand-in-hand with thinking about the power of the translator.” However translation alters the original, or even betrays it, “what we do [as translators] enriches the cultural ecosystem, the linguistic ecosystem. The original text doesn’t even really matter that much. What matters is this potentially really lovely afterlife that [a work] can have, and all of the echoes and reverberations that it can have throughout that ecosystem.”

The concept of a literary afterlife opens us to seeing books as living, changeable works of art, in which language can die and be reborn in translation. Certainly by the end of The Extinction of Irena Rey, the structures that uphold notions like artistic celebrity and all-powerful genius have rotted through and collapsed, and from the remains, something new grows.

Read our starred review of The Extinction of Irena Rey.

Jennifer Croft author photo © Nathan Jeffers.

With her mischievous debut novel, The Extinction of Irena Rey, Jennifer Croft draws readers deep into a gnarled forest in which eight translators search desperately for their beloved, vanished author.

Nonfiction Memoir Essays

Spirit Songs

Shortly after 9/11, Sasha taqʷšəblu LaPointe’s great-grandmother, troubled by the state of the world, commissioned a symphony. A Coast Salish elder and Indigenous language activist, Vi taqʷšəblu Hilbert had no prior connection to classical music. Yet her belief that our broken world desperately needed healing resulted in “The Healing Heart of the First People of This Land,” which was performed by the Seattle Symphony in 2006. The work was built from the sacred “spirit song” of Chief Seattle, whose treaty with white colonizers resulted in the building of the city of Seattle on top of the ancestral estuaries and salt marshes of the Coast Salish people. Writer, poet and musician LaPointe believes that if her great-grandmother were alive today, she would say, “We need these healing songs again. We need to do something.”

Sasha LaPointe’s incandescent Thunder Song is shaped by Vi Hilbert’s life, work and legacy, as well as by the more complicated influence of Chief Seattle. LaPointe’s own connection to her hometown features in many of the essays collected in this volume: “I have this complicated relationship with Seattle,” the author tells BookPage, “[with] my experience of being enamored with the city and then realizing what it means to exist in [Chief Seattle’s] namesake city as a Coast Salish woman.”

While LaPointe’s 2022 memoir, Red Paint, focused more on her individual story of trauma and healing, Thunder Song turns her gaze outwards. “Out of the stormy sea of writing Red Paint, I felt better for the first time in many years,” she says. “But when it was all done, I washed up on the shore and looked around and was like, what is wrong with the world right now?” It was the summer of 2020, and among the Black Lives Matter protests, the severe wildfires in Washington state and the pandemic, LaPointe felt spurred to action: “None of this is good, none of this is right. The sky doesn’t look right. And I threw myself into examining these things I was deeply angry about and disturbed by.”

In the title essay, LaPointe considers Hilbert’s healing influence amid political chaos and Indigenous erasure. “There is this collective trauma and collective grief and collective anger,” she says. “And the thing that really grounded me emotionally was looking to all the amazing things that our grandmother did around that symphony.” Other essays in the book cover the colonial erasure of Indigenous identity, the loss of ancestral lands and the violence that has claimed the lives of thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women. Like her great-grandmother, LaPointe turns to music to alchemize grief and sorrow—in her case, the electrifying rage of punk.

“I threw myself into examining these things I was deeply angry about and disturbed by.”

In “Reservation Riot Grrrl,” LaPointe makes a pointed but ultimately loving critique of the whiteness of punk. Listening to Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna sing about assault and survival was a pivotal turning point for a young LaPointe, who left home at 14 to make her way to Seattle’s punk scene. “Finding that misfit chosen family absolutely saved my life,” she says. The Riot Grrrl movement in particular offered her strength and empowerment. But LaPointe grew to feel that her Native identity was “submerged” in the whiteness of the punk scene, a feeling brought to a head when two white punks questioned LaPointe for wearing the red paint of her Native ancestors while performing with her band. She writes that their assumption that she was not Native “rattled me to my core,” threatening her Indigenous identity in a venue meant to offer safe harbor for misfits of all kinds.

The concluding essay, “Kinships,” was one of the last essays that LaPointe wrote for this collection. “It really was the medicine that the collection needed and that I needed while writing it,” she says. “I was this charged ball of anxiety and anger and fear for the world, for our Indigenous people, for our sacred land.” As described in the essay, she learns that the antidote for these feelings is connection with other Indigenous writers and activists across the globe. She writes movingly of her friendship with Maori poet Tayi Tibble, with whom she bonds over the links between their canoe-based cultures, as well as through their shared work as emerging Native writers. With Julian Aguon, an Indigenous human rights lawyer and the author of 2022’s No Country for Eight-Spot Butterflies, she finds another important relationship, especially when he asks LaPointe to deliver a petition to save sacred Indigenous lands in South Africa from development by Amazon. In these kinships, LaPointe finds seeds of hope: “We can be connected across the globe as Indigenous people who are fighting for our land and fighting for water,” she says.

Also in “Kinships,” LaPointe found herself once again guided by her great-grandmother’s spirit. Hilbert spent time in Hawai‘i working with Indigenous language revitalization groups, and when LaPointe visits the islands with her partner, she finds herself coincidentally and profoundly retracing her elder’s footsteps. Indeed, both Red Paint and Thunder Song are powerfully animated by the “spirit songs” of LaPointe’s matrilineal line; her writing is both a celebration and continuation of the work of her foremothers, in a Native punk mode all her own.

“We can be connected across the globe as Indigenous people who are fighting for our land and fighting for water.”

When I asked LaPointe who she was writing for, she immediately thought about “14-year-old Sasha out on the rez who desperately needed this book.” The response to Red Paint from Native readers was particularly gratifying: “When I consider an audience, I think of the folks who have reached out to me from tribal communities saying that reading my book helped them in some way.” Although LaPointe is primarily focused on these readers “who motivate me and bring me to the page,” there’s a larger audience for LaPointe’s work as well. By transmitting the healing songs of her great-grandmother through her own creative work in prose and performance, LaPointe offers all readers a chance to acknowledge and be changed by Indigenous voices and values.

Photo of Sasha LaPoint by Bridget McGee Houchins

Read our starred review of ‘Thunder Song’ by Sasha LaPointe.

Sasha LaPointe’s memoir in essays, Thunder Song, continues the work of her foremothers, in a Native punk mode all her own.

Children's & YA YA Fiction YA

Holly Black on Faerie riddles and family loyalty

Few YA series have garnered the level of devotion and praise achieved by Holly Black’s Folk of the Air series (FOTA), which followed Jude Duarte and her battle for power in Faerie. It’s no surprise that Black’s massive fan base rejoiced when the author released a spinoff duology, the Novels of Elfhame. Picking up right after the events of the first book, The Stolen Heir, The Prisoner’s Throne finds Suren, now queen of the Court of Teeth, and Oak Greenbriar, Jude’s brother and heir to the crown of Elfhame, on shifting soil, unsure of themselves and of each other.

While the first novel primarily followed Suren’s point of view, this time we get to be inside of Oak’s head. What was making this narrative switch like? Between the two characters, was one more challenging to write than the other?

It was definitely easier to write Oak’s point of view because I had made so many decisions in The Stolen Heir about his past and personality. It was hard to give both protagonists space, though. Even though we’re no longer in Suren’s point of view, we want to see how things play out for her. And there were some things about Oak’s past and point of view and certainly his powers that I needed to make more granular.

Did you have this spinoff in mind while you were writing any part of FOTA? If so, did planning for a spinoff impact the writing process of FOTA?

When I got to Queen of Nothing, I realized I wanted to write about Oak and Suren at some point in the future. I was intrigued by the way that Wren’s story both paralleled and contrasted with Jude’s. And I was interested in how much Jude sacrificed to make Oak’s life less traumatic than her own—and how despite all that, it still WAS traumatic. I wondered what it would be like to be Oak, doubly burdened by the trauma as well as the understanding that being “fine” was the only way to repay his family for what they’d done for him. I don’t think knowing that I wanted to revisit those characters changed the course of anything in the Folk of the Air books, but perhaps I did think of them a little more because of it.

What’s it been like to balance the telling of a brand new story alongside the incorporation of familiar, pre-existing elements from FOTA?

One of the reasons I wanted to start the duology with The Stolen Heir, and write from Wren’s point of view, was to give readers a chance to get to know Wren and Oak outside the characters they already have a connection with—Jude and Cardan in particular. I knew that we’d see people we knew from Elfhame both in the second book and in Oak’s memories. I hope that spending time getting to know Wren allows readers to care about everyone a lot in The Prisoner’s Throne.

One of the hardest things about having so many well-known characters in The Prisoner’s Throne is that they all needed to have room to be the clever and capable people we know them to be—which meant I needed to throw a lot of problems at them.

We meet Oak as a rambunctious but earnest child in the first series. Now, eight years later, he’s a teenager, scheming and wallowing and defying expectations in his own right. Was it difficult to transition to writing him as a teen?

It was far more difficult than I expected to figure out who Oak was when he was older. I wanted him to have some of the chaos and whimsy of his younger self, but also to be a complicated, charming person who nonetheless reflected the violence into which he was born. I rewrote him in The Stolen Heir so many times that I am not sure anyone but me saw the final version, but now I can’t imagine him any other way.

A central theme of The Prisoner’s Throne is family: How much loyalty do we owe family? Who counts as family? And what is the role of violence in making or breaking a family? So—hypothetically, if one of your family members wronged another, could you still consider them a part of your family?

My grandmother used to say to me that the most important thing was that I never lie to her. Even if I did something terrible. Even if I murdered someone. That she would do whatever she needed to do to keep me safe, even if I was in the wrong—but I just couldn’t lie. I put that speech into a book at some point because it was so memorable to me. Honestly, it made me feel really loved. It’s definitely not how everyone looks at family and loyalty and values.

There are ways that members of my family—and everyone’s family—have wronged one another. We’re not perfect. I’ve wronged people. But there are also lines that if someone in my family crossed, I wouldn’t consider them family anymore. Despite my grandmother’s speech, I am sure that would have been true for her too. It’s so interesting in fiction to figure out just where that line is for each character.

One of the most enjoyable elements of your work is the riddles and tricks that the Fae tell each other. Do you have a favorite riddle that you’ve written?

Thank you! My favorite riddle—although not original to me—is one I used in Tithe: “What belongs to you, but others use it more than you do?” It’s a useful thing to write in a book, since the answer is, of course, your name.

In both the Folk of the Air and the Novels of Elfhame series, our protagonists begin as enemies and gradually warm up to each other. A famous quote from Cardan is “I have heard that for mortals, the feeling of falling in love is very like the feeling of fear.” What would you say is the secret to a compelling enemies-to-lovers romance?

I think there’s a narratively significant difference between enemies and people who don’t trust one another or who are even on opposite sides of a conflict. To me, the intensity of the personal hatred is what makes the enemies-to-lovers progression so compelling—along with, ideally, the surprise. We sort characters into particular roles in stories and that allows us to not necessarily consider a character to be a romantic possibility until, suddenly, they are. But to me, enemies to lovers is all about how an intensity of feeling blurs lines—and often obscures more complicated feelings, often about oneself as much as about the other person.

Although you’ve explored a multitude of fantastical concepts across your novels, Faerie is a lore you return to again and again, to the great delight of your readers. Will there be more novels or projects set in this realm in the future?

There will definitely be one more Elfhame novel—and what it’s about will be clear after getting to the end of The Prisoner’s Throne. After that, I’m less sure of the specifics, but I know there will be future books set in Faerie.

If you lived in Faerie, what kind of creature would you be, and why? Non-human answers only!

Possibly a phooka. I like the idea of transforming into different creatures and playing tricks on people. And the possibility of having horns.

Photo of Holly Black by Sharona Jacobs.

The beloved YA author discusses her hotly anticipated return to Elfhame.

Children's & YA Middle Grade Children's

Kate DiCamillo brings readers back to the table

After your very first novel receives a Newbery Honor and you go on to win two Newbery Medals; after you become a two-time finalist for the National Book Award; after several of your books are adapted for the big screen (not to mention a stage musical and an opera); after you’re named the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature; and after your work becomes so commercially successful that you sell more than 40 million copies of your books—after you achieve all of that, what mountains are left for you to climb?

If you’re Kate DiCamillo, the author of such widely adored classics of 21st-century children’s literature as Because of Winn-Dixie, The Tale of Despereaux and Flora & Ulysses, you write another excellent novel: Ferris. While many of DiCamillo’s earlier books feature young protagonists who must deal with the loss of a parent or caregiver through distance, divorce or death, Ferris is a story about a child “who has been loved from the minute that she arrived in the world.”

As we chat over Zoom, Ramona the dog snoozing in a chair next to her desk, DiCamillo reveals Ferris’ deeply personal roots. “My father passed away in November of 2019, and my best friend that I grew up with had her first grandchild on December 31 of 2019.” That date was also her father’s birthday. “I was estranged from my father,” she shares, characterizing their relationship as “very difficult.” As DiCamillo looked at photos of the new baby surrounded by parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, she wondered, “What happens if you write a story about a kid that is just so certain and safe” in her family’s love? “Is there a story in that?”

It turns out, there is.

Ferris follows its titular protagonist, Emma Phineas “Ferris” Wilkey, during the eventful summer before she enters fifth grade. She finds herself on the receiving end of an unfortunate new hairstyle from her Aunt Shirley, whose husband has moved out of their house and into Ferris’ family’s basement. Ferris’ father is convinced that raccoons have infested their attic. Her younger sister, the scene-stealing Pinky, has decided that she wants to be featured on a “wanted” poster and has attempted to achieve her goal through petty theft, an incident involving biting and a hilariously unsuccessful stickup at the local bank. Ferris’ best friend, Billy Jackson, keeps playing François Couperin’s “Mysterious Barricades” over and over on every piano he can find. And Ferris’ beloved grandmother, Charisse, has been diagnosed with congestive heart failure but seems more concerned with uncovering what a ghost might want—a ghost she insists has been appearing in her bedroom doorway.

It’s great that we’re meeting, but even if we never met, I would be there with you, because it’s not a story until it’s you and me, together.

That may sound like a lot for one novel to juggle, but DiCamillo balances it all with the ease of an expert orchestra conductor. She does it so well that some readers may be surprised to learn that DiCamillo describes the experience of creating a novel as an act of “writing behind my own back” and “always starting not knowing where I’m going to end up.”

Where Ferris ends up is a climactic dinner sequence straight out of a screwball comedy, in which every single one of the novel’s many narrative threads coalesces. Although it will have readers gasping with laughter, the seeds of the scene lie in more turbulent soil for DiCamillo. When she was growing up, the family table “was often a place of terror” because of her father. As she worked on the scene, DiCamillo says that she thought about the concept of “repetition compulsion, how you keep on doing something until it turns out differently.” Eventually, DiCamillo says that she realized, “Well, here we go, this is the same place I end up every time I write a story: everybody around the table, happy, safe and eating. It surprises me every time.”

DiCamillo hopes that, through her work as an author, she’s able to create spaces that feel this way for readers. “So much of good storytelling is leaving space for the reader.” When she meets children at book events, she tells them, “It’s great that we’re meeting, but even if we never met, I would be there with you, because it’s not a story until it’s you and me, together. That’s what makes it a story, is both of us being there.”

Perhaps this is why DiCamillo becomes visibly emotional when she discusses what it’s like to write against a backdrop of rising censorship and book bans in schools and libraries across the country. “If there is any hope for us,” she says, “it is in being able to see and feel for each other, and books are a vehicle for doing that. Stories help us see each other and help us see ourselves.” She even confesses that she can’t talk about this subject “without weeping, because I know from personal experience and I’ve seen it with other kids: The right book at the right time will save somebody’s life.”

It’s a transformative power that every reader has experienced, but a power that Ferris is only just beginning to understand. Throughout the novel, Ferris reflects on the words that her “vocabulary-obsessed” fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Mielk, taught her. (“All of life hinges on knowing the right word to use at the right time,” Mrs. Mielk claims.) As a child, DiCamillo found it incredibly difficult to learn to read and only succeeded thanks to her mother’s tireless efforts. “I knew that’s what I needed, were those words,” she explains. “What Ferris has—those words, that family, that table to sit around—that’s the way I want the reader to feel too. It’s like, you are invited here, to this place. Now look, you have all those words. You have this table. You have this family. You emerge feeling loved.”

Ferris’ grandmother, Charisse, often tells Ferris that “every good story is a love story.” With Ferris, DiCamillo has created a truly great story, and it’s brimming with love.

Photo of Kate DiCamillo by Dina Kantor.

Love is more abundant than ever before in Ferris, the acclaimed children’s author’s dazzling and hilarious new novel.

Nonfiction History Black History American History

‘Madness’ at last treats the Black patients of a notorious mental hospital with humanity

As a 19-year-old undergraduate, Antonia Hylton read an academic paper that mentioned Crownsville State Hospital, known at its founding as the Hospital for the Negro Insane. That reference triggered an obsession with the hospital’s bleak history that has carried her through the 10 years it took to produce Madness: Race and Insanity in a Jim Crow Asylum. Hylton brings both her journalistic talent and a deep, personal engagement to something she unabashedly describes as a “passion project.” In it, she recounts the 93-year life of Crownsville, tying that painful history to the story of the treatment of mental illness in the United States, especially in communities of color, and to her own family’s experiences with mental health.

Speaking via video from a conference room at NBC headquarters in New York City, Hylton brims with energy and enthusiasm. “If I could understand everything there was to know about Crownsville,” she says, “I would understand my family and my country better.” In her mind, “doing this would be cathartic; it would help me have conversations or fill in blanks that I was struggling to fill in otherwise.”

Hylton calls her book a “tribute to oral history,” and the more than 40 interviews she conducted with former staff and patients—some of them in their 80s or older—and her own family members deeply enrich the story. “This book came to life because of the stories people shared with me,” she says.

One of the greatest challenges in collecting those stories was gaining access to the patients, many of them deeply traumatized by their experiences at Crownsville. “To find patients who were ready to go on the record comfortably was an incredible challenge,” Hylton says, “and it took a lot of trust-building and community outreach. I really had to accept that it was going to be a one-person-at-a-time kind of thing.”

“In addition to putting years of reporting on the page, I put my heart out there.”

Thankfully, there are few people better prepared for this specific kind of work than Hylton. In less than a decade following her graduation from Harvard University, Hylton has already accumulated an impressive set of professional credentials and honors, including Emmy and Peabody awards. After several years as a correspondent and producer for VICE Media, she joined NBC News and MSNBC, where she works as a correspondent on stories at the intersection of politics, education and civil rights.

Beginning in 2014, she spent long hours in the Maryland State Archives combing through Crownsville’s files, woefully incomplete thanks to shoddy record keeping and the destruction of decades of documents by the state. The paucity of documents would have been far worse had it not been for the efforts of Paul Lurz, a longtime Crownsville staff member who served as an unofficial preservationist. Hylton acknowledges feeling “really angry” that “no one had thought to dignify or track this information in the first place.”

Hylton follows the history of the hospital from its inception in 1911, when 12 Black men were transported to rural Maryland to begin constructing the facility that eventually would house them as its patients, to its closure in 2004. It’s a story of an institution where treatment was often crude and callous, though there were, at times, some who tried to treat their patients with humanity. Most notable among the latter was Jacob Morgenstern, a Holocaust survivor who became Crownsville’s superintendent in 1947, and who recruited a group of fellow survivors to serve as staff.

It’s hard not to read Madness without a mingled sense of anger and sadness, as Hylton patiently chronicles the decades when Black patients received substandard care in an overcrowded, understaffed hospital that deemed them less worthy of quality treatment than Maryland’s white mentally ill, even using some patients as subjects in scientific studies without their consent. The hospital was not desegregated until 1963, but in the ’60s and ’70s, as the approach to treating mental illness focused on shifting patients from large institutions like Crownsville to community mental health centers, its former patients were released into the population without access to the resources they needed to make that transition successfully.

Hylton says that what kept driving her to tell Crownsville’s anguished history was the door it opened into her own family’s painful past. She twines an institutional story with a deeply personal one, unearthing the stories of her cousin Maynard and great-grandfather Clarence, whose lives were tragically impacted by mental illness and then largely written out of her family’s history. “I’m going to resurrect Maynard and Clarence,” she says. “I’m going to give their lives some dignity. I’m going to give their struggles some context that wasn’t there decades ago.” Indeed, Hylton reveals, excavating these stories encouraged some family members to seek therapy to heal their own psychological wounds.

Read our starred review of Madness by Antonia Hylton.

The Maryland legislature has appropriated an initial $30 million for Anne Arundel County to turn the hospital grounds into a memorial, park and museum. Local historian and community organizer Janice Hayes-Williams has created an annual service she calls “Say My Name” at the site, to recall the some 1,700 patients buried there.

Hylton brings Madness to a moving climax with a scene she says “just poured out of me,” describing the 2022 commemoration at the onsite cemetery. On an April morning, she followed in the steps of community elders, clutching multicolored rose petals and a piece of paper bearing the name of Frances Clayton, a woman from Baltimore who died at Crownsville in 1924 at age 41. Kneeling down to place the petals on the ground, Hylton pressed her palm to the ground “to feel the pulse of the earth.” She writes that at that moment, she thought, “They’ve been waiting for us.”

“If I can inspire even just one family to have some of the conversations my family has been able to have as a result of this reporting, that’s what I want,” she says. The responses of some of her early readers “have already made me feel very whole, even with a story that is heartbreaking. In addition to putting years of reporting on the page, I put my heart out there.”

Photo of Antonia Hylton by Mark Clennon.

The Emmy Award-winning journalist chronicles the decades-long history of Crownsville State Hospital, where patients lived in prisonlike conditions.

Children's & YA Middle Grade Children's

Department stores come to life in Ben Guterson’s artful adventure

Some of Ben Guterson’s most treasured childhood memories center around two now-defunct grand old department stores in downtown Seattle: Frederick & Nelson and The Bon Marché. They “were absolutely places of magic for me,” the author reminisces in a call from his home in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains.

“At Christmastime, I would go to the second floor and take the escalator down to the first floor. . . . [A]ll the decorations, the trees, the glitter, the tinsel, the displays, the lights, the color, everything slowly revealed itself to me and I’d think I was descending into the heart of winter wonderland,” he says. “I fell in love with department stores because of that.”

Guterson’s appreciation of those bygone commerce centers and cultural touchstones is on marvelously magical display in The World-Famous Nine, his inventive, exciting middle grade mystery-adventure novel set in the storied Number Nine Plaza department store (aka “The Nine”).

The Nine is a blend of cleverly cultivated experiences and artfully arranged merchandise all under one roof. Unlike other department stores, that roof is 19 stories in the air and has an enormous Ferris wheel on top of it. The luxurious floors below contain a monorail, a display with a real iceberg and real penguins, an art gallery, rotating restaurants and more.

On the very first page of The World-Famous Nine, 11-year-old Zander Olinga rides an escalator down to the store’s main floor and into an astonishing new chapter of his life. What’s meant to be a fun five-week visit with his glamorous grandmother Zina Winebee, who owns The Nine, while his professor parents go on a research trip, soon turns into something much more thrilling and dangerous. Zander must undertake an urgent quest to unravel long-held family secrets by solving peculiar puzzles and tracking down a lost object that will protect The Nine and everyone in it from a terrible fate.

Read our review of ‘The World-Famous Nine.’

That’s a tall order for a kid, to say the least, but Zander’s new friend Natasha Novikov is confident the two of them can figure things out. He’s afraid of heights but great at solving puzzles, and she knows the store inside and out. Besides, one of Zander’s hobbies is creating mandalas, which are vital to their mission, if the ten-foot-tall sandstone boulder with “carved elaborate circular patterns” that has pride of place in The Nine is any indication. (Hint: it is.)

Guterson’s own affinity for mandalas—he draws them daily—not only inspired key elements of the complex mystery in The World-Famous Nine but also the artwork that appears within. Kristina Kister’s wonderful illustrations immerse readers in the dazzling world and unique denizens of The Nine, and Guterson’s impressively detailed mandalas grace the book’s pages as well. “I highly recommend it,” Guterson says about drawing mandalas. “It’s a really cool, creative and relaxing thing to do. I don’t want to sound too new-agey here, but . . . to engage in a creative act that’s not verbal or word-oriented in any way, I have found that to be extremely helpful.”

While the mandalas will be new to Guterson’s fans, The World-Famous Nine’s plethora of puzzles and wordplay will feel happily familiar to readers who delighted in the code-cracking, riddle-solving aspects of his previous books: the Winterhouse trilogy (Winterhouse, the first in the series and Guterson’s debut, was an Edgar Award and Agatha Award finalist) and The Einsteins of Vista Point.

Although the author now has multiple mysteries under his writerly belt, he still finds it challenging to strike just the right balance: “You don’t want to make the mystery or the solving of clues so easy that kids can spot it right away and then get frustrated with your hero, like, ‘Why is that main character so dumb when I figured it out already?’” But, he says, “You also don’t want to make it so hard that, when it’s revealed, someone says, ‘No one ever really could’ve figured that out!’”

“I think when you’re that age and you discover a book or an author that you love, it can just completely solidify a love of reading.”

Guterson has found that his true satisfaction and joy is writing for middle grade readers. In fact, he’s got even more books on the way: The World-Famous Nine is the first in a series, with its sequel, The Hidden Workshop of Javier Preston forthcoming. After all, he says, “I think when you’re that age and you discover a book or an author that you love, it can just completely solidify a love of reading. I find it really exciting to think that maybe my books . . . could do for a kid what the books I love did for me when I was that age.”

Photo of Ben Guterson by Harvey Photography.

The author incorporates magic and mandalas in The World-Famous Nine.

Children's & YA YA Fiction YA

Kacen Callender on the alchemy of empathy

Kacen Callender dedicates their first foray into young adult fantasy, Infinity Alchemist, to “the younger me who always wanted to write a YA fantasy.” While this might make one imagine a teenage Callender dreaming of a future as an author, Callender explains it is actually in reference to their early days of their career, when they struggled to write fantasy. “It was very difficult at that time, for whatever reason, to get the story out,” they say. ”Infinity Alchemist had been percolating for a lot of years, so it felt like a massive triumph for me to finally write it.”

What made this book such a challenge in those early days? Callender points to their struggle to pull together all the many necessary threads of this narrative into a cohesive storyline: “I didn’t quite understand plotting yet. Now, hopefully, I do.”

Some readers might view this focus on plot and action as a departure from Callender’s previous books, which are character-driven and move at a slower tempo, titles that might be deemed “quiet” by the publishing industry. In Infinity Alchemist, “there’s a lot of fighting scenes, a lot of explosive battles, a lot of excitement, alongside the emotional depth,” Callender says. Yet with its theme of learning about one’s self-worth, Infinity Alchemist still has a characteristic Callender feeling to it. “With all of my books, I tend to focus on a theme, some sort of internal healing and a message that I hope will resonate with readers,” they say.

Read our review of ‘Infinity Alchemist.’

One of the guiding principles of the fantasy world of Infinity Alchemist is that everyone has equal access to alchemy, but people still experience different degrees of success in learning alchemy, often due to the deliberate manipulation of the system by those in power. Protagonist Ash Woods is unusually gifted, but he has been denied access to the training that would make his power legitimate. Regarding the tension that creates, Callender says, “For me, it was always important that there not be a Chosen One, to include the idea that everyone is powerful and everyone is magical, and everyone is Chosen in the eyes of the Source or the Creator or what have you. I wanted to explain how power is internal; power is realizing that you are worthy without being gaslit by the idea of societal power.” But Callender adds: “You can feel power for yourself and feel that self-worth, but there are still other people who have the power to decide that you aren’t worthy. I wanted those different versions of power to be in conversation.”

“I wanted to explain how power is internal; power is realizing that you are worthy without being gaslit by the idea of societal power.”

Callender has a history of telling the stories of characters whose identities aren’t often represented in media, and Infinity Alchemist continues that work with a diverse cast of queer, trans, and polyamorous characters. Ramsay Thorne, for instance, is genderfluid, and the book seamlessly shifts pronouns throughout the character’s arc. This technique foregrounds Ramsay’s story more than Ramsay’s pronouns. “Ramsay comes to life in that way because it is going to be different for every reader, depending on where they last left the character. For example, I’m writing the sequel now, so for me the last I saw Ramsay, he was using he/him pronouns. But for you, having just read Infinity Alchemist, she was using she/her pronouns.”

Whether through the use of shifting pronouns or depicting a trusting polyamorous relationship, Callender’s work makes more visible the lived realities of countless people, and Infinity Alchemist is flooded with empathy and compassion. “That’s one of the great beauties of being able to write about these identities,” Callender says, as they explain how the imaginative act of reading allows anyone to “become” a character. “Even though you as a reader might not ever understand all the ways an identity can work, you can for a moment become that queer Black trans kid, and you’re understanding all of their wounds and their traumas and their grief and their healing.”

Callender builds on this idea: “Regardless of identity, that’s where a character is built: inside the idea that we all have these wounds that we either inherited or experienced. From my perspective, life is the story arc of healing those wounds.”

“That’s where a character is built: inside the idea that we all have these wounds that we either inherited or experienced.”

That wisdom comes through in every page of Infinity Alchemist. In the book, as Ash and Ramsay are coming to trust each other, Ramsay lists some of Ash’s more frustrating qualities, claiming him to be “selfish . . . and hot-tempered, and irrational, and you act without thinking.” Then Ramsay pivots to Ash’s kindness and curiosity, explaining, “It’s lazy to put a multifaceted human being, created from the alchemy of the universe, into a box of good or bad. No one is only one of the two.” When I ask Callender about the apt specificity of “lazy” here, they laugh and agree that it’s the perfect word. “It’s easy to decide that someone is good or bad instead of wanting to do the work. It’s a lot of work to look at a person and consider their traumas and wounds and all that has built them to be the person who they are today.”

We closed our time by discussing the relationships depicted in Infinity Alchemist and the way “polyamory reflects the concept of healing in the book, where everyone is worthy of love, and the idea that love cannot be limited.” Callender says, “I understand that some readers might ask why polyamory, or might not understand what it is as an identity. But it’s my hope that as there are more books with the topic of polyamory, it will be more accepted.”

Acceptance, self-worth, healing, love. “What’s better than that?” I ask, to which Callender replies, “Exactly.”

Photo of Kacen Callender by Bella Porter.

Having conquered several other genres, the acclaimed author discusses their young adult fantasy debut, Infinity Alchemist.

Romance Contemporary Romance

Tia Williams has the range

If you asked romance author Tia Williams what her favorite genre is, you might be surprised to learn it is horror. In fact, she once took a yearlong class on Dracula, taking an interest in the mythology of immortality and the fearsome, seductive title character. Williams chuckles as she says, “I’d love to write [a horror novel], but it always comes out as a romance when I sit down.”

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is Williams’ fourth contemporary romance, and while it’s filled with her trademark balance of sexy love story and emotional moments both beautiful and tragic, there’s something new here: a full-bodied embrace of the fantastical and the serendipitous. Williams describes A Love Song for Ricki Wilde as a “modern fairytale,” one that adheres to Williams’ own preferences as a fantasy fan who focuses more on characters than rules; Ricki Wilde never gets bogged down into the hows and whys of world building. “I like ‘Game of Thrones’ because despite the dragons, it feels very much like The Godfather,” she explains. She notes one of her other major inspirations is Jude Deveraux’s iconic 1989 time-travel romance, A Knight in Shining Armor, where a heartbroken woman ends up centuries back in time.

“Readers have to feel safe and that’s something I think about with every sentence.”

The titular character doesn’t fit in with the rest of her family, an Atlanta clan that runs a string of successful funeral homes. “Death bums Ricki out,” Williams says. She has no desire to step into the family business and feels universes away from her socialite siblings. So Ricki instead chooses to strike out on her own, move to Harlem and open up a floral boutique, adorably and aptly named Wilde Things. As Ricki puts down roots, a cast of fascinating characters orbits around her. There is Ms. Della, an elegant nonagenarian who offers Ricki a place to rent in her brownstone; Tuesday, a tenacious former child star who becomes Ricki’s new friend; and Ezra, Ricki’s love interest, a mysterious and sensitive man with a gift for music. When asked what would serve as the soundtrack for this book, Williams says with a smile, “A lot of Prince. Specifically ‘God,’ which is mainly an instrumental.” Coincidentally—or perhaps not—a framed image of Prince and Vanity’s 1983 Rolling Stone cover hangs on the wall above her head as we speak.

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde allowed Williams to explore and research not just pop music but also flowers and fragrance, voodoo practices and spirituality, many of which are interests the author already enjoyed. Ezra’s devotion to art and culture was inspired by Williams’ own love of music: She once owned a Billboard book on popular songs and would go page by page, learning everything she could about each hit and how it was made. Ricki’s tender care for her delicate plants and appreciation of their exotic, complex fragrances echoes Williams’ former career as a beauty editor and writer. “I remember discovering all these different kinds of flowers and their scents,” she says. “I had no idea night-blooming jasmine existed and what that smelled like.” However, her biggest research focus was 1920s Harlem.

Book jacket image for A Love Song for Ricki Wilde by Tia Williams

“I love the 1920s era: Hollywood, the Lost Generation in Paris, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes,” she says, and Williams includes flashbacks to this fascinating time in Harlem’s history alongside the present-day scenes. These additions create a rich sense of place, filled with Williams’ admiration for not only Harlem’s community and cultural renaissance, but also the ways art and activism provide solace and fuel resistance in the wake of devastating waves of racial violence. In Ricki Wilde, Williams writes, “What you haven’t reckoned with, you’re doomed to repeat. America was a ghost story with no end.” Shifting back and forth between the past and present, Williams shows the violence that’s been perpetuated against Black people and their communities. “American history and its causes do not exist in a vacuum and there’s a lot of generational trauma,” she says, but notes that even in the midst of hopelessness, there is love. It’s a dichotomy echoed in the book’s balance between life and death. Because Ricki’s been surrounded by death for most of her life, she seeks to offset it by tending to and nurturing her plants; Ms. Della possesses both the satisfaction of a life well-lived and the spirit to keep going.

That complexity, that sense of the fullness of life is also present in Ezra and Ricki’s relationship, which begins with a magnetic attraction but deepens as they, in Willliams’ words, get “lost in the soft, beautiful things”; their love grows through creating and experiencing art. Williams’ own work has already inspired adaptations, with The Perfect Find being made into a Netflix film last year starring Gabrielle Union and Keith Powers. Should Ricki Wilde get an opportunity to make the leap from book to screen, Williams thinks that KiKi Layne would make a good Ricki, especially given her performance in If Beale Street Could Talk. Actress Zazie Beetz is also a contender, as Williams says her more bohemian style would help bring Ricki to life. As for an on-screen Ezra, it’s no contest: The quiet, commanding presence of John David Washington is Williams’ pick.

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde has more twists than a well-versed romance reader might expect. Both the shift in genre and the obstacles Ricki and Ezra face (which we refuse to spoil), require a lot of faith in Williams. Readers may at first think they’ve mistakenly picked up a historical fiction novel, not a contemporary romance, and they may wonder how Williams is going to pull off that coveted happily ever after. One thing, however, is for certain: ears will be shed, whether from Williams’ evocative, emotional writing or how Ricki and Ezra realize they’ve found the person who truly understands them, all the way down to their bones. Williams hopes people will trust her all the way to the end. “There’s a genre rule when it comes to romance. Of course, readers might not know how an author is going to get there, but there will be a HEA. Readers have to feel safe and that’s something I think about with every sentence,” she says.

Read our starred review of ‘A Love Song for Ricki Wilde’ by Tia Williams.

There’s a lovely moment in the book where Tuesday is desperately trying to figure out who she is outside of her past life as an actor. She thinks writing a memoir might be her next career move, but it’s not quite igniting her passions. “Maybe you were a memoirist,” Ezra says. “But identity changes all the time, I’ve found. There’s a few more ‘yous’ you haven’t met yet.” Growth and change are central to Ricki Wilde, whether it’s the passing of time or the courage to pursue a dream. And in talking with Williams, it’s clear there are many “hers”—the Prince fan, the history buff, the beauty writer, the fantasy reader—that overlap and intersect, contributing to the fertile soil from which A Love Song for Ricki Wilde was able to blossom. But what about the other versions of Tia Williams that readers haven’t met yet? The heightened, magical world of Ricki Wilde is a brave and exciting step toward something new. Maybe, horror novelist is next. Or perhaps just, as she suggests, “damn good storyteller.”

Photo of Tia Williams by Francesco Ferendeles.

A Love Song for Ricki Wilde is a magical, surprising change of pace for the Seven Days in June author.

Children's & YA Picture Book Children's

Reaching out across the world

As a child, author-illustrator Jenny Sue Kostecki-Shaw was so shy that she didn’t want anyone else to see what she was drawing. “I was either in a cardboard box or in the closet—that’s where my studio was, and I would just draw all the time,” she remembers, speaking over Zoom from her home studio in the mountains of North Central New Mexico, where she lives with her husband and two children.

Now, Kostecki-Shaw no longer hides her creative talents and instead uses art to foster communication and friendships around the globe. Like You, Like Me, her latest book, was inspired by a pen pal relationship between her daughter, Tulsi, and a slightly younger girl in Tanzania, Vanessa. Kostecki-Shaw has been homeschooling her son and daughter for nine years, and she used letter writing as a skill-building exercise. Her children wrote not only to her, but also to their cousins and neighbors. They even kept little mailboxes in the woods. Later, Tulsi wrote to authors she liked, and eventually, she asked for a pen pal. One of Kostecki-Shaw’s friends—a librarian at an international school—helped Tulsi and Vanessa connect.

Read our starred review of Like You, Like Me.

The girls gave Kostecki-Shaw approval to use their names in the book. “They were pretty excited,” she reports. Kostecki-Shaw’s vibrant, torn-paper collage art shows the girls communicating from across the world, discussing the details of their lives: ponderosa pines, African drumming, red-tailed hawks and cheetahs.

A number of spreads feature each girl side-by-side on their own page, mirroring the other in creative ways and making it easy for readers to notice the similarities and differences between their two worlds. About midway through the book, Tulsi looks at a flicker feather that she wants to share with her friend. Kostecki-Shaw says, “I just tilted Tulsi’s head up, and thought, maybe this is a point where they could actually look at each other, even theoretically.” In the finished spread, the flicker feather picked up by Tulsi magically appears on a beach in front of Vanessa, as she holds onto a shell that appears in Tulsi’s possession in the next spread. “It almost feels like they’re in the same place,” Kostecki-Shaw says, “even though the backgrounds are different. From this point on, they’re looking at each other.” Like You, Like Me, she says, is a book about “coming together and sharing more and more.”

Like You, Like Me is a companion to Kostecki-Shaw’s earlier book, Same, Same but Different, which is also about two pen pals: Elliot in the United States, and Kailash in India. As a child, Kostecki-Shaw had a pen pal in Belgium, and for the last 15 years, she’s had an adult pen pal from France. “She once sent me a small hand-sewn envelope with fine red earth clay from where she was born in France,” Kostecki-Shaw says, “and I sent her flicker feathers and a tiny clay flicker bird I made. That’s where the inspiration came from for Vanessa and Tulsi sharing the shell and feather.”

“I love just sharing the inspiration that comes from connections with people you meet around the world, whether it’s through traveling or pen pals, or however you meet them.”

Kostecki-Shaw grew up in St. Louis, and her global curiosity was initially ignited by her father, who traveled often and widely for his work—the basis for her book, Papa Brings Me the World. “I remember just wanting to go with him, to see all those places,” she says. Her first book, My Travelin’ Eye, was inspired by difficulties with a lazy eye, which made learning to read a struggle. “I loved stories so much, and I loved books,” she recalls, “so I would copy all the art and ask everyone to read to me. I loved that books showed me other places to go.”

As an adult, after working for a number of years as an artist for Hallmark cards, she traveled to Nepal and taught English, and she also spent about five months in India. “Before I wrote Same, Same but Different,” she explains, “my life looked so much like Elliot’s. And now my life looks a lot like Kailash’s in some ways. It’s much more connected to nature. We live on a little homestead and we have goats and chickens and ducks, and we’re just a little bit more rooted in community.”

Several years ago, she and her family built her art studio themselves, with the help of a builder friend. “It was so empowering to me as a woman and as an artist to create my own space,” she says. Like You, Like Me is the first project she’s completed in that space, and she relished being able to spread out while creating collages with hand-painted papers and oil sticks. “It just felt so freeing. I would cover surfaces and just paint papers for days, making all kinds of patterns,” she says. “I was thinking a lot about the seasons and nature here in New Mexico, and the color palettes of photos from Tanzania, and looking at patterns that would show up in the ocean, leaves and flowers there.”

She uses a variety of techniques to add texture. “Texture is one of my favorite things. In addition to carving and stamping shapes,” she continues, “I printed with rubber bands and miscellaneous small objects, splattered wet paint and scratched dry paint with an old raggedy paintbrush. I made textures by pushing and pulling paint blobs around with a small piece of chipboard and a brayer, and I printed patterns with oil sticks. Basically, kindergarten play.”

As a child, she feared writing: “Even now, I have to face that little bit of fear of writing until I get far enough into the story where everything fades away, and I’m just having fun in the story and making art.” Now, as an author-illustrator, Kostecki-Shaw loves being able to simultaneously adjust both words and art, letting them “just dance together until they find their way.” She adds, “I love just sharing the inspiration that comes from connections with people you meet around the world, whether it’s through traveling or pen pals, or however you meet them. They just open you up to new ways and make your life so much more beautiful, whether through a conversation or an experience. My life has definitely gotten a lot more beautiful because of people I’ve met.”

Jenny Sue Kostecki-Shaw conveys the joy of fostering international friendships through the vividly textured Like You, Like Me.

Nonfiction History European History

Natalie Haynes brings the unsung women of the ancient world to life

In Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth, Natalie Haynes shoves aside the male-centric lens through which we’ve long viewed goddesses like Aphrodite, Demeter and Artemis, whether in history, literature, art or music. She steps into that breach armed with a sharpened gaze and copious research as she reveals to readers how these otherworldly women have been misrepresented and misunderstood in the past, and explores the ways in which they inspire and inform us in the present. BookPage asked the acclaimed author/scholar/comedian/broadcaster about her fascinating career and what she thinks we can all learn from the undersung women of the ancient world.

In last year’s Pandora’s Jar, you brought the likes of Medusa and Jocasta to the forefront. And now in this book, you turn to the goddesses in all their power and glory. What drives you to interrogate and explore how women were portrayed in myth and in art?

I can’t imagine not being interested in the portrayal of women: We’re half the world! And since almost all literature and art that survives to us from the ancient world is by men, it provides a fascinating canvas to explore. How did men imagine women, and how did they imagine powerful women, when they knew no such people in real life? What kind of goddesses would these men worship? I really wanted to explore the goddesses, the temples built to them, the stories depicting them, the art embodying them. So that is how Divine Might happened.

What was the most surprising, challenging and/or gratifying thing you discovered in the course of your research, in terms of seeing echoes of the ancient past in our present society and culture? Do you now have a favorite goddess?

The most challenging thing I discovered was just how little impact the goddess Hestia—once central to worship of all the gods in ancient Greece—had made on the modern world. There were so few examples of her in contemporary fiction and art that at the beginning of her chapter, I wasn’t sure I would be able to write it at all. But it turned out to be a really beautiful process, finding her where I could, and trying to explain how and why she had disappeared. I don’t have favorites—I change my mind with every chapter!

“Female anger is frightening to men. Always.”

Artemis may well be the most widely known goddess, with loads of mentions of her female-archer guise in ancient art and current pop culture. But while her strength and skill are routinely celebrated, you assert that at her core, “She is a true predator . . . fixed on death.” Will you share a bit more about what you found to be the most intriguing contradictions in terms of how Artemis has been portrayed and viewed?

Book jacket image for Divine Might by Natalie Haynes

I’m interested that Artemis is such a popular goddess here! I always assume Aphrodite/Venus must be the best known, just because of the sheer cultural penetration (and a planet named after her too.). Artemis is a puzzle because she is syncretized with so many other goddesses: every area in the Greek world seems to have known her by a different name and worshiped a different aspect of her. This is how you end up with a goddess who protects young girls, but also shoots and kills them, and a virgin goddess who is closely linked with the goddess of childbirth. I think it’s appropriate that she is so hard to pin down, though. Artemis belongs to the places away from cities and towns: She is a goddess of wild places, forests and mountains. We don’t really belong in her world; she is most at home with wild creatures. So we either accept we can’t understand her, or we become a little wild ourselves.

What differences do you see in art created by men versus women?

I think the more women make art, the more we’ll see different interpretations of what it means to be a woman. I was thinking about it today reading a review of Britney Spears’ new book: How she chooses to present herself seems completely different from how her management/family chose to present her when they controlled so much of her life. There’s a terrible poignancy to how long she has had to wait to be allowed to be her full self. And—more cheeringly—look at the Taylor Swift juggernaut. She remakes herself with each album, sometimes more than once. It’s a master class in depicting powerful womanhood in hugely varied ways. She’s inspiring millions of girls as she does it, so I think we could be in for an exciting time ahead.

You describe in colorfully unflinching detail some of Hera’s “spectacular and creatively unpleasant revenges.” And you note that modern culture often turns this exasperation into fodder for comedy rather than, say, a reasonable explanation for rage. Why do you think—even in myths that spoke plainly about murder, rape and other terrible things—Hera’s and other goddesses’ anger was assiduously avoided and downplayed?

“. . . women’s stories are every bit as valuable and compelling as men’s, every bit as important as I believe them to be.”

Female anger is frightening to men. Always. And it’s much easier to deny that if you claim that it’s irrational, that it comes out of nowhere, that it’s the consequence of being crazy or cruel. Otherwise you’d have to accept that structural inequality is irritating and make an effort to change it for the better. Sometimes I feel like Bruce Banner in The Avengers: “That’s my secret, Captain. I’m always angry.” He doesn’t wait for an alien invasion to be mad, he lives there. Well, me too.

Your first book, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life, was published in 2010, and you’ve since written several books—fiction and nonfiction—that challenge our assumptions about the ancient world. Have you met with any pushback to the new perspectives you’ve offered? How has your work and your life as an author changed since your first book?

I am told by academic friends that I am generally appreciated in their profession for encouraging so many students to pursue classics and ancient history. I’ve no doubt there are some scholars who hate me—that’s just a statistical reality—but I can’t honestly say I give them a moment’s thought. Who has the time?

Comedy + classicism is a pairing that’s worked quite well for you, to say the least! Which came first? When were you first inspired to combine the two? Does your BBC podcast “Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics” inform your books and vice versa?

Ha—I guess I would say I was funny before I was a classicist, but I was a classicist before I was a comedian. I started doing stand-up during my undergrad years. Since then the two have swirled around me most of the time, I suppose. The first few years in comedy were pretty low on classics (not much call for jokes on the ancient world in the late ’90s comedy circuit). But now these two fields have really merged for me. I love doing the live shows and making the BBC podcast. I’m extremely lucky!

What are you most hoping readers take away from this book?

I’m hoping that readers will come away from the book thinking that women’s stories are every bit as valuable and compelling as men’s, every bit as important as I believe them to be. I hope they’ll have a newfound respect for the huge power of these goddesses and the centrality of their role in the ancient world.

Is there anything you’d like to share about what’s next for you, goddess-y or otherwise?

Next up is season 10 of the podcast, I’ll be recording it in the spring. Still choosing who to include. And the new novel is about Medea, so that is going to be an intense time, writing her. But I wrote my dissertation on Euripides’ portrayal of Medea and Hecabe, so I have been squaring up to take on this story for decades. It feels like now is the time. Let’s hope I’m right.

Photo of Natalie Haynes by James Betts

Read our review of Divine Might.

The author-comedian discusses women’s stories, Taylor Swift, female rage and her new history of Greek mythology, Divine Might.

Fiction Historical Fiction

Shining light on a forgotten story of WWII

As Derek B. Miller sat down to write his seventh novel, The Curse of Pietro Houdini, something magical happened. “I wrote a great first sentence that somehow embedded the whole book,” he says, speaking from his home in Spain. “This is the only time this has ever happened to me.”

Miller had already chosen the setting for this spellbinding historical saga—a Benedictine abbey near Montecassino, Italy, during World War II. In 1944, American pilots dropped more bombs on this hilltop sanctuary than any other single building, mistakenly believing it to be occupied by German forces. While stories abound about the invasion of Normandy, few Americans are familiar with this military operation.
“I have a Ph.D. in international relations,” Miller notes, “and I didn’t know about it.” Part of the reason, he explains, is that “it’s just not a good old-fashioned American hero story. The battle went on for months and months and killed a lot of people.” What’s more, the abbey had been housing thousands of irreplaceable manuscripts and art, sent there for safekeeping in 1943. Thankfully, night after night, a German and an Austrian officer, with the help of the monks, loaded this treasure trove into carts and moved it to Rome before the Allied destruction began—a secretive mission described in his book. “I don’t think an abbey has called out to have its own story since The Name of the Rose,” Miller adds, referring to Umberto Eco’s famed murder mystery.

“I just love big, opinionated, risk-taking, take-no-prisoners central characters.”

Miller was introduced to the Montecassino abbey while working on a previous novel, Radio Life, which was inspired by the acclaimed 1959 science fiction classic A Canticle for Leibowitz, a post-apocalyptic story about monks who protect books during nuclear war and its aftermath by hiding them in an abbey. The book’s author, Walter J. Miller (no relation) was a radioman and tail gunner whose role in the Montecassino abbey bombing left him with post-traumatic stress disorder and undoubtedly inspired Canticle. Now, Derek Miller wanted to explore the setting of the abbey itself, but he was having trouble deciding what story he wanted to tell. “This isn’t nonfiction,” Miller says. “I didn’t want to be an academic. I wanted to be a dramatist. And I wanted to find the story within the story that could be mine.”

The plot finally began to emerge when Miller wrote that first sentence—“Pietro Houdini claimed that life clung to him like a curse and if he could escape it he would.” Instantaneously, one of the novel’s two main characters sprang into focus. As his name implies, Houdini is a larger-than-life character who may not be what he claims to be: a “master artist and confidant of the Vatican.” “I just love big, opinionated, risk-taking, take-no-prisoners central characters,” Miller says.

“Once the name popped out,” Miller continues, “once I had Houdini and a curse, and the abbey all sort of there, I realized that interrogating the curse mattered. And I was wondering who else was there? Who was he talking to? Who would care about something like that?” Before long, Miller envisioned an orphaned 14-year-old—Massimo—whom Pietro finds lying battered and beaten in a gutter. The two walk up the hill to the abbey, setting into motion a vibrant, well-crafted tale that’s rich in history, drama, intrigue, tragedy and well-placed doses of humor—at which Miller excels. Ultimately, he has created a story about both the heroics and the horrors of war, as well as the powerful bonds that can form in the midst of calamity.

Massimo’s first-person narration convincingly guides the book, and it is framed by an introduction and conclusion written from Massimo’s adult perspective decades later. “When I’m writing,” Miller explains, “I really have no idea what’s going to happen next. I only had milestones and a chronology [of historical events] that I decided to stick to seriously, partly because I’m a scholar.” Many readers, in fact, may be reminded of Anthony Doerr’s beloved World War II novel, All the Light We Cannot See. “This is going to sound shocking,” Miller says, “but I haven’t read it yet.”

Similarly surprising comparisons were made after the publication of his award-winning novel, Norwegian by Night: People complimented him on doing such a wonderful job writing Scandinavian crime. “I said, ‘That’s interesting, I’ve never heard of it.’ I thought I was writing a story about an old Jewish guy running through the woods in Norway. But apparently, it was part of an entire genre that I was unaware of, even though I was living in Norway at the time.”

“I haven’t really written love stories as such—you know, boy-meets-girl, that kind of thing. But there is, very much with Pietro and Massimo, love.”

Both Norwegian by Night and The Curse of Pietro Houdini feature an adult and child paired as main characters. “A lot of my books are really quite multigenerational,” Miller says. “It gives me tremendous scope for wisdom, dialogue, humor, misunderstanding and competing interpretations. And it’s fun, because old people being frustrated with young people, and young people being frustrated with old people is just hilarious.”

Miller also describes the pairing as a “useful literary device,” saying, “It’s always helpful for somebody in the know to have somebody to talk to who’s not in the know for the benefit of the reader. And in my books, there’s a lot going on.” Such a marvelous embarrassment of riches is certainly the case in The Curse of Pietro Houdini, in which many of Pietro’s discussions of art, history and the war with Massimo serve as vital backstory provided in an entertaining fashion. Miller points to the power of the connection that these characters establish, saying, “Being alone and then finding someone to connect with in the midst of that loneliness is essential in the human experience. I haven’t really written love stories as such—you know, boy-meets-girl, that kind of thing. But there is, very much with Pietro and Massimo, love.”

“Writing is a full-contact blood sport,” Miller concludes. “It’s a crazy way to make a living—almost an impossible way.” He started trying his hand at fiction during a number of unscheduled months spent waiting for his Ph.D. program to begin in Switzerland, and he continued with the craft alongside his studies. He eventually published his third manuscript, Norwegian by Night, in 2008, after 12 years of writing. That book came together when he elevated Sheldon Horowitz, who had been a minor character in a draft manuscript, to a central character. He turned out to be such a wonderful personality that Miller later wrote a prequel about his childhood, the suspenseful tragicomedy How to Find Your Way in the Dark.

Now Miller is working on a book set in the late 1950s on the coast of Spain, where Salvador Dali had his house in Cadaqués. Miller and his family live about an hour south of Barcelona, after living and working in Norway for a number of years (Miller’s wife is Norwegian). “I needed a change and it’s an adventure for the kids,” he says. “Life is short, so you take some bold decisions, if you’re so inclined.”

At some point, Miller hopes to finally visit the Montecassino abbey, which has been rebuilt since the World War II bombing. He says, “My deep, deep hope is that I can get The Curse of Pietro Houdini translated into Italian and that I have an excellent reason to go.”

Read our starred review of The Curse of Pietro Houdini.

Author photo by Camilla Waszink.

Derek B. Miller returns with a captivating historical tale centered on a pivotal yet rarely told episode of WWII: the bombing of the abbey of Montecassino, Italy. When a mysterious master artist, or possibly master con artist, and a 14-year-old orphan take shelter in the abbey, they are drawn into the mission to save precious art stored there from destruction. The adventure that ensues is tragic, funny and thrilling, with plenty of sleight of hand and even more heart.

Children's & YA YA Fiction YA

Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Pham on teamwork

LeUyen Pham arrives early and is already telling stories as we wait for Gene Luen Yang to hop on the call. Laughing, she explains, “You get the right people in the right space, and we’ll entertain you, no matter what.” She’s talking about our conversation, which took place over Zoom, but she could just as easily be talking about her forthcoming graphic novel with Yang, Lunar New Year Love Story. Though they’ve been friends for years, this is the first project they’ve worked on together, and the collaboration was seamless. Pham describes their process as being “like two friends in class, exchanging notes.”

As soon as Gene joins us, each artist can’t stop singing the praises of the other. It’s Pham who points out that Yang has just been honored with what he calls “a fancy award in Oklahoma,” which the rest of us would call the NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s and Young Adult Literature (Pham was also a nominee for the prize this year).

Read our starred review of Lunar New Year Love Story.

Of Pham, Yang says, “She can draw in multiple styles and do them all incredibly well. And because she comes from picture books, she has a painterly quality in her artwork.” According to Yang, sometimes picture book artists making the jump to comics struggle with the stamina required: “There’s just way more pictures in a graphic novel. But I think Uyen has mutant powers. She is shockingly fast.” What might take a comics artist years to draw, Pham completed in under eight months—including the coloring, a task many artists hire out. Yang quips, “There’s a saying in comics that to have a career, you just have to be two of the three: good, fast or nice. So I’ve told Uyen she can stop being nice now.”

Lunar New Year Love Story started from what its title suggests: a love story, and one close to Yang’s heart. When he and his wife of 23 years began dating, she hated Valentine’s Day, seeing it as a corporate scam. But, he explains, “I really liked her, so my workaround for that was to celebrate the Lunar New Year in a very Valentines-y way.” Noting the frequent overlap between the two holidays, he turned to love-themed Lunar New Year cards and presents, and from there, the tale of Lunar New Year Love Story’s protagonist, Val (short for Valentina), was born.

Val also hates Valentine’s Day, but when growing up, she loved it. Her imaginary friend, who plays a considerable role in this graphic novel, was St. Valentine himself (Val calls him St. V.). Though Yang wrote the manuscript, the book was truly a collaborative effort. Pham explains the many ways Yang invited her into the story, asking about her first love or her imaginary friends, and including components of her answers in the narrative. “It’s not very often that you have such a generous writer, but Gene has no ego, and somewhere along the way, it went from being Gene’s story to kind of meshing together.”

“Once you have the familiar, you can weave in the unfamiliar.”

Yang agrees: “I’ve collaborated with other artists, but this project is the one where there was the most bleed over in terms of responsibilities.” Pham insists on the greatness of Yang’s original manuscript (which, she says, he drew out entirely) and the incredible timeliness of it: “I had just gone to Milkwood (Sophie Blackall’s farm/creative retreat), and I was seeing these tremendous artists producing tremendous work, and everything changed for me. I came home and realized I didn’t have the heart for the project I had been working on.” Canceling that project made it possible for Pham to consider Yang’s book when it arrived. “It fell in my hands right at the moment when I needed something to fill the soul. That sounds really corny, and I don’t know how else to put it. I was looking for a soul-feeder, something I could put a lot of myself into.”

Pham did put a lot of herself into Lunar New Year Love Story, including her background and ethnicity. Yan knew he wanted “to tell a story about a Pan-Asian community, because that kind of community has been important to me.” The two explain that they had a number of conversations about Val’s possible ethnicity, before landing on Vietnamese. “That was the culture I understood and could communicate the best,” says Pham. When she first read the character of Val’s grandmother, “there was an immediate familiarity in her voice, and I thought, ‘I know exactly who this woman is, and I know exactly how I’m going to draw her.’ . . . It was all just my mom.”

Family is an incredibly important part of Lunar New Year Love Story, with Val having to navigate the changes in her relationship with her dad and their volatile history. But it’s the love story that drives most of the narrative as Val tries to figure out if she’s doomed to never find true love. When she meets Les at the Lunar New Year festival, she starts to hope, giving herself a year to prove it’s possible. Along the way, she has to deal with Les’s rude cousin Jae, who turns out to complicate matters more than Val ever expected. Yang notes that they “purposefully tried to hit all of the romcom structure.” But Yang and Pham didn’t rest there. “Once you hit that skeleton, it lets you play with a bunch of stuff. Once you have the familiar, you can weave in the unfamiliar.”

For some readers, that unfamiliar might come in the form of the traditional lion dance that Val falls in love with, or the intermingling of Chinese and Korean and Vietnamese cultures, or even the references to Catholic saints and other aspects of the Christian church. When asked if it has ever felt controversial to include issues of faith, or if he’s been cautioned against writing about faith in his books, Yang replies, “In college, I had an amazing creative writing professor who once told me, ‘You should never write about your faith.’ She was a Romanian American and a practicing Buddhist, and I was a Chinese American practicing Catholic. Instead, she said, “Live your faith, and if your faith is part of your life, it will come out in your writing.”

Agreeing, Pham says, “There’s the stadium in which these dialogues are played out in public, and then there’s people’s private lives. And this story takes place in private lives, not in a public stadium. I prefer stories at that level, where we’re simply showing what life is.” She echoes that thought when speaking about ethnicity: “I like that the story is just a story that happens to have Asian characters in it. It has a universality to it.”

From family and friendships to religion and culture, Lunar New Year Love Story is a romcom that looks at the deeper aspects of life. Pham took an incredibly thoughtful approach to the novel’s colors: “We made the book into 12 chapters, representing each month of the year. Each month has a theme, which corresponds to a different color on the feng shui wheel. Everything connects with a meaning.” Yang adds: “There are five elements in Asian cosmology, and each of those is associated with a color, each associated with different parts of society and culture. So what Uyen did was she took this old, old philosophy and applied it here, and even if you don’t know all of that when you’re reading, you can feel a depth in the color.”

“There’s the stadium in which these dialogues are played out in public, and then there’s people’s private lives. And this story takes place in private lives, not in a public stadium.”

Each partner insists it was the work of the other that made this book successful. “What I love about Gene’s work,” says Pham, “is that it’s always multilayered. It’s not a single story.” Like the lion dancers in their graphic novel, they know it takes two partners to make something beautiful and true.

The authors meshed together real details from each of their own lives to write Lunar New Year Love Story.

Nonfiction True Crime Memoir

Journalist Mandy Matney discusses reporting on Alex Murdaugh, a man who destroys everyone in his wake

When Mandy Matney graduated from journalism school at the University of Kansas in 2012 and her parents asked her to choose a celebratory vacation spot, she picked Hilton Head, South Carolina. During that trip, Matney remembers glancing at the local newspaper and thinking how nice it would be to have a job there. “They’re talking about alligators and all these cool things,” she remembers thinking.

“And then it happened!” Matney says, speaking from her Hilton Head home. After disappointing reporting stints in Missouri and Illinois, the Kansas native came to Hilton Head in 2016 as a reporter for The Island Packet. “I think I was drawn to this area for some reason,” she reminisces, adding, “I feel like it was kind of the universe telling me to come here.”

Several years later, Matney was covering a story much more predatory than alligators—the trial and conviction of prominent attorney Alex Murdaugh for the 2021 killings of his wife, Maggie, and their 22-year-old son, Paul. She had already been delving into the Murdaugh family’s influence and corruption: In 2019, 19-year-old Mallory Beach was killed in a boating accident in which Paul was driving, inebriated. These crimes opened a floodgate of investigations into Alex Murdaugh’s massive financial improprieties, and eventually led Matney to launch “Murdaugh Murders Podcast”—a career trajectory she recounts in Blood on Their Hands: Murder, Corruption, and the Fall of the Murdaugh Dynasty.

“You have to be the person to say something when you see that something isn’t right.”

Matney likens the Murdaugh case to a “superstorm that we can’t get out of,” acknowledging, “I kind of do miss my life before it was just constant chaos and absurdity.” After a bit of a break this summer, the Murdaugh story has heated up again, with Murdaugh asking for a new trial and his lawyers wrangling over whether the state or federal government should control the remainder of his assets. Throughout the myriad developments in the case, Matney has found the national press coverage to be “eye opening.” While she’s seen “a lot of really great journalism,” she acknowledges that she’s also been disappointed with reporters who “take the easiest, goriest, most salacious angle of the story and roll with it,” which is “the opposite of what I want to do.”

Cognizant of the swirling sea of media being produced about the family—books, documentaries and more—Matney and co-author Carolyn Murnick decided to frame their offering as her own “memoir based on four years of reporting,” a sort of story-behind-the-story that provides new material for even Matney’s most faithful podcast fans. It’s meant to be inspiring to other journalists, and, as Matney notes, “It’s the book that I would have wanted to have 10 years ago when I started my journalism career.”

“It’s kind of a whole new layer of vulnerability for me to tell all these [personal] stories,” she says, comparing her process to “taking an ice cream scoop to my insides” and revealing “those deep-down things that you don’t want to talk about and you don’t want to deal with.”

Matney grew up watching “Dateline” and “20/20″ with her mother, and remembers following the O.J. Simpson case when she was a kindergartner “because my mom was so into it.” She writes that although her first two jobs were soul-sucking (“I cried often”), her saving grace came in the form of nights spent listening to WBEZ’s “Serial” and watching Netflix’s “Making a Murderer,” while dreaming of “doing something as inspiring.”

Unfortunately, Matney’s job at The Island Packet was overshadowed by a misogynistic editor she refers to by the pseudonym “Charles Gardiner” in her memoir. When, for example, Matney got access to key files related to the strange 2015 hit-and-run death of a young man named Stephen Smith, potentially linked to the Murdaughs, Gardiner luridly asked, “What did you do to get that file?” Matney reflects, “I don’t think people talk enough about bosses being mentally abusive, and how much that affects your entire life and your work.”

Thankfully, she partnered with a savvy, supportive colleague, Liz Farrell (with whom she still collaborates) to follow their instincts in the Murdaugh story, even as their editor tried to discourage them. Matney believes that their outsiders’ perspectives added fuel to their reporting—they weren’t used to “this system of good old boys just running amok and doing whatever they wanted.” She adds, “I think a lot of people have a really hard time imagining that a guy who looks like Alex can do these things. But that’s a big point that I think we all need to realize is that there are people like Alex, who are manipulators and narcissists, and we can’t be fooled by them. . . .You have to be the person to say something when you see that something isn’t right, because they will—like Alex did—destroy everyone in their wake.” Just a few days before our conversation, Matney reveals, she stood a few feet away from Murdaugh during a federal hearing. “It’s bone-chilling,” she says. “It’s not fun for me to be in his presence.”

“It’s the book that I would have wanted to have 10 years ago when I started my journalism career.”

Matney’s memoir also addresses the toll that the case has taken on her mental health. “No one really told me when you start digging into stories that are this dark, and communicating often with victims of really horrific crimes, you are carrying a load that is unbearable at times. People need to talk about that.”

On a brighter note, Blood on Their Hands also chronicles how she and David Moses (then her boyfriend, now her husband) began their Murdaugh podcast. “It’s not this easy process where a microphone comes out of nowhere and just magically puts your words into a podcast and it sounds beautiful. It’s very frustrating at the beginning. . . . I’m not ashamed of the fact that our first few episodes sounded very rough. I want other people to know that it’s OK to start something and not be perfect at it. . . . I think that that’s been a big reason why a lot of our fans have been really attached to our podcast.” Matney loves podcasting, especially because “journalism is so different when you own your own business and you can actually do and say the things that you want.” Five years ago, she says, “I could never have dreamed of doing this with my husband in my house studio.”

Blood on Their Hands will surely satisfy true crime fans. And with Matney’s acknowledgment of the grinding work and mental toll her investigation demanded—to wit, “interviews with over one hundred sources, as well as hundreds of pages of legal filings, police reports, social media posts, and court transcripts”—the book is also a powerful tribute to journalism’s ability to hold the powerful to account.

Blood on Their Hands gets down and dirty with the murder and mayhem of the Murdaughs, the South Carolina family whose crimes made national news, and the toll it takes to bring the truth to light.

All Interviews

Jennifer Croft feeds the literary ecosystem

Spirit Songs

Photo of Sasha LaPoint by Bridget McGee Houchins

Read our starred review of ‘Thunder Song’ by Sasha LaPointe.

Holly Black on Faerie riddles and family loyalty

While the first novel primarily followed Suren’s point of view, this time we get to be inside of Oak’s head. What was making this narrative switch like? Between the two characters, was one more challenging to write than the other?

Did you have this spinoff in mind while you were writing any part of FOTA? If so, did planning for a spinoff impact the writing process of FOTA?

What’s it been like to balance the telling of a brand new story alongside the incorporation of familiar, pre-existing elements from FOTA?

We meet Oak as a rambunctious but earnest child in the first series. Now, eight years later, he’s a teenager, scheming and wallowing and defying expectations in his own right. Was it difficult to transition to writing him as a teen?

A central theme of The Prisoner’s Throne is family: How much loyalty do we owe family? Who counts as family? And what is the role of violence in making or breaking a family? So—hypothetically, if one of your family members wronged another, could you still consider them a part of your family?

One of the most enjoyable elements of your work is the riddles and tricks that the Fae tell each other. Do you have a favorite riddle that you’ve written?

Although you’ve explored a multitude of fantastical concepts across your novels, Faerie is a lore you return to again and again, to the great delight of your readers. Will there be more novels or projects set in this realm in the future?

If you lived in Faerie, what kind of creature would you be, and why? Non-human answers only!

Kate DiCamillo brings readers back to the table

‘Madness’ at last treats the Black patients of a notorious mental hospital with humanity

Department stores come to life in Ben Guterson’s artful adventure

“I think when you’re that age and you discover a book or an author that you love, it can just completely solidify a love of reading.”

Kacen Callender on the alchemy of empathy

“I wanted to explain how power is internal; power is realizing that you are worthy without being gaslit by the idea of societal power.”

“That’s where a character is built: inside the idea that we all have these wounds that we either inherited or experienced.”

Tia Williams has the range

Reaching out across the world

Natalie Haynes brings the unsung women of the ancient world to life

Shining light on a forgotten story of WWII

Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Pham on teamwork

Journalist Mandy Matney discusses reporting on Alex Murdaugh, a man who destroys everyone in his wake

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