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In this Service95 Book Club interview hosted by Dua Lipa, Margaret Atwood talks about the research she conducted in order to imagine the Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale (Houghton Mifflin, 1986) while writing the novel in Berlin during the Cold War and how the current political landscape is reflective of the themes in her book.
In this Service95 Book Club conversation hosted by Dua Lipa, Percival Everett revisits his award-winning 2021 novel, The Trees, and talks about how the murder and image of Emmett Till urged him to write the story, and how important the relationship between author and reader is to art. “People find their truth in art. It’s not complete until the reader comes to it. That’s when meaning gets made,” says Everett.
“She was a short story that kind of got too big and started rolling away from me,” says Katie Yee about her debut novel, Maggie; or a Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar (Summit Books, 2025), in this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, in which they discuss writing outside of your own experience and usual style.
In this episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer, Honorée Fanonne Jeffers discusses the themes of Blackness, intersectionality, and diaspora in her essay collection, Misbehaving at the Crossroads (Harper, 2025), and how it serves as a companion piece to her novel, The Love Songs of W. E. B. Du Bois (Harper, 2021).
Laura Pegram, Edwidge Danticat, and Princess Joy L. Perry discuss the making of the anthology Sing the Truth: The Kweli Journal Short Story Collection (Authors Equity, 2025) and talk about the importance of finding and nurturing emerging writers of color in this live episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer. Read more about the anthology in “The Anthologist” in the May/June issue of Poets & Writers Magazine.
Tayari Jones, author of An American Marriage (Algonquin Books, 2018), and A. M. Homes, author of May We Be Forgiven (Viking, 2012), talk about how the definition of women’s literature has evolved over time in this live episode of Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast hosted by Miwa Messer celebrating thirty years of the Women’s Prize for Fiction.
In this episode of Literary Hub’s Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast cohosted by V. V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell, author Vauhini Vara talks about the current discourse of artificial intelligence and the ChatGPT conversation that led to writing her essay collection, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age (Pantheon, 2025).
In this episode of the Ehkili podcast, Sahar Mustafah talks to author and editor Susan Muaddi Darraj to discuss her anthology, Ask the Night for a Dream: Palestinian Writing From the Diaspora (Palestine Writes Press, 2024), and the significance of amplifying Palestinian literary voices.
In this episode of NPR’s Wild Card podcast hosted by Rachel Martin, author Zadie Smith reflects on the twenty-fifth anniversary of her debut novel, White Teeth (Random House, 2000), and talks about her forthcoming book of essays and her generation’s struggle with the notion of time. “I’ve always felt there wasn’t enough time. I would like to accept time and also love it,” she says.
In this Poured Over: The Barnes & Noble Podcast episode hosted by Miwa Messer, author Laila Lalami talks about the quickly evolving nature of surveillance technology and how a conversation with her husband about data privacy led her to write her novel The Dream Hotel (Pantheon, 2025).
