Book Talk
Cyd Oppenheimer
All episodes
Best episodes
Top 10 Book Talk Episodes
Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Book Talk episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Book Talk for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Book Talk episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
04/18/18 • -1 min
Portland, Oregon, 1999. It's a city of strays, the place where people who are outsiders everywhere else come to find belonging. Andrea came, she tells us, at seventeen,"from rural western Nebraska, where adulthood came hard and fast and narrow, and queers kept quiet or met violence." She thinks she's found her people, the Lesbian Mafia: they have family dinner and play music together and date each other, break up, and date each other in new configurations. But it's not that simple. Things get complicated when Andrea starts a secret affair with a man, Ryan -- a move, she tells us, that at that time, for the Lesbian Mafia, was as good as treason. And things get more complicated when Andrea gets pregnant and a relationship that was supposed to be all about space suddenly isn't anymore. Shifting perspective between Andrea, Ryan, and their eventual daughter, Lucia, this is a novel about identity and community, about the family we're given and the family we choose, about the ways we try to protect the people we love, the ways we hurt them anyway, and the ways we keep on trying.
Host Cyd Oppenheimer talks with author Chelsey Johnson about being a rock'n'roll flutist, learning to love plot, and how to write an ending.
Guest readers Emily Moore and Jennifer Eng join Oppenheimer to discuss records and oceans, mothers and daughters, and strays and strayings.
Order today!
Available from:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
IndieBound
04/04/18 • -1 min
What you don't know about Charlie Outlaw, the actor, star of a hit TV show, is that he's been kidnapped. You don't know he was taken while vacationing on a remote island where he hoped for anonymity, a chance to re-evaluate his newfound celebrity and recent heartbreak. You don't know that his kidnappers don't know that he's famous -- that they value him only because he's American. You don't know, and he doesn't either, if his fame will doom him or save him or not matter at all.
What you don't know about Josie Lamar, the actress, former star of a cult TV show, object of Charlie's recent heartbreak, is that she's struggling with what it might mean to be washed up and in love with someone whose star is just beginning to rise. You don't know -- or maybe you do -- that she spent her formative years as a superhero, and that this is the person her fans still see when they run into her at the airport, the coffee shop, the doctor's office. Who is she if not the person others believe her to be? Where does acting end and reality begin? And can the superpowers that propelled her to fame help her to save Charlie -- or does real life not work that way?
Host Cyd Oppenheimer talks with author Leah Stewart about her "thematic preoccupation" with identity and gender, writing at the border of genre and literary fiction, and the influences of the 17th-century novel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer on this novel.
Guest readers Tui Sutherland, Brian Slattery, and Alfie Guy join Oppenheimer to discuss love, fame, and the hero's quest.
Order today!
Available from:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
IndieBound
02/07/18 • -1 min
The Hazel Wood is the estate of the writer Althea Proserpine, author of one slight book of dark fairy tales, long out of print, almost impossible to find, but with a slavish, cultish following. It is a place Althea’s granddaughter, Alice, has heard about but never been, having spent her childhood on highways with her mother, moving from place to place, trying to escape some sensed but unseen danger, staying as far away from Althea and the Hazel Wood as possible. But when Alice’s mother is suddenly abducted, Alice knows that to find her she must uncover the secrets of the Hazel Wood, and, in so doing, come to terms with the question of what it means to be the author of her own story.
Oppenheimer talks with author Melissa Albert about the draw of YA literature ("it's the power of the new, the power of the now"), about what makes her want to write ("it's the same thing that makes me want to read: the draw to know what happens next"), and about Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and (of all things) Little House on the Prairie.
Guest readers Brian Slattery and Tui Sutherland join Oppenheimer to discuss the draw of the Hinterland, doomed princesses, and girls who make decisions. Plus, they offer Melissa Albert multiple ideas for sequels.
Order today!
Available from:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
IndieBound
Episode 44: The Leavers by Lisa Ko
Book Talk
07/26/17 • 50 min
Peilan Guo leaves China to go to New York, city of dreams, to make a new life for herself as a new person, Polly. Years later, caught in a sweep by immigration authorities, she makes the opposite journey, sent back to where she came from. But this time she leaves behind her 10-year-old son, Deming, who knows only that one day his mother went to her job at a nail salon and never came home. Child welfare delivers him to a white couple, who adopt him, take him out of the city, re-name him Daniel. Told from the perspectives of both mother and son, this is a story of the importance of names, the meaning of home, what it is to leave and what it is to be left.
Host Cyd Oppenheimer talks with author Lisa Ko about becoming the person you need to be to write the book you want to write; about trying and failing and trying again; and about how, after you've been working on a book for eight years, you know when it's finally done (winning a prestigious literary award before the book is even under contract is a helpful sign!).
Guest readers Emily Moore and Kristopher Jansma join Oppenheimer to discuss mothers and sons, coming of age, and language and its loss.
Order today!
Available from:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
IndieBound
01/25/17 • 51 min
Eric Valery is 20 years old when he drops out of college and finds a job with a newspaper in small-town North Dakota. There’s a full-time staff of three, and one of the three is Anna, a quiet, pretty single mother in her early thirties. “We would like to think we will recognize the people who come to matter to us at first sight, but of course that’s absurd,” Eric tells us. “They often slip into the corners of our lives, unnoticed, then taken for granted, until one day, if we are lucky, we see them anew with startled comprehension.” The story of Eric’s one year in this town, at this paper, before he moves on to the rest of his life, is not a romance, but a meditation on the people who change us and the scars we all bear, on the many forms love can take, and on whether or not we are doomed to a future that is written in our past.
Host Cyd Oppenheimer talks with author Reed Karaim about why he chose to begin at the end ("the question is really not what happened, but why it happened"); about how to revise ("It's not genius. It's not inspiration. It's being willing to work at it"); and why he writes fiction in today's America ("I've got to believe the stories we tell ourselves still matter").
Guest readers Jennifer Eng and Alice Baumgartner join Oppenheimer to discuss fire and ice, oceans and buffalo, and tragedy and redemption.
Order today!
Available from:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
IndieBound
09/07/16 • 51 min
Behold the Dreamers is the story of Jende and Neni Jonga, Cameroonians who have come to New York in search of a better life for themselves and their son. The time is 2007 and the economy is booming. Jende gets a job as a chauffeur for an executive at Lehman Brothers; Neni does babysitting and housework for the wife. The American Dream seems within grasp. But with the collapse of the financial industry, the promise of that dream comes into question. Is achieving it still possible? Is it even desirable? This is a book about immigration, class, race, gender, money, power - but, even more than that, it's a book about success and failure, desire and love, compromise and loss.
Host Cyd Oppenheimer talks with Imbolo Mbue about learning to write ("It starts with reading a lot of books"), about initial reactions to the book's conclusion ("I had an agent tell me, 'American readers don't like complex endings'"), and about race ("When you come [to America], you realize you're black").
Guest readers Ian Solomon and Matt Levine join Oppenheimer to discuss what this novel has to say about heroism and humanity, dissembling and deception, and the quest for authenticity.
Order today!
Available at:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
IndieBound
08/24/16 • 56 min
In Good Morning, Midnight, the world has gone silent. No sound filters through to Augustine, a research scientist who refused to obey the evacuation order given to his arctic research center; likewise, Sully and her four fellow astronauts hear nothing from Earth on their journey back from Jupiter. The world was there one day and the next day it wasn't; no one knows why. These two characters, one in the farthest reaches of earth, the other in the farthest reaches of space, are forced to confront not just their uncertain futures but also their pasts: what was lost and what willingly relinquished, what was mourned and what regretted, what they aspired to, and the price they paid.
Lily Brooks-Dalton talks about how her job, one winter, at a New England public radio station planted the seed for this novel, about her choice to write what one of our readers termed "the quietest post-apocalyptic book I've ever read" ("Plot and action are not tools that my writerly self reaches for"), and about her decision to end with a cliffhanger ("Coming to a culmination in a place of not knowing is so much of what life is").
Guest readers Tui Sutherland and Brian Slattery join host Cyd Oppenheimer to discuss isolation, loneliness, grief, and hope, and crack each other up playing a game of "Which Astronaut Are You?"
Order today!
Available at:'
07/27/16 • 51 min
The Unseen World begins in the 1980s, in Boston, before the Internet, before e-mail or smart phones, when computers were large and clunky and not yet ubiquitous, and where David Sibelius, computer scientist, is raising his daughter Ada alone. Ada's childhood is an atypical one: she spends her time with David and his colleagues, not going to school, learning in David's artificial intelligence lab. So when, shortly after Ada turns 12, David is diagnosed with Alzheimer's, Ada is utterly lost. It turns out she is even more lost than she knows: everything David has told her, his friends, and his colleagues about his past, including his name, is a lie. Ada's life becomes a quest for the truth, as she seeks to decode the mystery her father has left her, and to understand what can be invented and still be the truth.
Liz Moore answers host Cyd Oppenheimer's questions about all the ways this book is different from her previous novel, Heft, in what it chooses to divulge and how it ends; talks about her writing process; and reveals that originally David had a different secret past (but won't tell us what it was!).
Guest readers Alice Baumgartner and Sophfronia Scott join Oppenheimer to discuss ghosts and grief, betrayals and bequests, and inheritance and invention.
Available at:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
IndieBound
07/13/16 • 55 min
"Surprise me." These words, from whence the novel takes its title, are what teacher and washed-up novelist Daniel Jablonski tells college senior Isabelle Rothman when she gives him her writing. She doesn't find his words helpful. Their relationship begins as fractious, contentious, and barbed, but it proves to be enduring, girded by a slow-emerging mutual respect. In the years following Isabelle's graduation, the two remain connected by a correspondence that proves important to them both. Through its exploration of their connection, Surprise Me is a meditation on writing, mentorship, and what it is to tell someone else's stories.
Deena Goldstone talks about what surprised her in the writing of this book ("Daniel's son was a revelation to me"), about the morality of mining other people's lives ("Almost everything I write has some germ in something that's happened to me or someone I know . . . but the entity that you create is a thing in and of itself"), and whether it's possible to teach someone to write ("mentorship is [ultimately] about helping someone find their own voice").
Guest readers Emily Moore and Matt Higbee join host Cyd Oppenheimer to discuss gender dynamics, the tension between writing and motherhood, and stalkers and figure skaters.
Available at:
01/10/18 • -1 min
How would you live if you knew when you would die? This is the question confronting the four Gold siblings: Varya, Daniel, Klara, and Simon. In 1969, when they are children, a fortune-teller predicts, for each of them, the date of their death. It’s superstition, silliness, they know this, but words have power. The prophecy follows them as they choose their paths into adulthood. Simon heads to San Francisco in search of an authentic self. Klara becomes a magician, an illusionist, a performer of death-defying feats. Daniel studies medicine but, as an Army doctor, instead of healing, he deems young men healthy enough to send to war. And Varya, the eldest, turns to science, the opposite of magic, but her field of study — how to extend the lives of primates — is perhaps her own version of a death-defying feat. As they live their lives — and face down their deaths — each must find the path to writing their own story in a world where uncertainty and loss are pervasive but love is enduring.
Host Cyd Oppenheimer talks with author Chloe Benjamin about unreliable narrators ("To me, every narrator is unreliable"), about allowing herself to write characters whose lived experience differs from her own ("research and empathy are the best way I've found to give myself that permission"), and choosing to end not with death but with healing.
Guest readers Annie Thoms and Jessica Sager join Oppenheimer to discuss the journeys of oppressed peoples, the stories that we tell ourselves, and what it means to believe in transformation.
Order today!
Available from:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
IndieBound
Show more best episodes
Show more best episodes
FAQ
What is the most popular episode on Book Talk?
The episode title 'Episode 59: Mother of Invention by Caeli Wolfson Widger' is the most popular.