Episode 32: The Winter in Anna by Reed Karaim

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!

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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

Previous Episode

Episode 31: Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore by Robin Sloan

Clay Jannon is a Web designer without a job, a twenty-something victim of the Great Recession who finds himself wandering the streets of San Francisco looking for Help Wanted signs. That’s how he wanders into Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, and into Mr. Penumbra, the very old, very blue-eyed man who greets him with the question: “What do you seek in these shelves?” Mr. Penumbra hires him for the night shift, on three conditions: he must always be on time and not leave early; he must never browse, read, or otherwise inspect the shelved volumes in the back; and he must record, in a leather-bound tome, precise records or all transactions: the time, the customer’s appearance, whether his buttons are stone or jade.

All quests begin with a set of rules, and all adventures begin when the rules are broken. Clay looks in the books and the adventure unfolds, taking him from the top shelves of his San Francisco bookstore to the underground vaults of New York, from the headquarters of Google to a storage warehouse in Nevada, from the sixteenth century to the present day. He seeks to solve an age-old mystery, and, in doing so, to answer the eternal question: how, if at all, can we achieve immortality?

Host Cyd Oppenheimer talks with author Robin Sloan about unlearning how to write for the Internet ("I still catch myself rushing, hurrying, getting nervous that a section’s going to go on too long”), reading with Google open on the side ("it makes my brain light up and makes my heart glow, what an amazing, wonderful way to read"), and about why books still matter in the post-election world.

Guest readers Tui Sutherland and Alfie Guy join Oppenheimer to discuss technology and tradition, fantasy and friendship, names and nighttime.

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Next Episode

Episode 33: The Animators by Kayla Rae Whitaker

Two poor girls from rural America somehow manage to find their way to a private East Coast college, and, from there, to each other. Mel, tough, aggressive, magnetic, knows she will be a cartoonist. Sharon, uncertain, unsure, insecure, knows only there are things she wants to make, but not yet how they will get made. The two become best friends and partners. A decade later, they are still at it: about to release an animated film about Mel's past which will bring them the acclaim they've been seeking. And that's just the first 25 pages. The Animators takes us in directions we don't expect it to go: from Brooklyn to Florida to Kentucky, from one painful past to another, from one great loss to a second even greater one. This is a book about whether the gifts we have define us or destroy us, about the powers and the perils of telling our own stories, about the way friendship can sustain us and sink us.

Host Cyd Oppenheimer talks with author Kayla Rae Whitaker about her choice to write about artists ("this was kind of a way of branching out into the world and experiencing a life that wasn't mine"), why she left so many questions unanswered ("as a reader, something that I'm really pleased to run across . . . is when we address the truth of how little we really know the people around us, and how little we know ourselves"), and the moments in the book that surprised even her.

Guest readers Annie Thoms and Jessica Sager join Oppenheimer to discuss mothers and daughters, journeys and re-birth, and the power and danger of stories.

Order today!

Available at:
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
IndieBound