Bich Minh Nguyen is the guest. Her new novel, Pioneer Girl, is available now from Viking. The San Francisco Chronicle calls it "[A] sincere and moving novel... a surprising synthesis of the personal and the public, the intimate and the epic, the historical and the fictional. Nguyen takes two disparate strands of our national mythology and weaves them into a powerful and wholly original American saga." And Kirkus Reviews says "Nguyen has a perceptive understanding of the tension between mothers and daughters and the troubling insights to be gained from digging into the past. An unexpected pleasure, with a well-drawn and compelling narrator." Monologue topics: Las Vegas, pot, gambling, losing, winning, ethics. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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“What did the council decide on item 42?” — answered with the speaker and the moment.