Poured Over

Rabia Chaudry on FATTY FATTY BOOM BOOM: A MEMOIR OF FOOD, FAT, AND FAMILY

10 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I had never known what it was like to feel full. And I know that sounds like really odd, but because most people can — I would be with friends and ...

Madeline Miller on GALATEA

08 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I always feel like as a reader, I always want to go in ready to be changed, ready to be transformed by what I'm reading, ready to be expanded. And th...

Anand Giridharadas on THE PERSUADERS: AT THE FRONT LINES OF THE FIGHT FOR HEARTS, MINDS, AND DEMOCRACY

05 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"More people than we realize are works in progress, are trying to figure out a way to think about the world… As Beyoncé said in her new album, they...

N.K. Jemisin on THE WORLD WE MAKE

03 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"…The idea just kind of spun itself into existence in my head, the world started to form almost immediately — when my creative brain kind of immed...

Louise Kennedy on TRESPASSES

01 Nov 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"…It was at the end of an exhibition called The Art of The Troubles. And that had been a little controversial (as these things very often are in po...

Marjorie Liu on THE NIGHT EATERS: SHE EATS THE NIGHT

29 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"We don't know our parents, I mean, we think we do; you know, all of us have a practice of dealing with contained worlds. And that practice begins wit...

Jodi Picoult and Jennifer Finney Boylan on MAD HONEY

27 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I was always writing, and I think it goes back to that Charlotte's Web thing when I had that experience of something taking me out of this world. It...

Siddhartha Mukherjee on THE SONG OF THE CELL: AN EXPLORATION OF MEDICINE AND THE NEW HUMAN

25 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"People write medical histories, people write personal case histories, I didn't want to do either. People write memoirs; I wanted to do all of them in...

Ross Gay on INCITING JOY

22 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"We were doing all of this for people we did not know and could not imagine. And as is the case, too, like, when you're planting trees, you hope that ...

Nicholas Dawidoff on THE OTHER SIDE OF PROSPECT: A STORY OF VIOLENCE, INJUSTICE, AND THE AMERICAN CITY

20 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"When I came back, I was thinking about how to tell the story. And I wanted to meet people who, in one way or another, resembled the young people who ...

George Saunders on LIBERATION DAY

18 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"By making a certain voice, then I'm going to force myself to do new things in that story. The voice is for me, very measured and realistic and regula...

Lydia Millet on DINOSAURS: A NOVEL

15 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"There's kind of an aspect of melancholy that I love as a reader… But I can't write a book that I wouldn't want to read… Although I am interested ...

Constance Wu on MAKING A SCENE

13 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I was always in a play, always in rehearsals. And if I wasn't in a play, I was counting the hours 'til I could be in a play. Because it was the first...

Sequoia Nagamatsu on HOW HIGH WE GO IN THE DARK

11 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I think the knee-jerk reaction to pandemic literature — that I think a lot of readers might have as well, I don't want to read that because it's go...

Morgan Talty on NIGHT OF THE LIVING REZ

08 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I want to tell stories. I hate the whole, don't tell, show mantra because it's not true—it has its like moments like, you know, when the reader...

Celeste Ng on OUR MISSING HEARTS

06 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"He thinks of himself as a character in a fairy tale in a way who's going on a quest. And there's so many stories like that about a character who's go...

Jess Kidd on THE NIGHT SHIP

04 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I want to escape into these like incredible, immersive situations, really. But I think I try and balance this kind of creation of a world or this wor...

Sarah Thankam Mathews on ALL THIS COULD BE DIFFERENT

01 Oct 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"So you know, something that is a big part of my project…is actually this idea that we deserve pleasure. I think that pleasure and care, these are a...

Hua Hsu on STAY TRUE: A MEMOIR

29 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I think I figured a lot of things out literally as I was writing the book. I'm usually an obsessive methodical writer, or I have everything, if not m...

Laura Warrell on SWEET, SOFT, PLENTY RHYTHM

27 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I feel like very often when we have stories about womanizing characters, whether we piece those stories out, so we see each woman—individually or n...

Hafizah Augustus Geter on THE BLACK PERIOD: ON PERSONHOOD, RACE, AND ORIGIN

24 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I did nothing but read the entire time I was writing this….literally every waking moment, I was doing some type of research and a lot of research ...

Bobby Finger on THE OLD PLACE

22 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"Ever since we left, when I was 13, it's a place that I think about constantly. I think about it in hypothetical terms. It's something that I just sor...

Andrew Sean Greer on LESS IS LOST

20 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I already had a kind of Don Quixote set up in mind. And so I was like, Wouldn't it be funny if Arthur was the sort of Sancho Panza in this? I'll j...

Saeed Jones on ALIVE AT THE END OF THE WORLD

17 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"This book feels very much…drawing from the Black Saints: Whitney Houston, Paul Mooney, Little Richard, Luther Vandross, almost my own canon, my own...

Abdulrazak Gurnah on AFTERLIVES

15 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"Well, home is a complicated concept....So you've shaken me awake at three o'clock in the morning. Where's home? I'll say Zanzibar without hesitation...

Ian McEwan on LESSONS

13 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I'm heading into my mid 70s and I really want to just get into a novel and live inside it. No sense of hurry. No deadline, no sense that anyone's wai...

Jonathan Escoffery, Yiyun Li and Ling Ma on The Art of Fiction

10 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I start with the emotion. I don't know what the story is. I don't know who the characters are necessarily. I'm working on very little like, I'm think...

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton on ON THE ROOFTOP

08 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"…In this particular book, I think I wanted to combat the feeling that we were already inundated with, and even the feelings that are attached to so...

Javier Zamora on SOLITO

06 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"That nine-year-old kid still follows me and is with me and is very much a part of me... And this is the hope for the book, not only for non-immigrant...

Mason Hereford on TURKEY AND THE WOLF: FLAVOR TRIPPIN' IN NEW ORLEANS

03 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I think about food constantly, but more so than anyone else it's the people I work with who are inspiring me now.... I'm always inspired by the peopl...

Jessie Burton on THE HOUSE OF FORTUNE

01 Sep 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I think it is a conversation I'm having with my younger self, who loved the idea of time travel, who loved the idea that these people perhaps not so ...

Sarah Addison Allen on OTHER BIRDS

30 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I think they grew out of the setting of this weird island, this odd place, this place of southern stories and ghosts and food and how they are misfit...

Ada Limón on THE HURTING KIND

27 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I think it's really important to remember that poetry has always sort of existed in the moment. It's full of the life that we're living right now. It...

R.F. Kuang on BABEL

25 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"We're all constantly translating ourselves to the world—we all are trying to take the inevitable stuff that happens in our psyche, our fears, and h...

Beth Macy on RAISING LAZARUS: HOPE, JUSTICE AND THE FUTURE OF AMERICA'S OVERDOSE CRISIS

23 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"And so, then I thought, Who do I most admire? Who taught me the most, and also, they're doing it for completely selfless reasons, right? And I tho...

Keith Corbin on CALIFORNIA SOUL: AN AMERICAN EPIC OF COOKING AND SURVIVAL

20 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"But I had fun growing up, you know, kids Double Dutch and playing football in the front yard, trash can basketball, running around 40 deep into proj...

Dr. Moiya McTier on THE MILKY WAY: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF OUR GALAXY

18 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"To me, science is the rigorous attempt at understanding the world around you. And most people think that that means you're in a lab wearing a coat, w...

Julian Barnes on ELIZABETH FINCH

16 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"This is one of the great differences between journalism and literature, which I practice in. You write journalism in order for everything to be absol...

Jana Casale on HOW TO FALL OUT OF LOVE MADLY

11 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"To me, the thing as a writer that you should always be working towards is like, how can I make this just be delicious for the reader?" Jana Casale ha...

Jasmine Guillory on Writing Characters We Love

09 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"All three of the books that I have written during the pandemic have really been my way of going into another world and finding a place where none of ...

Tess Gunty on THE RABBIT HUTCH

06 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"To write a young woman who refuses to define herself by anything other than her activism, her mind, her curiosity, that was just a delight, and she w...

Ryka Aoki on LIGHT FROM UNCOMMON STARS

04 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"But when I write, that's when I feel I can take part in society, I can contribute to ideas, and to teach and to share, and to say, I love you to so...

Anthony Marra on MERCURY PICTURES PRESENTS

02 Aug 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"There's just so much rich material in Hollywood during the 1940s—which is where much of the book is set—there is just sort of an endless rabbit h...

Eleanor Brown on ANY OTHER FAMILY

28 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I just had so many questions about adoption and motherhood. And you know, you've read my books, you know that I'm very interested in what makes a fam...

Eric Kim on KOREAN AMERICAN: FOOD THAT TASTES LIKE HOME

26 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"What's really interesting about taste memory is it's not that you're trying to necessarily replicate the dish exactly as it was, I think you're actua...

Alice Elliott Dark on FELLOWSHIP POINT

21 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"One thing I really have learned—or at least for myself about writing—is never to explain why a person is the way they are, just to make a dramati...

Isaac Fitzgerald on DIRTBAG, MASSACHUSETTS

19 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I wish I could tell you that I went to a cabin and wrote it perfectly and got it in on time, and it just flowed out of me. But really, the truth of t...

Becky Chambers on A PRAYER FOR THE CROWN-SHY

16 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"The primary intent of these books is to take a break... have something you can just curl up with for an afternoon. This is a book that is not going t...

T. Kingfisher on WHAT MOVES THE DEAD

14 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"When you're writing a children's book, it shares much relation with horror, because it has to be usually very immediate and very visceral and grippin...

Caleb Gayle on WE REFUSE TO FORGET: A TRUE STORY OF BLACK CREEKS, AMERICAN IDENTITY, AND POWER

12 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"But there is joy in advocating for changing of the world for the better, for not allowing the world to tell you who you shall be, but rather reimagin...

Chris Bohjalian on Telling Stories

09 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I decided to give myself the license to fail, and to write across gender, to write in the voice of a midwife's daughter. And if the book isn't workin...

Ibram X. Kendi on HOW TO RAISE AN ANTIRACIST

07 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"And so, too often, kids are raised to have empathy for people who look like them, or worship like them or act like them. And we're also taught to hav...

Gabrielle Zevin on TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW, AND TOMORROW

05 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I never thought I would be writing something where there would be a lot of intricate feelings around the game engine. But then if you think about som...

Brian Broome on PUNCH ME UP TO THE GODS

02 Jul 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"The most important thing is the reader. I tell my students, Look, if you're writing about yourself, it's great that you want to get your feelings out...

Jason Reynolds and Jason Griffin on MY NAME IS JASON, MINE TOO

30 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"For me, and perhaps for both of us, I think that our greatest sort of skill set is audacity. It's so funny the way people sort of negatively connote ...

Patrick Radden Keefe on ROGUES: TRUE STORIES OF GRIFTERS, KILLERS, REBELS AND CROOKS

28 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"It's so painful to me to feel as though the very notion of objective truth or that journalism could be a vehicle for expressing a kind of objective t...

Ava Reid on JUNIPER & THORN

25 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"So much classic fantasy exists in this sort of timeless state where, you know, whatever fantasy world it's set in has kind of always existed....I've...

Ed Yong on AN IMMENSE WORLD

23 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I sort of figured that, having been interested in science from as long as I can remember, I would be a PhD student, and make a career for myself a...

Ottessa Moshfegh on LAPVONA

21 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I wanted to write something that was going to take me away, literally and metaphorically, literally take me away from sitting with my feelings about ...

Geraldine Brooks on HORSE

18 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"You know, Marlon James said something once, he said, if you're going to write about the enslaved, and you're not going to write about the resilience,...

Sloane Crosley on CULT CLASSIC

16 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"...A part of the point of the book was to not shy away from what we shy away from in real life. And one of the things we shy away from in real life i...

Hannah Whitten on FOR THE THRONE

14 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"And when you give people the option to kind of live inside the head of a different character … if you're doing your job, and you make it a characte...

Corban Addison on WASTELANDS: THE TRUE STORY OF FARM COUNTRY ON TRIAL

11 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"It was the people really, that convinced me that this was a story not just worth telling, but needed to be told, and needed to be told the right way,...

Leila Mottley on NIGHTCRAWLING

09 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I really wanted to depict the ways that young Black girls are made adults by a culture that sees us as that. And I wanted to show the way that that p...

Tom Perrotta on TRACY FLICK CAN'T WIN

07 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"Tracy never went away. So yes, you can say I'm bringing her back, but the culture kept her in circulation in a way that was really interesting to me,...

Katie Runde on THE SHORE

04 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I missed it so much. And definitely didn't get it or appreciate the specialness of it, or this particular beauty of it … until you have to show up ...

David Levithan on BOY MEETS BOY

02 Jun 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I was very, very unintentionally smart in that I started it as a short story, I genuinely believed it was a short story, which was good, because if I...

Sarai Walker on THE CHERRY ROBBERS

31 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I didn't want it to be just a very overwhelming dark book. I mean, it has so much tragedy that I had to balance that I wanted to make it part of, y...

Steve Almond on ALL THE SECRETS OF THE WORLD

28 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"And I had to actually give up and say, Okay, maybe I'll go to the grave not having written a novel, and I don't have to carry around shame about that...

Honorée Fanonne Jeffers on The Love Songs of W.E.B Du Bois

26 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I'm always coming back to Chicasetta, in the same way that Ernest Gaines always comes back to Bayonne parish. And William Faulkner always comes back ...

Akwaeke Emezi on YOU MADE A FOOL OF DEATH WITH YOUR BEAUTY

24 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I had a dream about them. I have like these really cinematic dreams. And I woke up from this one. And I was like, this is a fantastic, messy little s...

Candice Millard on RIVER OF THE GODS

21 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"…You have to have so much primary source material that you are drowning, you think you can never get through it all. That's the only way you get di...

Emma Straub on THIS TIME TOMORROW

19 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"That was really what I wanted to get at. The relationships that you have with the people who you love so much, and who you're so close with that ...

Selma Blair on MEAN BABY

17 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"But then when I read that Raymond Carver said he didn't have the ability to write, you know, a full novel. He was a sprinter and I thought, Oh, mayb...

Alison Espach on NOTES ON YOUR SUDDEN DISAPPEARANCE

14 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"For me, part of the fun of coming-of-age novels, both reading and writing, is getting to have that adult perspective on these youthful moments and ki...

Jennifer Weiner on THE SUMMER PLACE

12 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I was thinking about caretaking. And I was thinking about mothers because I lost my mom last year, but just the places that feel familiar and how the...

Heather Walter on MISRULE

10 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"…It's like if Tim Burton decorated Versailles for Halloween…" Heather Walter's queer retelling of Sleeping Beauty kicked off with Malice, whic...

Monica Ali on LOVE MARRIAGE

07 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"For me, the novel form is the greatest expression because it has that room, that latitude to really explore for the full complexity of human existenc...

Hernan Diaz on TRUST

05 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"And the title, of course, has this double meaning, the financial meaning of trust, and let's call it, emotional meaning of trust … To what extent c...

Vaishnavi Patel on KAIKEYI

03 May 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I grew up hearing The Ramayana over lunch. My grandma would tell me little bits and pieces to me and my younger sister, she would tell us little bi...

Viola Davis on FINDING ME

28 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"And so then, I felt like that's when I had to go back to the beginning of telling my story of sort of rediscovering the young Viola, who definitely m...

Bonnie Garmus on LESSONS IN CHEMISTRY

26 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"And I think it's just overall her humanity and her recognition of what other people could accomplish. If you just say the right things, if you create...

Margo Jefferson on CONSTRUCTING A NERVOUS SYSTEM

23 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I didn't want that more traditional kind of arc of childhood to a certain stance of wisdom or resignation or triumph. I wanted—partly because I fel...

Nghi Vo on THE CHOSEN AND THE BEAUTIFUL

21 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"There's an intense pleasure in viewing the flaws of the people around you and saying, I'm not a part of that, even if maybe at the beginning you wan...

Susan Cain on BITTERSWEET: HOW SORROW AND LONGING MAKE US WHOLE

19 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"Leonard Cohen is like my all-time favorite musician … I, all my life, have had this reaction to sad music, of not feeling sad at all when I list...

Douglas Stuart on YOUNG MUNGO

16 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I knew that after writing this sweeping family portrait that goes over about 40 years in the Bain family's history, that for my next novel, I wanted ...

Chloé Cooper Jones on EASY BEAUTY

14 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"You know, beauty is such an interesting term. I think it's really important how vast and complex it is … we call people beautiful, I call my dog ...

Sara Nović on TRUE BIZ

12 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"True Biz is an ASL idiom. It doesn't have one direct translation into English, but a few of the things that it could mean: seriously, literally. Rea...

Grace D. Li on PORTRAIT OF A THIEF

09 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I really wrote it for me, I didn't think anything would come about — I wanted something that could bring me a bit of joy, where Asian American char...

Jennifer Egan on THE CANDY HOUSE

07 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"In the end, all the good ideas and sort of fancy craft approaches get you absolutely nothing if there's no emotional content. That's what it is. I me...

Emily St. John Mandel on SEA OF TRANQUILITY

05 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"I love being immersed in the grand project of a novel. When I was a kid, I was drawn to books about secret worlds, like The Secret Garden, or The L...

Viet Thanh Nguyen on THE COMMITTED

02 Apr 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"…Cynical as he is of the world that he encounters, he's also pretty cynical and critical of himself. And that manifests itself in that sense of hum...

Maud Newton on ANCESTOR TROUBLE

31 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"As you might imagine, over the years, many people heard stories about my family. And they said, Hey, why don't you write a memoir? I really wasn't ...

Francesca May on WILD AND WICKED THINGS

29 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"They're not all villains and all heroes, I think a lot of people are very morally gray…" The atmospheric and haunting Wild and Wicked Things is a ...

Jane McGonigal on IMAGINABLE: HOW TO SEE THE FUTURE COMING AND FEEL READY FOR ANYTHING — EVEN THINGS THAT SEEM IMPOSSIBLE TODAY

24 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"We should call no future unthinkable and no future unimaginable. We have to be willing to think about the hard things and ready ourselves for them...

John Cho on TROUBLEMAKER

22 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"The original impulse to write a book for this age was knowing that this is a time of identity formation for me, curiosity about the outside world. An...

Peter Swanson on NINE LIVES

17 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"My book starts in my brain with me telling myself a story. And I choose not to write it down, as I'm thinking about it. Sometimes for months, sometim...

NoViolet Bulawayo on GLORY

15 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"And within that time, I realized that the story needed to be about regular citizens. But because so much had been written, I found myself needing a n...

Lee Kravetz on THE LAST CONFESSIONS OF SYLVIA P.

10 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"The thing that really sort of blew me away, one of the reasons why we have sort of the type of poetry that we have today and the type of literature t...

Hanif Abdurraqib on A LITTLE DEVIL IN AMERICA: NOTES IN PRAISE OF BLACK PERFORMANCE

08 Mar 2022

Contributed by Lukas

"The book's title comes from Josephine Baker's speech at the March on Washington … she was speaking to a crowd that was younger, and maybe did no...