Fresh Air

Her new novel, The Girls Who Grew Big, follows three young women navigating pregnancy in a postRoe v. Wade world.

Leila Motley, welcome to Fresh Air. ... Her new novel, The Girls Who Grew Big, centers on the lives of three young mothers in the Florida panhandle as they navigate what it means to be a mother today when reproductive rights are being rolled back across the country.

Your novel actually puts young mothers at the center, right in the middle of these conflicting realities.

Her new novel, The Girls Who Grew Big, is about a group of teenage mothers in a small town in the Florida panhandle who forge a community through their circumstances.

Leila Motley's new novel is called The Girls Who Grew Big.

Her 2024 poetry collection, woke up no light, wrestles with girlhood, reparations, and desire.

Her 2024 poetry collection, woke up no light, wrestles with girlhood, reparations, and desire.

the previous book, which was called Heart Full of Rhythm, The Big Band Years of Lewis Armstrong.

the next chapter of Armstrong's life was covered in the previous chapter of my previous book, which was called Heart Full of Rhythm, the big band years of Louis Armstrong.

El Dorado Drive is Megan Abbott's most doom laden novel yet. It's set in the year 2008 in Detroit, which happens to be Abbott's hometown. The three middleaged Bishop sisters, our main characters here, can recall their father driving them around town in a sapphire blue caddy when he was general counsel to GM. The trio is beset by money troubles until middle sister Pam invites her sibs into an allfemale financial club she's joined called The Wheel.

El Dorado Drive is Megan Abbott's most doom-laden novel yet. It's set in the year 2008 in Detroit, which happens to be Abbott's hometown. The three middleaged bishop sisters ... are beset by money troubles until middle sister Pam invites her sibs into an allfemale financial club she's joined called The Wheel.

Restraint is not a hallmark of S.A. Cosby's crime fiction. His writing is rough, raw, and violent. King of Ashes, Cosby's latest novel, is set in the Virginia town of Jefferson Run, which, like Abbott's Detroit, has seen better days. Once a manufacturing hub where mason jars were made, the town is now ruled by a gang called the Black Baron Boys. Roman Carruthers, our antihero, uses his financial knowhow to try to save his family while plotting the gang's annihilation.

Restraint is not a hallmark of S.A. Cosby's crime fiction. His writing is rough, raw, and violent. King of Ashes, Cosby's latest novel, is set in the Virginia town of Jefferson Run ... I warn you, that crematory gets put to use a lot. But King of Ashes is so ingenious, neither grit nor gore could make me stop reading it.

Larry Charles has a new memoir called Comedy Samurai, 40 Years of Blood, Guts, and Laughter. When he says blood and guts, he means it. He and Sacha Baron Cohen took enormous risks with their films, in which Baron Cohen took his characters Borat and Bruno into the real world and shot scenes with people who thought Borat and Bruno were real people.

Larry Charles has a new memoir called Comedy Samurai, 40 Years of Blood, Guts, and Laughter.

His new memoir is called Comedy Samurai.

Larry Charles's new memoir is called Comedy Samurai.

He added that layer to the book after all this happened.

He wrote in his memoir that hugging and learning is anathema to comedy.

I immediately ordered it on Amazon. It's in a collection called If It Bleeds. There's three stories.

I immediately ordered it on Amazon. It's in a collection called If It Bleeds.

One of my mentors who passed away, writer Greg Tate, he wrote a book called Everything But the Burden.

One of my mentors who passed away, writer Greg Tate, he wrote a book called Everything But the Burden.

He titled one of his books Outcats, a word coined by the pianist Paul Knopf and revived by Francis.

He wrote about many Outcats. Here's how Francis used the word, quote, by popular stereotype, all jazz musicians are Outcats, but those of us within music recognize the outcat as a specific type, too selfabsorbed to be part of any movement and too idiosyncratic to spearhead one and too marginal in the larger scheme of things to elicit much.

He is the author of many books on jazz, including Bebop and Nothingness, In the Moment, and Outcats, jazz composers, instrumentalists, and singers.

His new book is AI Valley, Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion Dollar Race to Cash In on Artificial Intelligence.

His new book is AI Valley, Microsoft, Google, and the Trillion-dollar race to cash in on artificial intelligence.

Investigative reporter Gary Rivlin's new book tells the inside story of how AI was developed and how big tech firms are racing to build powerful systems with enormous potential for harm and profit. His book is AI Valley.

new book called A Town Without Time. The very first piece Talese published in Esquire in 1960 leads off this collection. It's called New York is a City of Things Unnoticed.

She reviewed This Beautiful, Ridiculous City by Kay Sahini and A Town Without Time by Gay Talese.

Talese ... has written a lot of great pieces about New York, many of which are gathered together in a new book called A Town Without Time.

She reviewed This Beautiful Ridiculous City by Kay Sohini and A Town Without Time, Gay Talese's New York.

And it was entitled Who is the Black Panther? And it was a series about five graphic novels that I consumed and loved.

Reginald Hudlin had done a new series of the Black Panther comic and it was entitled Who is the Black Panther.

And when I started reading Seven Guitars by August Wilson, I recognized myself in those people.

we started reading Seven Guitars by August Wilson.

A monumental collection of The Letters of Emily Dickinson was published this year. Edited by Dickinson scholars Chris Dan Miller and Donald Mitchell, it's the closest thing we'll probably ever have to an autobiography by the poet.

Our book critic, Maureen Carrigan, has a review of a hefty new collection of letters by one of America's greatest poets.

She reviewed The Letters of Emily Dickinson.

A new monumental volume of Dickinson's letters, the first in over 60 years, gives us an engaged Emily Dickinson, a woman in conversation with the world through gossip as well as remarks about books, politics and the signal events of her age.

The result is that The Letters of Emily Dickinson reads like the closest thing we'll probably ever have to an intimate autobiography of the poet.

In Cahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford summons up a femme fatale, crooked cops and politicians, and working-class resentment as bitter as bathtub gin. He weds these hard-boiled elements to a story about the actual vanished city of Cahokia, which before the arrival of Columbus was the largest urban center north of Mexico. Spufford's novel is set in an alternative America of 1922, where the peace of Cahokia's indigenous, white, and African-American populations is threatened by a grisly murder.

Novelist Frances Spufford's latest work of alternative historical fiction is called Cahokia Jazz. It's a hardboiled detective novel that imagines an America where Native Americans weren't decimated by smallpox brought over by Europeans, but rather flourished and exerted political power.

Maureen Corrigan says that its vision of democracy straining at the seams looks awfully familiar.

Much of the action of Frances Spufford's latest novel, Cahokia Jazz, plays out in the shadows, beginning with its opening scene. At first glance, a classic noir tableau.

In Spufford's mashup of noir with alternative history, however, the lost city of Cahokia endured and evolved into a modern metropolis whose indigenous, white, and AfricanAmerican populations live in cautious harmony.

Spufford even draws upon an old trade jargon to flesh out a language, Anopa, that's used in Cahokia, and he scatters phrases liberally throughout the novel.

Crampton's new book is called A Body Made of Glass, A Cultural History of Hypochondria.

Her new book is called A Body Made of Glass, A Cultural History of Hypochondria.

It's about her own experience of hypochondria, and it examines how our understanding of hypochondria has changed from ancient times to today.

and she's the author of the new book, A Body Made of Glass, A Cultural History of Hypochondria.

Caroline Crampton is the author of the new book, A Body Made of Glass, A Cultural History of Hypochondria.

Her new book is A Body Made of Glass.

Later, a talk with comic and actor Jimmy O. Yang... and wrote the memoir How to American, An Immigrant's Guide to Disappointing Your Parents.

I love reading books but I get distracted very quickly and I'm like oh man now I gotta read the script and the book that's a lot of pages but then I rifled through the book in half a day it was so engaging.

He has numerous standup specials and he wrote a book called How to American, An Immigrant's Guide to Disappointing Your Parents.

He's had numerous standup specials, and his memoir is called How to American, An Immigrant's Guide to Disappointing Your Parents.

Mike Judge wrote an introduction to your book, your memoir, How to American.

Water, Water, Collins' collection of 60 new poems, takes its title from the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ballad, The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner.

She reviewed Water, Water, the latest collection of poems by Billy Collins.

Water, Water, Colin's collection of 60 new poems takes its title from the romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge's ballad, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and its often misquoted lines.

She reviewed Water, Water, the latest collection of poems by Billy Collins,

But James Norbury's illustrated adult fable called The Dog Who Followed the Moon fell into my hands a few weeks ago, and I've been under its spell ever since.

Norbury, who's the bestselling author and illustrator of the philosophical Big Panda and Tiny Dragon books, is a practicing Buddhist.

James Norbury's illustrated adult fable called The Dog Who Followed the Moon fell into my hands a few weeks ago, and I've been under its spell ever since.

Inspirational is a word that's become cheapened, but it's a fitting word for The Dog Who Followed the Moon, an inspirational and gorgeous book about not giving up.

I know you read the book The Outrun and loved it so much that you wanted to make it into a movie, produce it, and play the main character.

And in the film The Outrun, it's based on the best-selling memoir by Amy Liptrot.

It's based on the bestselling memoir by Amy Liptrot.

I know you read the book The Outrun and loved it so much that you wanted to make it into a movie, produce it, and play the main character.