Marginalia

According to writer and history buff, Joe Stumpe, "early Wichita earned a wicked reputation from newspapers across Kansas thanks to a bevy of madams and murderers, bootleggers and bank robbers, con men and crooked cops." 

November Road is a thriller set in November 1963, and it begins just before JFK’s assassination. When a mob lieutenant realizes that many of his associates are being eliminated one by one, he speculates not only that the murders are tied to the assassination, but also that he is next.

In November Road, author Lou Berney expands on mob-related conspiracy theories surrounding Kennedy’s death. I recently sat down with Lou Berney at the KMUW studios to talk about November Road and more.

Here's our conversation:

Olga Tokarczuk is the author of Flights, winner of the Man Booker International Prize, which is awarded to the best work of translated fiction from anywhere in the world. She shares the prize with the book’s translator, Jennifer Croft. And Flights was chosen from more than 100 submissions.

Tokarczuk has been labeled as one of Europe’s most imaginative writers, and with Flights, new readers in the states are beginning to understand why.

I recently visited with her about Flights and the translation process. Here's our conversation:

Delia Owens has written several books, but they are primarily non-fiction, a reflection of the 23 years she spent studying wildlife in Africa. Her new book, Where the Crawdads Sing, is Owens’ first work of fiction. It also takes the reader on a deep dive into nature, but this novel is set in the marshlands of coastal North Carolina.

I recently spoke with Owens about growing up with nature, about how her research informed her fiction, about the nature of sisterhood and more. Here's our conversation:

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In her novel Ghosted, Rosie Walsh writes the story of an extremely capable woman who meets a man, spends an incredible week with him, makes future plans with him, and then he disappears. Initially she believes something happened to him during his planned holiday, except through the marvels of social media, she can see when he is online, and when he receives her texts, and when he starts to write back, and then stops. She's been ghosted, and she doesn't know why.

I spoke with Rosie Walsh about her novel, her writing methods, and what’s next. Here's our conversation:

In her political thriller Vox, author Christina Dalcher used her work in linguistics to inform the imagined society in which a political regime silenced women with word counters. And not just grown women, baby girls as young as three months were being fitted with these bracelet word counters on their small wrists.

Each female was allotted 100 words a day. The counters reset at midnight. And each infraction was met with negative reinforcement… an electrical charge.

For the last 11 years, Hank Green and his brother, John, have been making videos back and forth to each other on a YouTube channel called Vlogbrothers, which has over 3 million subscribers. 

Although Fruit of the Drunken Tree is fiction, it has its roots in author Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s real life. 

In her new novel, author Vanessa Hua uses an immigrant story to explore the definition of home and belonging, but it’s her use of setting that encourages the reader to look under the surface--or up beyond ground level--to recognize that every immigrant story is unique.

A River of Stars follows a young woman on her flight from China to the US, through the birth of her child, to her own quest of achieving the American Dream.

I recently spoke with Vanessa Hua about the book as well as her work as a journalist. Here's our conversation:

Sarah Perry was longlisted for London’s Young Poet Laureate in 2013, and her experience as a poet is evident in her debut novel, Let Me Be Like Water.