Author Interviews

I love literary fiction.

There. I said it. I will no longer be ashamed! I love fiction that explores questions without necessarily giving answers, that eschews happy endings for meaningful ones, and allows characters to transcend archetypal roles. 

Sonya Chung believes in literary fiction, too -- and it's what she writes. Her first novel, "Long for This World," hits another things that I love, however:

I love fiction about other places in the world. 

Is it because my parents had stacks of National Geographic magazines in the basement? Maybe it's due to my love of actual travel, which my parents also supported. 

Chung has written a book that shows Korea and Koreans in a natural light. I so enjoyed speaking with her about "Long for this World," and I hope you will enjoy watching us, too.

Ruth Kassinger looks quite sane, by which I mean she looks as if she keeps her life in balance: Time for work, family, play... You would never guess that beneath her calm exterior lurks the heart of an obsessed artiste, a woman who would let nothing, not even a complete lack of knowledge, stop her from building an old-fashioned conservatory.

We either must redefine "quite sane," then, or be glad that Kassinger is not so, since her recounting of her obsession, "Paradise under Glass: An Amateur Builds a Conservatory Garden" is pure delight. She walks us through her conservatory's development by telling us about conservatories through history, including tales of exotic plant hunters and quirky greenhouses. 

NRP Religion Correspondent Barbara Bradley Hagerty knew a lot about how faith affects human behavior. Growing up in a Christian Science household, Hagerty saw her mother and grandmother pray over afflictions and relate stories about times that they were healed through "right thinking." 

What Hagerty didn't know was whether or not faith was somehow ingrained in human behavior. Even after she left Christian Science (the story of her lapse is in her first chapter), the author considered herself a person of faith, who believed in God -- but was that because of God, or because of a gene, or something else she'd never considered?

The result of her inquiries into what we now know of the divine can be found in Hagerty's book "Fingerprints of God: The Search for the Science of Spirituality," and I had a wonderful time talking with her about those results in today's featured interview. Enjoy!

"The Murderer's Daughters" is a novel inspired by real events and emotions in author Randy Susan Meyers' life, although her own father never did kill anyone. 

I found this particularly significant and powerful because Meyers did not publish this novel until later in her life -- yet she was still able to access those events and emotions and translate them into a full-blown examination of what might happen "after" a person's rage changes the lives of everyone in its wake. 

This isn't a story about a murder. It's a story about how two little girls grow into two complicated women and ultimately come to terms with the tragedy that defined their childhood. I highly recommend it, and hope you'll enjoy watching my interview with Randy Susan Meyers.