On this edition of The Literary Life, John Grisham is live at Books and Books in Coral Gables for a great night with a room full of readers, basking in the brilliance of a master storyteller. John’s new book is The Exchange, and he brings back Mitch McDeer, the hero of The Firm — and he talks with Mitchell Kaplan about this new book and much, much more.

From the episode:

John Grisham: I’m on the board of the Innocence Project in New York, and we work to free innocent people all the time. We’ve freed 400. I’m on the board of the Centurion Ministries in Princeton. They freed 70 in 40 years, a smaller group. There are a lot of innocence groups in the country. There’s one here in Florida. Working hard to free completely innocent people. Once I got caught up in that world, I realized how many terrible prosecutions there are, the many different ways the system can go wrong. The curse of mass incarceration. The unfairness of the death penalty.

And all that’s been an ongoing process for me. Sometimes it bleeds over into the fiction.

I write two types of books. This is, to me, is pure entertainment. Like The Firm: there’s no socially redeeming message. It’s just fun, okay? Uh, and the other books are, they deal with issues. And there are a lot of issues I’ve touched on: environmental destruction and insurance fraud and for-profit law schools. You know, there’s a lot of bad actors in the world.

And it’s fun to take an issue and kinda weave a story, a compelling page-turning story and get you to think about an issue maybe you haven’t thought about before. Because oftentimes I’m thinking about it for the first time too.

Books & Books recently had the pleasure of hosting three-time National Book Award finalist and best-selling author Lauren Groff, presenting her new novel, The Vaster Wilds. The New York Times calls it “a lonely novel of hunger and survival.” The brilliant Groff reads from her adventure novel and answers questions from her audience of fans. This new episode of The Literary Life was recorded at Books & Books in Coral Gables.

From the episode:

Lauren Groff: So I thought, oh gosh, well maybe my Jamestown idea has another part to it. Maybe I could write a female Robinson Crusoe. And then I remembered –and this is the third part of the book that actually came together and exploded into an idea– I remembered captivity narratives, which, if you don’t remember ninth grade history, like, don’t worry about it.

My, my tenth grader doesn’t either. But captivity narratives are these astonishing American texts. I know they’re, I mean, they’re from all over the world, but the ones that we really study tend to be American. And they are from the eruption of colonization and the Native peoples. So what happens in captivity narratives is that it’s the story of someone on the frontier being seized by the Native Americans, held for a time and then ransomed back.

And usually these texts were as told to religious people. So Increase Mather, a very famous early preacher, and Cotton Mather, his son, who was responsible for the Salem witch trials, loved to collect these, these captivity narratives, and publish them. The most famous one that we know of is Mary Rawlinson’s Captivity Narrative, which is actually an amazing text just to read.

Uh, harrowing, interesting. It’s all… used for propaganda purposes. So the propaganda purposes of captivity narratives was in order to justify and make seem godly, in a way, the expansionof the Europeans into North America. It was a way of saying, look at these poor, primarily white women who have been captured. Look at how evil the people are who captured them.

So they’re really problematic, right? As texts, they’re really complicated and they really do tell a lot about the mindset of the people at the time, who are writing them. And I thought, well, after I wanted to write a female Robinson Crusoe, wouldn’t it be great if I was also writing a captivity narrative?

Nathan Hill is the guest on this edition of The Literary Life. His new novel Wellness is one of the most anticipated books of the year: following his critically acclaimed The Nix, Wellness tells the story of a marriage at its inception and then into its future. Two days after Oprah selected Wellness for her book club, Nathan visited Books and Books and his humor, poignancy, and flat-out brilliance were on display — on page and stage.

From the episode:

Nathan Hill: Oprah contacted me in March, and I’m so happy I can finally tell the story. I was on a Zoom call with… It was the second or third time we scheduled it, because they wanted to keep it a big surprise, and so they were like, we want to have this Zoom meeting. And I was like, well, what’s the meeting about?

And they were like, Ah, nothing. And I was like, well, I’m busy. I had, like, tennis practice. I was like, I’m busy. And I did not know that this was, like, this was the one spot in the week that Oprah had free. And had I known that, of course, I would have skipped tennis practice, but, but I didn’t know that. So I was like, well, no, I’m, it’s, if we’re, if the meeting’s not about anything, I’m gonna, I’m gonna go to practice.

And so they’re like, okay, how about Friday at, like, three? So I was like, okay. Friday at three rolls around, I get a text, we’re pushing it back to four. I’m like, okay, fine. Get a text an hour later. We’re pushing it back to five. And like, if you’re getting pushed back late on a Friday, you’re like, I am so unimportant.

I’m so, like, they don’t care about me at all. I’m the last thing they have to, you know, put in the, in the bag before going on their weekends. Um, and uh, and then I get on the Zoom call, and it’s just my publicist. Um, and she’s like, can we record this for all the people who can’t make the meeting? And I’m thinking they’re skipping the meeting now?

And I’m just like, this is just getting worse and worse and worse. And I was like, fine, record it. I’m kind of annoyed by now. And then she’s like, oh, there’s one more person joining the meeting. And then the entire screen was taken up by Oprah Winfrey. And she’s like, she had a copy of my book.

I didn’t even have a printed copy of my book at that point. Somehow she had it. I still don’t know how that happened. And she said that she wanted to pick the book for her book club. And we had a nice, a really nice chat. Jenny was in the kitchen making a sandwich. I ran out, I was like, I just zoomed with Oprah!

*

Nathan Hill’s best-selling debut novel, The Nix, was named the #1 book of the year by Audible and Entertainment Weekly and one of the year’s best books by The New York Times, The Washington Post, NPR, Slate, and many others. The Nix was the winner of the Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction from the Los Angeles Times and was published worldwide in more than two dozen languages.

Hill’s nonfiction has appeared in Wired, ESPN the Magazine, Poets & Writers, and the New York Times Book Review. His short stories have been published in many literary journals, including The Iowa Review, Agni, The Gettysburg Review, The Denver Quarterly, and Fiction, which awarded him its annual Fiction Prize.

A native Iowan, Hill lives with his wife in Naples, Florida.

Mitchell Kaplan: Books & Books in Coral Gables, our flagship store, is right across the street from the Coral Gables Cinema. Our indie bookstore so close to this indie cinema is my idea of heaven.

Over the years, we’ve had many collaborations and just a few weeks ago, during the cinema’s first run showing of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, Kai Bird, the co-author of American Prometheus (which Christopher Nolan adapted for his screenplay) joined me for a Q&A following a screening of the film. That Q&A makes up this edition of The Literary Life.

From the episode:

Kai Bird: Marty started this book in 1980. He signed a contract with Knopf and he worked on it, he was a tenured professor of history at Tufts, and he worked on it every year for the next 20 years. Gathering 50,000 pages of archival documents, interviewing 150 of Oppenheimer’s colleagues, students, associates at Los Alamos… He hadn’t started to write.

And finally in the year 2000, he came to me. We’d become good friends and, uh, I was unemployed. I’d finished my last book, on the Bundy Brothers, and he asked me to join him. He was a very funny guy. He said that if, if you don’t join me, my gravestone is gonna read: “He took it with him.”

But biography takes time. It takes, you know, years. The fastest biography usually is at least five years. And Marty was very thorough and, you know, just dedicated to getting this done. […] I did join him but it still took five more years, so it was a 25 year project.

On this edition of The Literary Life, my guest has published over 105 novels and has sold over 450 million copies of his books. That’s right, 450 million copies. That’s the output of Dean Koontz and my revealing conversation with him covers lots of territory: his book collection, his love of reading, his new works, his thoughts on artificial intelligence, his writing process, how he researches, his openness about overcoming his difficult childhood, the impact of his early teachers, and the incredible bond with Gerda, his lifelong love and partner. Dean spoke to me from Southern California while I was at Books and Books in Coral Gables, Florida.

From the episode:

Mitchell Kaplan: You have such a fertile mind and such a creative mind, and you write at least two books a year — and then some, with some of your novellas and other things. What is your process for being able to keep up with being on the cutting edge of everything that is being talked about? Do you read a lot of magazines? I know that you’re not on the internet at all or that much — what is the nature of your reading these days, I guess is my question.

Dean Koontz: I subscribe to a number of publications in areas of interest to me, and uh, and I’m always reading about these things. I read a few different newspapers and if I hit on something, some subject in it that interests me, then it’s: what else can I find about this? Then I — you’re right, I don’t go online. That was a decision I made right at the beginning, because I know I’m an obsessive compulsive personality, and I could see that you could get into that. It triggers the dopamine response in your brain, and I know what that’s like because anything I’ve become obsessive about that pleases me, I can’t let go of, although fortunately not drugs. A little bit of red wine.

But I stayed away from it. I don’t go on, I have an assistant I can go to and say, here’s something I’d like to get information on, and what can you find for me? So the internet is there for me, but I don’t have to go out and surf it and go through the hours of time on it that would take me to get what I want.

Then, if something I see triggers something in my head that’s very interesting, and if I could talk to readers about that in an interesting way in the context of fiction, that would probably be an engaging story. And that’s sometimes what drives me to more research and sometimes actually to the story. Although stories come to you from so many sources that sometimes you can’t even identify where the idea came from.

Campbell McGrath is among South Florida’s most revered poets recognized with the MacArthur Genius Award, a Kingsley Tufts poetry Award and by admirers from Robert Pinsky to Elizabeth Alexander. His newest collection is Fever of Unknown Origin and on this edition of The Literary Life, we celebrate its publication with a reading at the Coral Gables location of Books & Books.

Introducing Campbell is Scott Cunningham, executive and artistic director of OMiami, which is building community around the power of poetry.

From the episode:

Campbell McGrath: My professional life is mostly walking around inside my own head, you know, just the empty corridors, like reciting words to myself.

It’s, you know, it’s, again, it’s a good thing that art, most of the things artists do, they would put you in asylum for if you weren’t doing it in pursuit of art, right? But, you know, since it’s about art, it’s kind of all forgiven. It is totally, totally essential — and you’ll never meet a poet who won’t agree that at some, at one of the key stages in writing a poem, developing a poem is standing up and reading it to yourself in the room and saying, “What did I just hear?”

Another stage is, however, reading it to other people for the first time that, ’cause you know, you can still, you’re still trying to gauge yourself. It’s still always complicated even though you get better at it over time. But hearing an audience is super informative, like, I guess that one was a little flat or this happened or that happened.

So it’s a key part of it and that’s what makes poetry different from all the other great forms of writing is that the oral tradition kind of is essential part of it, and that was always important to me.

*

Campbell McGrath is the author of eleven books of poetry, most recently Nouns & Verbs: New and Selected Poems, and XX: Poems for the Twentieth Century, a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. His writing has been recognized with a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award,” a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Witter Bynner Fellowship from the Library of Congress, and a United States Artists Fellowship. He lives with his wife in Miami Beach, and teaches in the MFA program at Florida International University.

On this edition of The Literary Life, what makes for a happy life, a fulfilling life? Robert Waldinger and Mark Schulz, the directors of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, have just published The Good Life: Life Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study on Happiness. Their invaluable insights emerge from the revealing personal stories of hundreds of participants in the Harvard study that forms the basis of this new important book.

From the episode:

Marc Schulz: At the beginning we were talking a little bit about the particular challenges of each generation and the challenges of this generation. I think, uh, very much have to do with the role of social media and the new communication technologies. So, you know, there are other things that are important I don’t wanna leave out as well.

There’s uncertainty about the future, especially our environmental future and the climate change. There’s uncertainty about the, you know, whether the economy will grow or continue to stagnate. So there are real physical concerns that the younger generation has, but the thing that’s different in this generation is partly these social comparisons that are fueled by the media availability. And it’s ubiquitous. We carry it around. It’s not just something we turn on.

The messaging of those distractions has become more powerful with social media and the presence of technologies in our lives. So you talked before about, you know, it’s no longer folks down the street that we might compare ourselves. It’s to the lifestyle that Beyoncé lives and the things that Beyoncé has. And the way I talk about it is that we used to be able to go out, you know, to the street, look down the block, and just make sure that the cars that the neighbors had were similar to our cars.

But now we know what everyone has and it’s not an objective picture of what everyone has. It’s their curated show online of their best moments. So it’s not just Beyoncé, it’s the people you went to school with are putting online a kind of curated narrative about themselves that shows them at their most successful moment.

So that’s a very hard thing to compete with. We are creatures of comparison. And those comparisons have become quite pernicious. They’re particularly challenging for younger people. Those comparisons, particularly challenges for, for young girls and for women as well. So I think that’s part of the challenge. And then there are changes in our society that have continued to evolve, have been happening for a long time. Um, we’re a mobile society. Many of us are, are moved from where we grew up. So our friends that we went to school with, our families that were important sources of support are no longer present in our lives. And that means by, almost by definition, we’re paying attention to other messages and new people in our lives, and they’re good things about that. I think enriching things about that, but it also means that some of the old ways of socializing have become less important to folks across time.

_____________________________

Subscribe now to The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever else you find your podcasts!

At a time when the state of Florida has become ground zero for those who want to silence the voices of so many, we at Books & Books found it critical to bring Chasten Buttigieg to the Miami area to celebrate the publication of the young-adult edition of his memoir, I Have Something to Tell You. Chasten was joined in conversation with the Deputy Executive Director of the national LGBTQ Task Force, Mayra Hidalgo Salazar. Pastor Laurie Hafner welcomed our guest on this week’s edition of the Literary Life.

From the episode:

In politics, it felt like the memoir is supposed to be a very specific type of memoir. And for anyone who read the first version of the book, you’ll know that I didn’t meet all of those requirements. I sort of bucked the idea that everything should be buttoned up and polite and that we shouldn’t talk about our feelings or our vulnerabilities or our fears or the bumps along the way.

And I learned so much about myself through all of those failures or traumas or experiences but it was hard to pack your childhood and all of your experiences and then presidential politics into one book. This book, however, I just wanted to write the book I wish I would’ve had in eighth grade. And I’m glad that the publisher agreed it should exist.

I just wish I could travel back in time and hand young Chasten this book, to focus specifically on identity, on all of the fears that I was harboring when I was younger, and all of the lessons I learned once I grew up. If only young Chasten could have known what was in store because growing up in rural conservative Michigan, I did not think that there was ever going to be a way out, that there would ever be this day, there would ever, there would ever be this ring or these two beautiful kids in my life.

I was so focused for so long on the idea that it was all gonna add up to nothing. So I know, because I have met, there are so many other young Chastens across the country, whether they’re in rural Michigan or here in Florida, I’ve been able to sit at those tables and have those conversations with young people.

And so while things have gotten a little better, I know that there are still young people out there wondering whether or not they belong and if someone really cares. And so this was my way to say, yes, you do.

_____________________________

Subscribe now to The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever else you find your podcasts!

Anne Berest, the author of The Postcard—one of the most acclaimed and beloved French novels of recent years—came to Books & Books and dazzled a room full of readers. Let’s join those readers on this episode of The Literary Life.

From the episode:

Brenda Diaz de la Vega: There’s a precise date in the book: on October 8th, 1942 at four o’clock in the afternoon, two French police officers knock loudly on Emma and Ephraïm’s door. When Layla tells you that she has the name of the two policemen, you tell her that you prefer not to know. But throughout the book, what you’re looking for are names, clues to get more information. So I was curious to know why did you choose to not hear those two particular names?

Anne Berest: I regret and I will explain why I didn’t want to write the names in the book. I am not an historian. I am a writer, a novelist, so, I had the right to change some things, and I decided to change the names of people who behaved badly during the war. Okay? For example, uh, in the book, you will read the letter that the mayor of the town wrote to denounce my family. All the words, all the sentences of this letter are true. I changed nothing, but I changed the name of the mayor because I didn’t want the great-grandchildren of this man to have trouble now because they are not responsible for what happened during the war.

Of course, I give the name of people who were heroic. We, we call them les justes in France, all the people who gave their lives to help people but collaborators, I changed. But I regret to have done this for the two policemen. Why? Because when my book came out in France, we were in a moment during the elections, and one guy who became very famous in France went to the media to say, historians are totally wrong. The French government didn’t collaborate with Nazis and it’s wrong, French policemen never arrested Jews.

And so that’s why I regret because while I’m not an historian, I think that literature is a gateway to history.

_____________________________

Subscribe now to The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever else you find your podcasts!

Ana Veciana-Suarez is much beloved by all of us who know her and have been reading her column in the Miami Herald for many, many years. Syndicated by the Tribune Company, her work is described this way: Ana explores the human experience by touching on the private issues and public events that shape our lives. She pays particular attention to the social issues affecting women and families, often providing poignant tales of the immigrant experience as she tries to make sense of a world hurtling forward at breakneck speed with little regard for its past.

Now Anna brings this sensibility to her new novel Dulcinea, a re-imagining of Cervantes’ Don Quixote. Ana joined me at Books and Books in Coral Gables, Florida.

From the episode:

Mitchell Kaplan: I read an article that you, an essay that you wrote a few weeks ago about writing in the middle of tragedy. And there has been a fair amount of tragedy in your life that you’ve experienced, and for you to maintain this kind of incredible optimism and this credible sense of being present is pretty… it’s something that I’ve always respected so much in you, and I’ve always admired that you’ve been able to do that. Nothing seems—I mean, I’m sure things get you down, but you seem to be able to process it in some way, overcome it, and in the writing of this book, you had to overcome a couple of very, very difficult things.

Ana Veciana-Suarez: Right, and part of it I think is, you know, I’m very good at… Putting things in compartments, and I think once I begin to write, I always save, I can get past that first hour of resistance where you just like, ‘Oh my gosh, why am I doing this?’ Then I’m fine. Because you fall into that world, you kind of inhabit the personality of your characters and you move on.

And journalism helps you in that. You know, you can’t wait for inspiration. You’ve got to write, it’s a job, and it’s a job that pays the bills. But, this essay I wrote, it was a website that asked me, it was writing through grief and that over time, having lost, you know, my first husband died of a heart attack at 37 and, you know, I had five children at home and, but you had no other choice.

But I also think, you know, my parents, I owe a lot to my parents in the sense that my parents, you know, had to do all these things and my mother especially had to put up with so much and she just, you know, she was always, like I said, she would, you know, pick herself up. Dust herself off and move forward.

And if it was on her knees, it was on her knees. As long as you were moving forward. And I’ve told my kids, I hope that if there’s any lesson that I’ve imparted to you is that because we all, you know, we don’t know what another person is going through. We really don’t know. Sometimes, you know, you meet people and you think they have this perfect life, and then you just scratch a little and you think, oh my gosh.

_____________________________

Subscribe now to The Literary Life with Mitchell Kaplan on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever else you find your podcasts!