A podcast about literary beginnings

Tiffany Hanssen: My Name Was Gerry Sass

August 31, 2026 by Stephen Fishbach

“Nothing feels more real than funny…. It’s a bonding experience. Humor acts as a way to draw a reader in. ”

Debut novelist — and WNYC host — Tiffany Hanssen joins me to talk writing violence, humanizing morally complex characters, and injecting humor into a dark story.

The Sopranos meets Six Feet Under in this thrilling debut crime novel about the killing of a hitman-for-hire, his daughter who wants revenge, and a priest who accidentally witnessed everything.

Buy My Name Was Gerry Sass.

Anna Nordberg: When She Was Ours

July 22, 2026 by Stephen Fishbach

“There was never one big moment of closure with my mom’s death, never one big moment of epiphany. It’s ongoing. But that doesn’t necessarily make the best structure for a book.”

Debut novelist Anna Nordberg joins me to talk about escalating stakes in scene-setting, being pigeon-holed into a genre, and how to transmogrify your own personal grief into a work of art.

Thea Erickson, a renowned surgeon, is filled with both joy and grief as her family gathers at their home on a summer night in 1995. Her elder daughter Phoebe is getting married, but even the happiness of the day feels bittersweet, as Thea grapples with a terminal cancer diagnosis. She worries she won't be around to support her younger daughter Astra, who's still in college, but even Thea cannot foresee what is to come--a terrible accident the night of the wedding that changes Astra's life forever.

Buy When She Was Ours.

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner: Lin-Manuel Miranda–The Education of an Artist

April 14, 2026 by Stephen Fishbach

“I had to learn. First draft - I get to put in everything. Second draft is not just everything that I’ve learned, but what is the story being told here. How does this tell the education of an artist.”

Daniel Pollack-Pelzner joins me to discuss his debut book, Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist.

“He’s got this real mindset of what he could learn from the people around him. He was not the standout composer or writer or performer in his cohort, but he got really really good really really quickly. Everybody I talked to described him as a sponge. He would just absorb learning and skills from everybody around him. And as a collaborator, he found out how to work with people who had the skills that he didn’t. I thought maybe this could be a book that my students could learn from, about how to harness your creativity.”

Buy Lin-Manuel Miranda: The Education of an Artist

Lincoln Michel: Metallic Realms

August 27, 2025 by Stephen Fishbach

“I like when any narrative has a good tonal balance. I don’t want it to be all high comedy where you’re always at eleven, nor do I want it to be all sad and melancholy.”

Lincoln Michel joins me to discuss his second novel, Metallic Realms.

“Half the book is set in the real world, in late 2010s Brooklyn, amongst a group of Millennial struggling writers who are in a science fiction writing collective. And the other half of the book is the science fiction stories that they write. And the whole thing is tied together by this Pale Fire-esque narrator who considers himself the scholar of the science fiction writing collective, and the chapters are him analyzing the stories but then ultimately revealing how the group fell apart and his own hand in that.”

Buy Metallic Realms

Listen to Lincoln Michel discuss his previous novel, The Body Scout

Sara Levine: Treasure Island!!!

December 23, 2024 by Stephen Fishbach

“If you’re doing an unreliable narrator, you have to drop clues so the reader can infer the author’s presence behind the narrative voice.”

Sara Levine joins me to discuss her novel Treasure Island!!!

When a college graduate with a history of hapless jobs (ice cream scooper, gift wrapper, laziest ever part-time clerk at The Pet Library) reads Robert Louis Stevenson's novel Treasure Island, she is dumbstruck by the timid design of her life. Convinced that Stevenson's book is cosmically intended for her, she redesigns her life according to its Core Values: boldness, resolution, independence, and horn-blowing. The New York Times raves, "A rollicking tale, shameless, funny and intelligent."

Buy Treasure Island!!!

Johannes Lichtman: Calling Ukraine

July 21, 2023 by Stephen Fishbach

“What I learned from my first book is that every single thing isn’t life or death ... that not every little thing is going to make or break you. ”

Johannes Lichtman joins me to discuss his novel Calling Ukraine.

National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and author of Such Good Work Johannes Lichtman returns with a novel that is strikingly relevant to our times--about an American who takes a job in Ukraine in 2018, only to find that his struggle to understand the customs and culture is eclipsed by a romantic entanglement with deadly consequences.

Buy Calling Ukraine from Bookshop.

Lauren Oliver: Panic

October 20, 2022 by Stephen Fishbach

“I think of writing like walking across a frozen lake. There’s times to drop through and go under, but you have to be able to get back out and surface and not lose yourself.”

Lauren Oliver joins me to discuss her novel Panic.

Heather never thought she would compete in Panic, a legendary game played by graduating seniors, where the stakes are high and the payoff is even higher. She’d never thought of herself as fearless, the kind of person who would fight to stand out. But when she finds something, and someone, to fight for, she will discover that she is braver than she ever thought.

Dodge has never been afraid of Panic. His secret will fuel him, and get him all the way through the game, he’s sure of it. But what he doesn't know is that he’s not the only one with a secret. Everyone has something to play for.

Buy Panic from Bookshop .

Lincoln Michel: The Body Scout

October 29, 2021 by Stephen Fishbach

“I tend to prefer worldbuilding that tries to conjure the world for the reader, giving interesting details that they’ll fill in themselves.”

Lincoln Michel joins me to discuss his debut novel The Body Scout.

In the future you can have any body you want—as long as you can afford it.

But in a New York ravaged by climate change and repeat pandemics, Kobo is barely scraping by. He scouts the latest in gene-edited talent for Big Pharma-owned baseball teams, but his own cybernetics are a decade out of date and twin sister loan sharks are banging down his door. Things couldn't get much worse.

Then his brother—Monsanto Mets slugger J.J. Zunz—is murdered at home plate.

Buy The Body Scout from Bookshop.

Teddy Wayne: Apartment

October 05, 2020 by Stephen Fishbach

“You couldn’t make the writing terrible and inept, because who wants to read that? But if I made it graceful and elegant and lyrical throughout, why is the narrator not a successful writer?”

Teddy Wayne joins me to discuss Apartment.

In 1996, the unnamed narrator of Teddy Wayne’s Apartment is attending the MFA writing program at Columbia on his father’s dime and living in an illegal sublet of a rent-stabilized apartment. Feeling guilty about his good fortune, he offers his spare bedroom--rent-free--to Billy, a talented, charismatic classmate from the Midwest eking out a hand-to-mouth existence in Manhattan.

The narrator’s rapport with Billy develops into the friendship he’s never had due to a lifetime of holding people at arm’s length, hovering at the periphery, feeling “fundamentally defective.” But their living arrangement, not to mention their radically different upbringings, breeds tensions neither man could predict. Interrogating the origins of our contemporary political divide and its ties to masculinity and class, Apartment is a gutting portrait of one of New York’s many lost, disconnected souls by a writer with an uncommon aptitude for embodying them.

Buy Apartment from Bookshop.

Carmen Maria Machado: In the Dream House

November 05, 2019 by Stephen Fishbach

“I didn’t expect it to be therapeutic. I don’t think I expected it to be quite as painful as it was….I wished as I was writing it that I hadn’t agreed to do it.”

Carmen Maria Machado joins me to discuss her memoir In The Dream House.

In the Dream House is Machado’s wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming.

That struggle gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope―the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman―through which Machado holds the events up to the light.

Buy Carmen’s memoir In the Dream House.

Ryan Chapman: Riots I Have Known

June 18, 2019 by Stephen Fishbach

“It was very revelatory and exciting to feel that after years of false paths, that at long last I finally found something that felt natural.”

Ryan Chapman joins me to discuss his debut novel Riots I Have Known.

An unnamed Sri Lankan inmate has barricaded himself inside a prison computer lab in Dutchess County, New York. A riot rages outside, incited by a poem published in The Holding Pen, the house literary journal. This, our narrator’s final Editor’s Letter, is his confession. An official accounting of events, as they happened.

As he awaits imminent and violent interruption, he takes us on a roller coaster ride of plot and language, determined to share his life story, and maybe answer a few questions. How did he end up here? Should he have remained a quiet Park Avenue doorman? Or continued his rise in the black markets of postwar Sri Lanka? What will become of The Holding Pen, a “masterpiece of post-penal literature” favored by Brooklynites everywhere? And why does everyone think the riots are his fault? Can’t they see he’s really a good guy, doing it for the right reasons?

“Savage, fearless, and funny as hell, Riots I Have Known also possesses, not so strangely, a poignant core.” —Sam Lipsyte

Buy Ryan’s novel Riots I Have Known.

Namwali Serpell: The Old Drift

May 15, 2019 by Stephen Fishbach

“My interest is in getting the reader immersed in such a way that they experience some kind of surprise that opens them up to something about the world they didn’t know before.”

Namwali Serpell joins me to discuss her debut novel The Old Drift.

1904. On the banks of the Zambezi River, a few miles from the majestic Victoria Falls, there is a colonial settlement called The Old Drift. In a smoky room at the hotel across the river, an Old Drifter named Percy M. Clark, foggy with fever, makes a mistake that entangles the fates of an Italian hotelier and an African busboy. This sets off a cycle of unwitting retribution between three Zambian families as they collide and converge over the course of the century. As the generations pass, their lives—their triumphs, errors, losses and hopes—emerge through a panorama of history, fairytale, romance and science fiction.

“A dazzling debut, establishing Namwali Serpell as a writer on the world stage.” —Salman Rushdie, The New York Times Book Review

Buy Namwali’s novel The Old Drift.

Nathan Englander: Kaddish.com

April 03, 2019 by Stephen Fishbach

“We want a story’s most pressurized form. If someone’s gonna have a slice in your story, have them eat the whole pizza. Take the story to the point right before it tips over. That’s where the story should rest, on that blade.”

Nathan Englander joins me to discuss Kaddish.com.

Larry is the secular son in a family of Orthodox Brooklyn Jews. When his father dies, it’s his responsibility to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months. To the horror and dismay of his sister, Larry refuses—imperiling the fate of his father’s soul. To appease her, Larry hatches an ingenious if cynical plan, hiring a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to recite the prayer and shepherd his father’s soul safely to rest.

“I want people to literally just laugh, laugh, laugh, cry. Like sit down and eat this book in a sitting.”

Buy Nathan’s novel Kaddish.com.

Sam Lipsyte: Hark

March 12, 2019 by Stephen Fishbach

“Sometimes you write early scenes, and they operate as a sort of scaffolding. They help you while you’re constructing the building, but eventually you’re going to take them down.”

Sam Lipsyte joins me to discuss Hark.

In an America convulsed by political upheaval, cultural discord, environmental collapse, and spiritual confusion, many folks are searching for peace, salvation, and—perhaps most immediately—just a little damn focus. Enter Hark Morner, an unwitting guru whose technique of “Mental Archery”—a combination of mindfulness, mythology, fake history, yoga, and, well, archery—is set to captivate the masses and raise him to near-messiah status

Hark is Sam Lipsyte’s fourth novel.

Buy Sam’s novel Hark.

Lauren Wilkinson: American Spy

February 26, 2019 by Stephen Fishbach

“I love this country and I’m a productive member of society, but there’s always this feeling that I’m in this place that doesn’t serve me or people who look like me. It feels like there’s this double life.”

— Lauren Wilkinson

Lauren Wilkinson joins me to discuss her debut novel American Spy.

It’s 1986, the heart of the Cold War, and Marie Mitchell is an intelligence officer with the FBI. She’s brilliant, but she’s also a young black woman working in an old boys’ club. Her career has stalled out, she’s overlooked for every high-profile squad, and her days are filled with monotonous paperwork. So when she’s given the opportunity to join a shadowy task force aimed at undermining Thomas Sankara, the charismatic revolutionary president of Burkina Faso whose Communist ideology has made him a target for American intervention, she says yes.

American Spy has won starred and rave reviews in every publication from Kirkus to Time. Publisher’s Weekly writes, “[This] unflinching, incendiary debut combines the espionage novels of John le Carré with the racial complexity of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.”

Buy Lauren’s novel American Spy.

Garth Greenwell: What Belongs to You

February 12, 2019 by Stephen Fishbach

“I like books that begin with a lit fuse.... You know a bomb’s going to go off, you know betrayal is in the works. In some sense, that gives the book a freedom to slow down.”

— Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell joins me to discuss What Belongs to You.

What Belongs to You follows an American teacher, who enters a public bathroom beneath Sofia’s National Palace of Culture. There he meets Mitko, a charismatic young hustler, and pays him for sex. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, drawn by hunger and loneliness and risk, and finds himself ensnared in a relationship in which lust leads to mutual predation, and tenderness can transform into violence.

What Belongs to You won the British Book Award for Debut of the Year, was longlisted for the National Book Award, and was named a Best Book of 2016 by over fifty publications in nine countries. A new book of fiction, Cleanness, is forthcoming from FSG in early 2020.

Buy Garth’s novel What Belongs to You.

Ling Ma: Severance

February 01, 2019 by Stephen Fishbach

“Work is the centerpiece of the novel. From work, you touch on everything else – you touch on skin care and modes of self care, you touch on the expectations of immigrant parents. You can keep spiraling off from the topic of work.”

Ling Ma joins me to discuss Severance.

Severance follows Candace Chen, a 20-something New Yorker who works as a production coordinator at a Bible manufacturer - when the end of the world hits. Shen Fever makes people repeat their daily routines, until they die.

Candace joins a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit.

Severance won the 2018 Kirkus Prize, was a New York Times notable book, and was named as a best book of 2018 at Elle, NPR, the Chicago Review of Books, Vulture, Marie Claire, Refinery 29, Bustle, Buzzfeed, and many more.

Severance is Ling’s first novel.

Buy Ling’s novel Severance.

Teddy Wayne: Loner

January 18, 2019 by Stephen Fishbach

“Write around your weaknesses. Don’t necessarily try to compensate for them. Avoid them.”

Teddy Wayne joins me to discuss Loner.

Loner follows Harvard freshman David Federman, who becomes increasingly obsessed with his classmate Veronica. Published in September of 2016, Loner now seems a prescient look at an angry, disaffected young man who demands more from his life. It was named a best book of the year by NPR, Kirkus, The New York Post, BookPage, and Bookish.

Loner is Teddy’s third novel. He is the winner of a Whiting Writers’ Award and an NEA Creative Writing Fellowship as well as a finalist for the Young Lions Fiction Award, PEN/Bingham Prize, and Dayton Literary Peace Prize.

Buy Teddy’s novel Loner.

Jaclyn Gilbert: Late Air

January 04, 2019 by Stephen Fishbach

“I was really trying to reconcile this much deeper story of the self, and questions of losses from my past that in a lot of ways made it a story that I just had to write. Because the questions just would not go away.”

Jaclyn Gilbert joins me to discuss her debut novel Late Air.

When Murray—a Yale college running coach—finds his star athlete crumpled and unresponsive during a routine practice on the campus golf course one morning, he is forced to reconcile with his repressed past and increasingly tenuous grip on life. Told from interlocking perspectives, Late Air circles the story of a marriage shattered by a nameless tragedy,.

Jaclyn received her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College and BA from Yale University. She is the recipient of a research fellowship from the New York Public Library, a contributor to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, and her work has appeared in Post Road Magazine, Tin House, Lit Hub, and elsewhere.

Buy Jaclyn’s novel Late Air.

Joshua Max Feldman: Start Without Me

December 21, 2018 by Stephen Fishbach

“You work something over and over and over. You apply so many thought lasers to the page – and eventually it starts to lose something. So I try to give the work space to breathe and let the magic happen on the page.”

Joshua Max Feldman joins me to discuss his novel Start Without Me.

Joshua is a writer of fiction and theater. Start Without Me - his second novel - explores questions of love and choice, disappointment and hope in the lives of two strangers who meet by chance on Thanksgiving Day.

His first novel, The Book of Jonah, has been translated into nine languages.

Buy Joshua’s novel Start Without Me.