Listen Up! March 2024 on Poured Over

In like a lion and out like a lamb: We have some terrific author interviews coming this month, some live in our flagship stores on New York’s Union Square and at The Grove in Los Angeles.

We’re kicking off March with poet/translator/novelist Idra Novey and our newest Fiction Monthly Pick, Take What You Need, a story of art and visibility, translation and liminal spaces. Tana French is a crime fiction legend around these parts, and she joins us to talk about her latest, The Hunter, the second installment in a new series featuring Cal Hooper. We’re traveling back in time to New York in the 1980s — when Keith Haring was creating art for everyone across the city and laying the foundation for his extraordinary career — with Brad Gooch and Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring. In The Great Divide, Cristina Henriquez (The Book of Unknown Americans) delivers an epic story of the building of the Panama Canal, told through the experiences of the workers and residents whose lives are utterly changed by one of our greatest feats of engineering.

Live from New York, twice: Pulitzer Prize finalist Tommy Orange and special guest Roxane Gay riff on his second novel, Wandering Stars, a prequel and a sequel to his incredible debut — There There (and all its wild, kinetic energy). Bestselling essayist and novelist Sloane Crosley sits down to talk about her elegant and revelatory memoir, Grief Is For People, her best pal, life and death and much more.

We love juicy, voice driven novels like our March Discover pick, Piglet by Lottie Hazell. Taut and propulsive, this is a story of a relationship going off the rails and a woman seeking to find fulfillment at any cost.

Téa Obreht, bestselling author and former B&N Book Club pick (Inland) takes us to The Morningside in an indelible story of mothers and daughters and finding home, set in an unforgettable building and a near-future world. Perfect for fans of Emily St. John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility (and Tom Hiddleston’s movie, High-Rise). Lisa Ko follows up The Leavers, her debut and a finalist for the National Book Award, with Memory Piece, an unforgettable story of art, friendship and coming-of-age that cuts across decades from the 1980s to the 2040s. Our Double Shot episode this month pairs two incredible voices: artist Tessa Hulls and her fabulous graphic memoir Feeding Ghosts, and Griffin Hansbury with his new novel, Some Strange Music Draws Me In.

Live from Los Angeles: Pulitzer Prize finalist Percival Everett, author of Erasure (the basis for the Oscar-nominated film American Fiction, starring Jeffrey Wright and Sterling K. Brown) flips the script on an American classic in his new novel, James, putting Huck Finn to the side and Jim center stage in a powerful and often very funny story of family, home and freedom.

And we round out the month with work from two of our most interesting culture critics working today. Music, basketball, movies, books and more: Hanif Abdurraqib and Vinson Cunningham cover plenty of ground in fresh new ways. A finalist for the National Book Award (A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance) and recipient of a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, Abduraaqib’s memoir, There’s Always This Year: On Ascension and Basketball, plays with time and memory, intimacy and vulnerability, going away and coming home — and leaves everything on the court. We watched our young narrator muddle his way through an entirely new — and utterly unfamiliar — world of power and money in Cunningham’s debut novel, Great Expectations, a clear-eyed, charming coming-of-age-story we didn’t want to end. (Oh, and that title? We’re still laughing along with Cunningham, who explains all during his episode of Poured Over.)

Catch new episodes Tuesdays, Thursdays and occasional Saturdays, wherever you listen to podcasts, stream us here on B&N Reads, or watch on B&N’s YouTube channel.

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