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Francis Spufford’s new novel, Nonesuch, drops us into Blitz London—blackouts, random acts of violence, food rationing—and then, almost imperceptibly, the world acquires another layer. In this episode, Spufford, the author of Golden Hill and Light Perpetual, among others, talks about the “daft mixture of wartime finance, early TV, archangels, Renaissance magic, and falling bombs," that makes Nonesuch such an epic and invigorating read. We talk about the Blitz as a kind of permission slip for a writer: a time of exhaustion and improvisation, when ideals are tested in private, and when the fantasy of a “better” history starts to look like a dangerously tempting bargain. We also trace two companion texts that illuminate the book’s moral weather: John Crowley’s Four Freedoms, a wartime novel about ideals and compromise, and W. H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” that unsettled poem written as Europe tipped into catastrophe.

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Madeleine Dunnigan’s fierce, unnerving coming-of-age novel, Jean, is set in the final weeks at Compton Manor, an all-boys school that sells itself as enlightened where desire moves like weather, and cruelty is a kind of social sport.
In this episode Dunnigan explains why the boarding-school setting is such a useful framing device; what drew her to the late 1970s punk-era—close enough to the Second World War to feel its aftershocks, but far enough to watch a new, disillusioned generation take shape; and writing queer desire as a woman.
The conversation also traces two key influences: Patrick Modiano’s Such Fine Boys, with its atmosphere of postwar drift and compromised authority, and Mavis Gallant’s “Potter,” “Baum, Gabriel, 1935–( ),” and “The Remission”—short stories about outsiders, social comedy, and lives shaped by prolonged waiting.

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Few cities lend themselves to myth quite like New York, a city that reinvents itself so often that each generation claims its own version. In this episode, we speak with journalist Jonathan Mahler about The Gods of New York, his sweeping portrait of the 1980s city of ambition and excess, when figures like Ed Koch, Donald Trump, and Al Sharpton weren’t just characters in the story—they were battling, in public, for the city’s soul. Mahler, best known for Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx Is Burning, traces how money, media, race, and power collided in a decade that helped shape the New York we live with now. We also talk about a very different but equally electrified New York dreamscape: Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and the comic-book imagination as a kind of hope machine.

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Before you can shape a story, you have to pay attention to the world as it really is—even when it’s messy, even when it stings. That lesson from Louise Fitzhugh’s classic Harriet the Spy has guided the career of reporter and biographer Laurie Gwen Shapiro. Her new book, The Aviator and the Showman, is the first major biography of Amelia Earhart in two decades, praised by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times for peeling back the myths around “Lady Lindy” to reveal the woman beneath the legend.
Shapiro has long gravitated to improbable, irresistible tales. In The Stowaway (2018), she unearthed the story of Billy Gawronski, the teenager who swam the Hudson to join an Antarctic expedition—a book born of her own dogged persistence in tracking down his widow. Before turning to biography, she was an award-winning filmmaker, co-directing the unforgettable documentary Keep the River on Your Right.
In this episode, Shapiro traces the arc of her storytelling life back to the notebooks of Harriet the Spy, and to the questions raised in a favorite Grace Paley short story, “A Conversation with My Father,” which wrestles with how to tell the truth about life without reducing it to cliché.

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“Anything Ada Calhoun wants to write is well worth reading,” declared Kirkus in its review of her new novel, Crush, a sharp and seductive exploration of midlife desire and the unruly force of infatuation. Calhoun is the author of the acclaimed history St. Marks Is Dead; the memoir Also a Poet, which chronicles her attempt to finish an abandoned biography of Frank O’Hara begun by her father, the critic Peter Schjeldahl; the essay collection Wedding Toasts I’ll Never Give; and the cultural study Why We Can’t Sleep: Women’s New Midlife Crisis. Alongside her own books, she has ghostwritten more than thirty titles, an apprenticeship that sharpened her instinct for voice, candor, and structure. “There are a lot of ways to tell a true story,” she has said. “I like looking for the most generous and interesting ones.”
In this episode, Calhoun discusses her journey from ghostwriter to memoirist to novelist, and the writers who guide her: Thornton Wilder, whose The Bridge of San Luis Rey remains a touchstone nearly a century after its publication, and Audre Lorde, whose essay The Use of the Erotic reframes desire as a source of knowledge and power.