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Ann Packer is the author of four best-selling novels including Some Bright Nowhere, The Children’s Crusade, Songs Without Words, and The Dive from Clausen’s Pier, which received the Kate Chopin Literary Award among many other prizes and honors. Her short fiction has been published in two collections — Mendocino and Other Stories and Swim Back to Me — and includes stories that appeared in The New Yorker and in the O. Henry Prize Stories anthologies. Ann’s work has been translated into over a dozen languages and published around the world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

George Saunders is the author of twelve books, including Lincoln in the Bardo, which won the 2017 Man Booker Prize for best work of fiction in English, and was a finalist for the Golden Man Booker, in which one Booker winner was selected to represent each decade, from the fifty years since the Prize’s inception. His stories have appeared regularly in The New Yorker since 1992. The short story collection Tenth of December was a finalist for the National Book Award and won the inaugural Folio Prize in 2013 (for the best work of fiction in English) and the Story Prize (best short story collection). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Torrey Peters is the author of the novel Detransition, Baby, which won the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction and was named a Best Book of the Century by the New York Times. Her second book of short stories is called Stag Dance. Torrey is an amateur sauna builder, rides a pink motorcycle, and splits her time between Brooklyn and Santa Marta, Colombia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Daniyal Mueenuddin was brought up in Lahore, Pakistan, and Elroy, Wisconsin. A graduate of Dartmouth College and Yale Law School, his stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Zoetrope, and The Best American Short Stories 2008, selected by Salman Rushdie. His collection In Other Rooms, Other Wonders was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. For a number of years he practiced law in New York. He now divides his time between Oslo, Norway, and his farm in Pakistan’s South Punjab. His new novel is called This is Where the Serpent Lives. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Princess Joy L. Perry is the recipient of a Virginia Commission for the Arts Fellowship and a winner of the Zora Neale Hurston/Richard Wright Award. Her short stories have appeared in All About Skin, African American Review, and Kweli Journal. She lives in Norfolk, Virginia. Her new novel is This Here is Love. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Ed Park is the author of the novels Same Bed Different Dreams, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and Personal Days, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. His fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Bookforum, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. He is a founding editor of The Believer and the former literary editor of The Village Voice and has worked in newspapers and book publishing. His debut story collection is An Oral History of Atlantis. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Torrey Peters is the author of the novel Detransition, Baby, which won the 2021 PEN/Hemingway award for debut fiction and was named a Best Book of the Century by the New York Times. Her second book of short stories is called Stag Dance. Torrey is an amateur sauna builder, rides a pink motorcycle, and splits her time between Brooklyn and Santa Marta, Colombia. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sue Monk Kidd writes fiction and non-fiction. Her novels include The Secret Life of Bees, The Mermaid Chair, The Invention of Wings, and The Book of Longings. Some of her non-fiction titles include The Dance of the Dissident Daughter and When the Heart Waits. In this episode we discuss her new novel The Book of Longings Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kristin Koval is a former lawyer who always wanted to be a writer but initially wandered down other paths. She attended Phillips Exeter Academy, Georgetown University and Columbia Law School. She lives in Boulder, Colorado and Park City, Utah with her husband, two sons and two Great Danes. Her novel is called Penitence. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Robert Macfarlane is a British writer internationally known for his writing on nature, people, and place. His best-selling books include Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind. They have been translated into more than 30 languages and won many prizes around the world and have been adapted for film, music, theatre, radio, and dance. He has also written operas, plays and films including river and mountain. In 2017 the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the EM Forester Prize for literature. Macfarlane lives in Cambridge England where he is a fellow at Emmanual College, Cambridge. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices