Big Books & Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller

Emily St. John Mandel is a master at speculative fiction — and at times oddly prescient. Her novel “Station Eleven,” follows a nomadic troupe of actors and musicians two decades after a pandemic wipes out the bulk of humanity. It was released in 2014 — six years before COVID-19 ravaged the globe. So it understandably made people a little nervous when her new novel was announced. “Exit Party” is set in 2031, after the complete collapse of the United States. Click hereWhen she joined Kerri Miller at Talking Volumes on Nov. 4, she said her writing grew out of an unease with the country’s current political moment, and the multiverse approach she deployed felt right in a country where there is almost no “consensual reality.” Talking Volumes: Emily St. John Mandel But Mandel’s novels are more than simple dystopia. Instead, she said, she works hard to imbue her books with hope, even as they wrestle with loss. Singer-songwriter Anna Graves rounded out the evening.

In the author’s note of her new book, “Pirate Queen,” author Ariel Lawhon asks, "What if the story of your life was written by the people who despised you, who wanted nothing more than to blacken your name?" So it was for Grace O'Malley, an Irish woman in the 16th century who commanded her own ships, led a powerful family clan, and survived imprisonment, a violent marriage, a shipboard birth and a number of battles to both claim and defend her property.But the historical record of O'Malley's life in Irish history is puzzlingly scant. That’s why, as Lawhon writes, “it’s in the folklore that we find the real Grace.” On this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, Lawhorn tells Kerri Miller how she brought Grace O’Malley to life, and why her story echoes to those of us today. Guest:Ariel Lawhon is the author of, among other books, “Frozen River.” Her new novel is “Pirate Queen.”

Barbara Kingsolver is a lauded writer. But the art doesn’t stop there. She’s also a pianist. Like Livia, the main character in her new novel, “Partia,” Kingsolver also left her humble roots in Appalachia to go to college on a piano scholarship. In part, it’s what inspired her to write this book. “Very few people have written about music from the inside,” she tells host Kerri Miller on Big Books and Bold Ideas. “I’ve never read a novel about a pianist from a pianist point of view. I loved the challenge of translating one art form into another.”Click hereKingsolver composed “Partita” like a musical partita — a series of parts that makes a whole. Livia is enthralled with her music during her early days at college and has big dreams. But then she falls madly in love for the first time, and her path is forever changed.“Partita” is a reflection on the “what ifs” of life, but even more, it’s a story about redemption, love and the power of music. Guest: Barbara Kingsolver the author of ten bestselling works of fiction, including “Demon Copperhead,” “Unsheltered” and “The Poisonwood Bible.” Her new novel is “Partita.” Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.Subscribe to The Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Min Jin Lee was disappointed she didn’t get to come to Talking Volumes in 2017 to talk about her novel “Pachinko.” She says that’s probably because it struggled initially. Her editor quit just three months before the book was published. Her husband lost his job the day “Pachinko” was released. And besides The New York Times and USA Today, no media companies would review her book. But that slow burn eventually ignited into a blazing inferno. The New York Times named it one of the 10 best books of 2017 and, by 2022, it had been made into a TV series by Apple — which propelled another waves of global sales. So it was with great pleasure that Lee came to Talking Volumes this year, to talk about her new novel, “American Hagwon.” Link to American Hagwon on MPR's Bookshophttps://bookshop.org/a/125236/9781538752036During her time on stage at The O'Shaughnessy with host Kerri Miller, Lee talked about her years of researching hagwons — a type of cram school, common in Korea — and how they change education. In particular, she sees an intense global competitiveness in Korean students, which stands in sharp contrast to students in American falling further and further behind. Talking Volumes: Min Jin Lee But Lee and Miller also talked about Lee’s path to becoming a well-known author and how Lee’s own childhood of being an exceptional student who struggled socially influences her work. For one thing: she’s learned to hold her own and fight back, if necessary. “Asian American women are not considered strong,” she told Miller, “but they're wrong. I mean, if you really just like look at the data, it's like: are you kidding me? Do you know any Asian American women? But I think we're perceived to be weak, and they clearly don't know any history. This doesn’t happen in Asia. But here in the U.S., I've had I've had some people do some very stupid things, and I will do what I need to do.”It was a dazzling evening, highlighted by musical guest Sophie Hiroko. There are only two more Talking Volumes shows of the 2026 season: Emily St. John Mandel on Nov. 4, and Colson Whitehead with special guest host Catharine Richert on Nov. 11. Get your tickets online.

To mark the fall member drive, Kerri Miller dips back into three conversations she’s had this year with authors who write about nature — and thus, wrestle with what they see climate change doing to our planet. How do we live richly in the midst of a great unraveling? We start by revisiting the Big Books and Bold Ideas with Terry Tempest Williams, a writer and teacher at the Harvard School of Divinity. Her latest book is "The Glorians: Visitations from the Holy Ordinary," which itself is a meditation on attending to beauty and carrying forward against all odds.Naturalist Robert Macfarlane's new book "The Book of Birds” — done in collaboration with artist Jackie Morris — is an ode to our avian friends. Macfarlane insists he's not a birder; he's just an appreciator. But he's thoughtful and poetic about what he observes. He says he wrote "The Book of Birds" to reignite a sense of wonder about about birds because "we will not save what we do not love."Author Cal Flynn lives on a remote island off the coast of Scotland, so maybe it's no surprise that she's obsessed with wilderness. Research for her new book, "The Savage Landscape," led her to climb mountains, plunge into forests and helicopter to volcanoes. But more than adventure, Flynn was in search of what these wild places mean for humanity.Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Miss Marple rides again in Lucy Foley’s new novel, “Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel.” This time, the beloved spinster sleuth finds herself on holiday, at a glamorous and isolated hotel nestled high in the Swiss Alps — where a body is quickly discovered on the first gondola ride of the day. Thankfully for the hotel guests — and mystery readers — Miss Marple is there, observing from the sidelines and taking it all in. As Foley told Kerri Miller at Talking Volumes, “Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel” is the first full-length, commissioned novel featuring Agatha Christie’s beloved Miss Marple in fifty years. The challenge was translating her into a more modern sensibility.

Carol Anderson has been sounding the alarm for years. As a historian at Emory University, she is intimately acquainted with America’s legacy when it comes to voting access. Her book, “One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression is Destroying our Democracy,” was longlisted for the National Book Award in 2018. She brought her deep knowledge of history and concern about what’s happening to voting access now to Red Wing on Sept. 23. During a conversation at the Sheldon Theatre with MPR News host Kerri Miller, Anderson said she’s worried the Jim Crow-era is beginning anew, thanks to persistent attempts to deny communities of color their right to vote. “I see it as the result of a long-term campaign to undermine the strength of our electoral systems,” she told Miller. “How many times can you hear ‘stolen election, stolen election, voter fraud, voter fraud, voter fraud?’ If you say a lie enough times, it becomes the truth, and there's a nasty long history of hollering ‘voter fraud.’”But while Anderson acknowledged the country’s track record on voting access is grim, she also applauded the only thing that has ever held it at bay: voters who are active and civically engaged. She pointed to the Red Wing audience as evidence. Click here“This is, what, a Wednesday evening? And you’re here listening to a talk about voter suppression and voting rights?” she laughed. “This is where our strength is. It is people getting educated about what’s happening and knowing not to listen to the lies about election integrity and voter fraud.”Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Have Americans given up a sense of virtue in their political leaders? What does character mean when so-called “authenticity” is prized over moral goodness? As publisher of The Bulwark and host of The Focus Group podcast, Sarah Longwell has thought long and hard about these questions. When she was a young conservative growing up in the ‘90s, she applauded Republicans who held then-President Bill Clinton to task for his moral failings. “I was very attracted to the idea that character counted,” she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. “In the years post-Clinton, that idea of virtue or character really was animating for the right — at least in their rhetoric. So it was deeply shocking to me, when Donald Trump came on the scene, to see every Republican I knew, both personally and who I had admired from afar, fall in line.” Click hereLongwell’s new book, “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time,” is a call for pro-democracy groups to unite and push back against authoritarianism. Her thesis is built upon hundreds of focus groups she’s conducted since President Trump was elected — with Republicans, Democrats, Independents and the politically homeless — where she’s heard voters say that character just isn’t the deal breaker that it used to be. “But I do think for America to have a better moral line of what we’ll tolerate,” she says. “It will require a [candidate] to come in and — not pretend to be perfect — but they should lean hard into the idea that we can be better than this.” Guest:Sarah Longwell is publisher of The Bulwark and host of The Focus Group podcast. Her new book, “How to Eat an Elephant: One Voter at a Time,” is already a New York Times bestseller.Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.

Marlon James new novel, “The Disappearers,” was published just 18 days ago, and already, this deeply personal novel about gay men in Jamaica has been declared “the novel of the decade, if not the century” by the New York Times. It has also been longlisted for the 2026 Booker Prize National Book Award. James, a part-time Macalester College professor and full-time literary phenomenon, kicked off the 2026 season of Talking Volumes last week.He joined Kerri Miller on the stage of the O’Shaughnessy Auditorium at St. Catherine University in St. Paul on Sept. 12. James told Miller, many of the themes in the book — violence, survival, shame, perseverance, masculinity — are culled from his own life. Talking Volumes: Marlon James Minneapolis singer-songwriter Annie Mack rounded out this moving and intimate evening. Tickets for the rest of the 2026 season of Talking Volumes are still on sale. Up next: Lucy Foley joins Miller on Sept. 25, to talk about her new novel, “Murder at the Grand Alpine Hotel,” the brand-new Miss Marple mystery that brings Agatha Christie’s iconic sleuth to a glamorous, snowbound resort in the Swiss Alps.

In December of 2017, Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat was a mall in south Florida when a loud gunshot broke through the holiday shopping chatter. Believing that a mass shooting was underway, Danticat ran with her fellow shoppers in utter terror. Eventually, she learned the shooting was a hoax. But the trauma that experience provoked was very real. She works some of that trauma out in her new novel, "Dèy." Taken from the Creole word for “mourning,” the story follows a young mother, Magnolia, who survives an actual mass shooting. But the story is more about what happens next. How do you carry on when your life is marked by a before and an after? How can trauma be contained when life, inextricably, goes on? “Surviving isn’t the end of the story,” Danticat writes. “It’s where a different one begins.”Click hereDanticat returns to Big Books and Bold Ideas this week to talk with Kerri Miller about why she wanted to weave joy into a book about grief and how trauma is processed best with those you love. Guest:Edwidge Danticat is the author of many books, including “Breath, Eyes, Memory” and “Claire of the Sea Light.” Her new novel is “Dèy.”Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, RSS or anywhere you get your podcasts.Subscribe to the Thread newsletter for the latest book and author news and must-read recommendations.