Ep. 35 Prodigies, Time Machines, and Beautiful Writing with Aja Gabel
This week on The Stacks our guest is author Aja Gabel. Aja's debut novel, The Ensemble, came out in 2018, and she talks with us about writing her book, cover design, which writers inspire her, and why she got a PhD in creative writing. We also talk music prodigies and time machines, which is to say, we talk about a little of everything.
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Everything we talk about on today’s episode can be found below in the show notes and on Bookshop.org and Amazon
The Ensemble by Aja Gabel
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Open Secrets by Alice Munro
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Chalk by Joshua Rivkin
Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Lot by Brian Washington
Swing Time by Zadie Smith
The People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry
Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku
The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer
The Emissary by Yoko Tawada and Margaret Mitsutani
Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi
The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
This Will Only Hurt a Little by Busy Philips
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump and Tony Schwartz
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
How to Write An Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Saturday by Ian McEwan
Atonement by Ian McEwan
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama
The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama
Sarah Fong on The Stacks (Ep. 3)
"Yasha and Daniela at Atlanta Open 2011" (YouTube)
Helen Yentus (Cargo Collective)
"Waugh" (Bryan Washington, The New Yorker)
Ten Non-Fiction Books for Fiction Lovers (Traci Thomas, The Stacks)
Arrival (Paramount Pictures)
Passengers (Columbia Pictures)
"A Glimpse into the Ideological Monoculture of Literary New York" (Matthew Binder, Quillette)
Atonement (Universal Pictures)
The Bachelor (ABC)
The Hours (Paramount Pictures)
My Brilliant Friend (HBO)
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