
Our guest today is Vanessa Hua. Vanessa is the author of A River of Stars and a columnist at The San Francisco Chronicle. We talk today about the differences between writing a column versus a novel, the people who change our lives without knowing, and untraditional motherhood.
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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.
Books
- A River of Stars by Vanessa Hua
- Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- The Little House Series by Laura Ingalls Wilder
- All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein
- Number One Chinese Restaurant by Lillian Li
- Jesus Land by Julia Scheeres
- What is the What by Dave Eggers
- The Sixth Man by Andre Iguodala
- Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala
- All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung
- Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot
- The Other Side by Lacy M. Johnson
- The Reckonings by Lacy M. Johnson
- Stealing Buddha’s Dinner by Bich Minh Nguyen
- The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante
- R. O. Kwon

- Trust Exercise by Susan Choi
- Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
- On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
- How Much of These Hills is Gold by C. Pam Zhang
- Your House Will Pay by Steph Cha
- Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
- Damon Young
- The Golden State by Lydia Kiesling
- Like a Mother by Angela Garbes
- Motherhood So White by Nefertiti Austin
- We Live for the We by Dani McClain
- Jasmine Guillory
- The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang
- The Ripped Bodice (Culver City, CA)
- The Booksmith (San Francisco, CA)
- City Lights Booksellers and Publishers (San Francisco, CA)
- Mrs. Dalloway’s Literary and Garden Arts (Berkeley, CA)
- Books Inc. (Multiple Locations in Northern California)
- Book Passage (San Francisco, CA)
- The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradal
- Dear Girls by Ali Wong
- Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine
- Hundred-Year Walk by Dawn Mackeen
- Good Night, Gorilla by Peggy Rathmann
- Mo Willems
- A is for Activist by Innosanto Nagara
- Rad American Women by Kate Schatz
- The Gutsy Girl by Caroline Paul
- There There by Tommy Orange
- The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
- Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
- 1984 by George Orwell
- The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Dear America by Jose Antonio Vargas
Everything Else
- San Francisco Chronicle
- University of California at Riverside
- All the Presidents Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976)
- Robert Redford
- If It Happened There (Slate)
- Golden State Warriors
- “Picking the Best Memoirs Since 1969” (The New York Times)
- “How to Mourn a Glacier” (Lacy M. Johnson, The New Yorker)
- Oprah
- Mao Zedong
- “Ep. 90 Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson — The Stacks Book Club (Jason Reynolds)” (The Stacks)
- BookCon
- “Ep. Mothering and Social Justice with Dani McClain” (The Stacks)
- “How a Stint at The Bachelorette Turned Me Into a Novelist” (J. Ryan Stradal, Vanity Fair)
- Spotlight (Tom McCarthy, 2015)
- Herb Caen
- Art Hoppe
- By the Book (The New York Times)
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