fiction

There's still time for deep and thoughtful reading this summer -- and our 500th episode.

Amitav Ghosh’s newest novel Gun Island is a story about both two of his great themes - migration and climate.

What should you have been be reading this summer—and how should you have been reading it? 

Today is the final day of February: Black History Month. But did you know that it’s Women in Horror Month too? Oakland writer Sumiko Saulson enjoyed watching horror films at the drive-in theatre when she was a child. Now she’s writing scary stories and getting other women published.

How do today's best TV shows explore questions about identity, morality, and the human condition?

Award-winning, best-selling author and columnist Vanessa Hua recently released her debut novel “A River of Stars”, the story of an escaped maternity hotel captive, her journey into motherhood, and making a new life in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

What have you read this summer that challenged your assumptions and made you think about things in new ways?

What books should thoughtful people read this summer?

Is remix culture an exciting new development in the arts, or a sign that genuine creativity is dead?

What books should thoughtful people be reading this summer?

Summer is here – what philosophers, philosophies, or philosophical issues do you want to read up on? Heidegger's Being and Time may not be the obvious choice to take on vacation, but there are lots of readable, beach-friendly classics and non-classics to add philosophical depth to your summer reading.

A good novel can do many things. It can distract us from the humdrum of daily existence, stimulate our imaginations, and delight us with its creative use of language. But isn’t there something more we gain from engaging with fictional worlds and characters? Do we, for example, use literary texts to morally improve ourselves? Is there some deeper truth we’re supposed to learn from a good novel? Or do we use fiction to fine-tune certain cognitive capacities?