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Recommended books
A Visit from the Goon Squad: Pulitzer Prize Winner
Author:
Jennifer Egan
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER • With music pulsing on every page, this startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption “features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn't, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human” ( The Chicago Tribune ) . One of the New York Times ’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Atlantic ’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER • With music pulsing on every page, this startling, exhilarating novel of self-destruction and redemption “features characters about whom you come to care deeply as you watch them doing things they shouldn't, acting gloriously, infuriatingly human” ( The Chicago Tribune ) . One of the New York Times ’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of The Atlantic ’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years Bennie is an aging former punk rocker and record executive. Sasha is the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Here Jennifer Egan brilliantly reveals their pasts, along with the inner lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs. “Pitch perfect.... Darkly, rippingly funny.... Egan possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart.” — The New York Times Book Review
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Creation: Life and How to Make It
Author:
Steve Grand
Working mostly alone, almost single-handedly writing 250,000 lines of computer code, Steve Grand produced Creatures ®, a revolutionary computer game that allowed players to create living beings complete with brains, genes, and hormonal systems―creatures that would live and breathe and breed in real time on an ordinary desktop computer. Enormously successful, the game inevitably raises the question: What is artificial life?
Working mostly alone, almost single-handedly writing 250,000 lines of computer code, Steve Grand produced Creatures ®, a revolutionary computer game that allowed players to create living beings complete with brains, genes, and hormonal systems―creatures that would live and breathe and breed in real time on an ordinary desktop computer. Enormously successful, the game inevitably raises the question: What is artificial life? And in this book―a chance for the devoted fan and the simply curious onlooker to see the world from the perspective of an original philosopher-engineer and intellectual maverick―Steve Grand proposes an answer. From the composition of the brains and bodies of artificial life forms to the philosophical guidelines and computational frameworks that define them, Creation plumbs the practical, social, and ethical aspects and implications of the state of the art. But more than that, the book gives readers access to the insights Grand acquired in writing Creatures ―insights that yield a view of the world that is surprisingly antireductionist, antimaterialist, and (to a degree) antimechanistic, a view that sees matter, life, mind, and society as simply different levels of the same thing. Such a hierarchy, Grand suggests, can be mirrored by an equivalent one that exists inside a parallel universe called cyberspace.
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CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella
Authors:
George Saunders,
Joshua Ferris
Since its publication in 1996, George Saunders’s debut collection has grown in esteem from a cherished cult classic to a masterpiece of the form, inspiring an entire generation of writers along the way. In six stories and a novella, Saunders hatches an unforgettable cast of characters, each struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world.
Since its publication in 1996, George Saunders’s debut collection has grown in esteem from a cherished cult classic to a masterpiece of the form, inspiring an entire generation of writers along the way. In six stories and a novella, Saunders hatches an unforgettable cast of characters, each struggling to survive in an increasingly haywire world. With a new introduction by Joshua Ferris and a new author’s note by Saunders himself, this edition is essential reading for those seeking to discover or revisit a virtuosic, disturbingly prescient voice. Praise for George Saunders and CivilWarLand in Bad Decline “It’s no exaggeration to say that short story master George Saunders helped change the trajectory of American fiction.” — The Wall Street Journal “Saunders’s satiric vision of America is dark and demented; it’s also ferocious and very funny.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times “George Saunders is a writer of arresting brilliance and originality, with a sure sense of his material and apparently inexhaustible resources of voice. [ CivilWarLand in Bad Decline ] is scary, hilarious, and unforgettable.” —Tobias Wolff “Saunders makes the all-but-impossible look effortless.” —Jonathan Franzen “Not since Twain has America produced a satirist this funny.” —Zadie Smith “An astoundingly tuned voice—graceful, dark, authentic, and funny—telling just the kinds of stories we need to get us through these times.” —Thomas Pynchon
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On Fragile Waves
Author:
E. Lily Yu
NPR Books We Love 2021 | Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2021 | Booklist Best of 2021 | Booklist Editors' Choice: Adult Titles | NYT Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2021 | Washington Independent Review of Books 51 Favorite Books of 2021 “ On Fragile Waves is a tremendous and almost unbearable work of witness. It is devastating and perfect.” — New York Times Book Review The haunting story of a family of dreamers and tale-tellers looking for home in an unwelcoming world.
NPR Books We Love 2021 | Publishers Weekly Best Books of 2021 | Booklist Best of 2021 | Booklist Editors' Choice: Adult Titles | NYT Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of 2021 | Washington Independent Review of Books 51 Favorite Books of 2021 “ On Fragile Waves is a tremendous and almost unbearable work of witness. It is devastating and perfect.” — New York Times Book Review The haunting story of a family of dreamers and tale-tellers looking for home in an unwelcoming world. This exquisite and unusual magic realist debut, told in intensely lyrical prose by an award winning author, traces one girl’s migration from war to peace, loss to loss, home to home. Firuzeh and her brother Nour are children of fire, born in an Afghanistan fractured by war. When their parents, their Atay and Abay, decide to leave, they spin fairy tales of their destination, the mythical land and opportunities of Australia. As the family journeys from Pakistan to Indonesia to Nauru, heading toward a hope of home, they must rely on fragile and temporary shelters, strangers both mercenary and kind, and friends who vanish as quickly as they’re found. When they arrive in Australia, what seemed like a stable shore gives way to treacherous currents. Neighbors, classmates, and the government seek their own ends, indifferent to the family’s fate. For Firuzeh, her fantasy worlds provide some relief, but as her family and home splinter, she must surface from these imaginings and find a new way.
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Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)
Author:
Annie Dillard
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Blue Ridge valley. Annie Dillard sets out to see what she can see.
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Blue Ridge valley. Annie Dillard sets out to see what she can see. What she sees are astonishing incidents of "mystery, death, beauty, violence."
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Episode overview
For years, I’ve kept a list of dream guests for this show. And as long as that list has existed, Ted Chiang has been atop it.
Chiang is a science fiction writer. But that undersells him. He has released two short story collections over 20 years — 2002’s “Stories of Your Life and Others” and 2019’s “Exhalation.” Those stories have won more awards than I can list, and one of them was turned into the film “Arrival.” They are remarkable pieces of work: Each is built around a profound scientific, philosophical or religious idea, and then the story or the story structure is shaped to represent that idea. They are wonders of precision and craft. But unlike a lot of science fiction, they are never cold. Chiang’s work is deeply, irrepressibly humane.
I’ve always wondered about the mind that would create Chiang’s stories. And in this conversation I got to watch it in action. Chiang doesn’t like to talk about himself. But he does like to talk about ideas. And so we do: We discuss the difference between magic and technology, why superheroes fight crime but ignore injustice, what it would do to the human psyche if we knew the future is fixed, whether free will exists, whether we’d want to know the exact date of our deaths, why Chiang fears what humans will do to artificial intelligence more than what A.I. will do to humans, the way capitalism turns people against technology, and much more.
The ideas Chiang offered in this conversation are still ringing in my head, and changing the way I see the world. It’s worth taking your time with this one.