How I Wrote This

Adelle Waldman is the author of two novels. In this bonus episode, she reads from her latest, Help Wanted. Our full interview will be available on March 25.

More about Help Wanted:

"At a big-box store in a small town in upstate New York, the members of Team Movement clock in every morning at 3:55. Under the eye of a self-absorbed and barely competent boss, they empty the day’s truck of merchandise, stock the shelves, and scat...

Christina Cooke was named a “Writer to Watch” by CBC Books in 2024. Born in Jamaica, she moved to Texas as a girl, then Vancouver, Fredericton, and Iowa before settling in New York. Her fiction and essays can be found in The Caribbean Writer, Prairie Schooner, Apogee, and the Michigan Quarterly Review. Her novel, Broughtupsy, was published in Canada by House of Anansi and an excerpt (of sorts) called “Homecoming” was published in P...

Joseph O’Neill has written a family history and five novels including This is the Life, The Breezes, Netherland (which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award), The Dog (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize) and most recently, Godwin. He also writes political reviews and essays as well as short stories, several of which hav...

About Terrace Story:

Annie, Edward, and their young daughter, Rose, live in a cramped apartment. One night, without warning, they find a beautiful terrace hidden in their closet. It wasn't there before, and it seems to only appear when their friend Stephanie visits. A city dweller's dream come true! But every extra bit of space has a hidden cost, and the terrace sets off a seismic chain of events, forever changing the shape of t...

Hilary Leichter’s debut novel Temporary, tells the story of a woman’s adventures in the gig economy, something with which she has years of experience. Now a lecturer at Columbia University, she talks about the precariousness of temp work, the desire for permanence, and how time is an engine that drives fiction. In Terrace Story, her most recent novel, she returns to time in a story of three genera...

About I Felt the End Before it Came:

"With great candour and disarming self-awareness, Cox takes readers on a journey from his early days as a solicitous door-to-door preacher in Montreal to a stint in New York City, where he’s swept up in a scene of photographers and hustlers blurring the line between art and pornography. The culmination of years spent both processing and avoiding a complicated past, I Felt the End Before It ...

Since 2008, Daniel Allen Cox has published four novels and a memoir-in-essays. He was a finalist for the 2023 Grand Prix du livre de Montréal for his memoir, I Felt It Before the End Came: Memoirs of a Queer ex-Jehovah’s Witness, a nominee for a National Magazine Award for his essay “You Can’t Blame Movers for Everything Broken”, and a contributor to both the Best American Essays and Best Canadian...

Jennifer Egan reads from her New York Times Bestseller The Candy House.

About The Candy House:

"The Candy House opens with the staggeringly brilliant Bix Bouton, whose company, Mandala, is so successful that he is “one of those tech demi-gods with whom we’re all on a first name basis.” Bix is forty, with four kids, restless, and desperate for a new idea, when he stumbles into a conversation group, mostly Columbia professors...

Jennifer Egan is the Pulitzer Prize winning novelist of A Visit from the Goon Squad and the author of six other books as well as many nonfiction articles including a year-long series about homelessness in New York. Her 2017 novel, Manhattan Beach was awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction while her latest, The Candy House, was named one of the New York Times’s 10 Best Books of 2022...

Discover the life and legacy of L.M. Montgomery in this insightful 7-part podcast, in which we explore her childhood, literary journey, and the timeless impact of Anne of Green Gables on generations of readers.

In this episode, we explore the formative years of author Lucy Maud Montgomery. We delve into her early life in Prince Edward Island and discuss the influences and experiences that shaped her writing, including ...

The 2024 Giller Prize shortlist was announced on October 9 and five books and authors remain. Four of the shortlisted authors join Pamela to read excerpts from their books and tell her more about them: Eric Chacour (What I Know About You), Deepa Rajagopalan (Peacocks of Instagram), Conor Kerr (Prairie Edge), and Anne Fleming (Curiosities).

Listen to our conversations now.

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensl...

We’re working our way through the finalists for the 2024 Giller Prize. In Episode 2 of this three-episodeseries, we hear from: Claire Messud (This Strange Eventful History), Jane Urquhart (In Winter I Get Up at Night), Corinna Chong (Bad Land), and Shashi Bhat (Death by a Thousand Cuts).

Listen to our conversations now.

How I Wrote This is created and hosted by Pamela Hensley

Presented by Knockabout Media

Original music by Tyle...

The 2024 Giller longlist celebrates the best in Canadian fiction. Twelve titles were selected from 112 books published between Oct.1. 2023 and Aug. 16, 2024. In this mini-series, which is a departure from our usual format, you’ll hear readings from the nominated books and brief conversations with their authors.

In this first episode, Pamela is joined by: Caroline Adderson (A Way to be Happy), katherena vermette (real ones), and ...

Shaena Lambert has published two collections of short stories, The Falling Woman and Oh, my darling and two novels, Radiance and Petra and been nominated for literary prizes including the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize, the Danuta Gleed Award, and the Frank O'Connor Award for the Short Story. A Canadian with German heritage, she talks about echoes from the past and how the artistic legacy of her great-grandfather, grandfa...

Wiebke von Carolsfeld spent her childhood in West Berlin, studied Literature and Art History in Cologne, and apprenticed at the publisher Kiepenheuer & Witch shortly after they’d acquired the rights to The Satanic Verses. When she emigrated to Toronto, for language reasons, she shifted her aspirations to film. One of her early projects, Eisenstein, resulted in a nomination for Best Editing at the Genies.&nbs...

Behzad Karim Khani is an author whose explosive debut novel Hund, Wulf, Schakal (Dog, Wolf, Jackal) tells a story of violence on the streets of Berlin, and the lives of two immigrant brothers from Iran. It’s a book that elicited rave reviews such as this one in the Suddeutschezeitung: “Sentences you’d want to frame…simply a great work of literature.”

Behzad was a boy in Tehran when the Iran / Iraq war ended. With his family, he ...

Jenny Erpenbeck is one of Germany’s most celebrated authors. She’s written four novels that have been translated into English, a memoir, several short stories, plays, and a few librettos, including the one she finished just before we spoke.

Jenny writes about growing up in East Berlin and how her experience of the German Democratic Republic (GDR, or East Germany) shaped her worldview. Her novel, The End of Days won the Hans Fall...

Andrea Wulf talks about gardens as windows into the politics, culture and science of a nation, why Alexander von Humboldt’s name belongs alongside Darwin, Einstein, and Newton; and how a group of young Germans in the small town of Jena introduced Romanticism and changed the world as we know it.

Andrea is an historian who was born in India, grew up in Germany, and now lives in the UK. In London, where - for the first time - she was e...