Little Atoms

Kiran Desai is the bestselling author of two novels, Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and The Inheritance of Loss, which won both the Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. On this episode of Little Atoms she talks to Neil Denny about her new Booker Prize Shortlisted novel The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny.

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Natalie Haynes is a writer and broadcaster. She is the author of The Amber Fury, The Children of Jocasta, A Thousand Ships, which was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020 and Stone Blind. Her non-fiction book about women in Greek Myth, Pandora’s Jar, was a bestseller in both the UK and the US. She has written and performed eleven series of her BBC Radio 4 show, Natalie Haynes Stands Up...

Patrick Ryan's short story collection The Dream Life of Astronauts was named one of the Best Books of the Year by the St. Louis Times-Dispatch, LitHub, Refinery 29 and Electric Literature, and was longlisted for The Story Prize. His debut collection of linked short stories, Send Me, was chosen for Barnes & Noble's Discover New Writers program. His work has appeared in The Best American Short S...

Stuart Nadler is a recipient of the 5 Under 35 Award from the National Book Foundation, and the author of Wise Men, The Inseparables, Rooms for Vanishing and a story collection, The Book of Life. His work has been named a Kirkus Best Book of the Year, a Barnes & Nobel Discover Great New Writers Selection, and an Amazon Book of the Year. He is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, where he was a Trum...

Since Laura Lippman's debut, she has been recognised as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction and named one of the "essential" crime writers of the last 100 years. Stephen King called her "special, even extraordinary," and Gillian Flynn wrote, "She is simply a brilliant novelist." Her books have won most of the major awards in her field and been translated into more than twenty-five languages. On this episode of Little A...

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Mike Jay has written extensively on scientific and medical history and contributes regularly to the London Review of Books and the Wall Street Journal. His previous books on the history of drugs include High Society, Mescaline and Psychonauts. On this episode of Little Atoms he talks to Neil Denny about his latest book Free Radicals: How a Group of Romantic Experimenters Gave Birth to Psyched...

Brandy Schillace is a historian, former professor and museum professional, and former editor of Medical Humanities, a social-justice journal. She writes about gender, medical history, and neurodiversity for outlets including Scientific American, Wired, CrimeReads, and Undark. She has previously appeared on Little Atoms talking about her books Death’s Summer Coat and Mr. Humble & Dr Butcher, and on ...

Nell Stevens writes memoir and fiction. Her debut novel, Briefly, a Delicious Life was longlisted for the 2023 Dylan Thomas Award. She is also the author of Bleaker House and Mrs Gaskell & Me, which won the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award. She was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2018. Her writing is published in The New Yorker, the New York Times, Vogue,&n...

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, and the nonfiction books The Sting and Always Crashing in the Same Car. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Paris Review, The Believer, Tin House, Vogue, GQ, Black Clock, and Open City. He has been a MacDowell Fellow and is a fou...

Francesca Wade is the author of Square Haunting: Five Women, Freedom and London Between the Wars, which was longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize and shortlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. She has received fellowships from the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center at the New York Public Library, the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the Harvard Radcliffe Institute, and her work has appeared in The New York Review of Bo...

Daria Lavelle writes fiction, most of which features at least one impossible thing. Her stories have appeared in Dark Matter, The Deadlands and Dread Machine, among others. She holds a BA from Princeton University and an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, and enjoys opera, escape rooms, and checking restaurants off her bucket list. She was born in Kyiv before immigrating to the US as a child. On this episode ...