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Ted Mooney talks about his novel, The Same River Twice. It tells the story of Odile, a French fashion designer who agrees to smuggle some May Day banners out of the former Soviet Union for an American art dealer. The operation, seemingly simple, ends up turning her world upside-down.

For this week’s Underappreciated, New Yorker fiction editor Willing Davidson discusses the life and work of Henry Roth. Roth’s first novel Call it Sleep was first published in 1934 to mixed reviews. However, when it was published again thirty years later, it was a great success: selling over a million copies. Roth didn’t write another novel until the multi-volume Mercy of a Rude Stream came out in the mid-1990s. His final novel An American Type was published posthumously. Davidson assembled it from a stack of nearly 2,000 unpublished pages.

David Rabe discusses his career as both a novelist and a playwright. His play “A Question of Mercy,” is currently playing at Atlantic State 2. Based on the journal of Dr. Richard Selzer, it tells the story of a doctor trying to help a young man dying of AIDS end his life, rather than suffering alive. Rabe’s latest novel, Girl by the Road at Night, is his first work of fiction set in Vietnam.

Journalist, columnist, and novelist Carl Hiaasen discusses his latest novel, Star Island, about a 22-year-old pop star about to attempt a comeback from her latest drug-and-alcohol disaster, and her “undercover stunt double,” who is kidnapped from a South Beach hotel by an obsessed paparazzo. He’ll also talk about the weekly column he’s been writing in the Miami Herald and his take on the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Gary Shteyngart talks about his new novel, Super Sad True Love Story. Set in New York in the near future, when a functionally illiterate America is on the verge of collapse, it tells the story of Lenny Abramov. Lenny loves books, despite the fact that nobody reads anymore, and printed books are viewed as artifacts of a lost world.

Anthony Doerr discusses his second collection of short stories, Memory Wall. Set on four continents, the stories are all about memory, exploring how they provide meaning and coherence in our lives, and connect us to ourselves and to others.

For this year’s first segment of our Underappreciated series, Dennis Johnson discusses the life and literary work of the German writer Hans Fallada.

Vendela Vida talks about her new novel, The Lovers, about the love between husbands and wives, mothers and children. It tells the story of Now Yvonne, a widow with grown twin children, who returns to the Turkish coastal village where she and he husband honeymooned, hoping to remember a happier time. But her plans for a restorative vacation are quickly complicated.

Robin Oliveira discusses her first novel, about a young woman's struggle to become a doctor during the Civil War, My Name Is Mary Sutter. Mary Sutter is a head¬strong midwife from Albany, New York, who dreams of becoming a surgeon. Determined to overcome the prejudices against women in medicine, she goes to Washington, D.C. to help tend the Civil War wounded.

David Mitchell talks about his latest book, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, a historical novel set in Japan at the turn of the 19th century, when the country was isolated from the West with the exception of a small Dutch outpost called Dejima, in Nagasaki Harbor.

Melanie Sumner discusses her novel, The Ghost of Milagro Creek, set in a barrio of Taos, New Mexico, where Native Americans, Hispanics, and Anglos live together. It’s a tale of star-crossed love, murder, and is a portrait of a troubled community.

Adam Ross discusses his novel, Mr. Peanut. It’s about a man who’s been in love with his wife since the moment they met in college. After she dies, he’s both deeply distraught and the prime suspect. The story explores the opposing impulses of love and hatred, and if it’s possible to know anyone completely.

Maggie Pouncey discusses her debut novel, Perfect Reader. It tells the story of Flora, who discovers that her recently deceased father, beloved former college president and famous literary critic, was secretly writing love poems to a girlfriend Flora didn’t know he had. Flora must contend with this mystery woman’s own claims on his poetry and his memory.

Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler's Wife, discusses her second novel Her Fearful Symmetry. It tells the story of twin American girls, Julia and Valentina, who inherit a London apartment when their aunt dies of cancer. It’s a tale about love and identity, about secrets and sisterhood, and about the tenacity of life—even after death.

Novelist John Banville talks about latest book, The Infinities. It tells the story of a family that gathers together as the patriarch is dying. But the family is not alone—they’re joined by some mischievous immortals: Zeus, Pan, and Hermes.

Alan Furst discusses his latest novel, Spies of the Balkans. It’s set in a Greek port town in 1940 and tells the story of a man who risks everything to right the world’s wrongs.

David Means discusses The Spot: Stories, his second collection of short fiction. The stories are at once comically detached and emotionally affecting, expansive and concise, inventive and rooted in tradition, and have earned him comparisons to Flannery O’Connor, Alice Munro, Sherwood Anderson, Anton Chekhov, and Raymond Carver. 

Former writer for The Simpsons, Larry Doyle, discusses his novel Go, Mutants!, a contemporary satire set in an alternate universe populated by aliens, mutants, and atomic monsters.

Bret Easton Ellis discusses his latest novel, Imperial Bedrooms. It tells the story of Clay, a successful screenwriter who has returned from New York to Los Angeles to help cast his new movie, and ends up drifting through his circle of old friends. Then his life careens completely out of control.