Meg Wolitzer

Novels are low-tech objects. They can't be plugged in, they've got no buttons or knobs, and they don't make your eyes pop out of your head as you watch creatures or asteroids zigzag across a screen. Usually, novels have no visual aids at all. So if you want to know ...

In the old days, when a book came out it just had to compete with other books. But these days a book has to compete not only with other books, but also with blog posts and tweets and tumblrs and everything else in written form. There's only so much that ...

As soon as I hear that a novel is set in a college or a university, I'm in. David Lodge, Richard Russo, Donna Tartt, Chad Harbach — they've all created campuses with an intimate, sometimes cozy feeling that offers an escape from a world that can seem terribly open-gated and ...

"You've got spunk," Lou Grant says to Mary Richards on the very first episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. And then he adds, famously, "I hate spunk." The year is 1970, the same year in which Jeannette Walls set her new novel, The Silver Star. In the book, someone ...

How do you write an absorbing novel about unspeakable things? It's always a tricky business, and an editor I know once described the dilemma this way: "A reader needs to want to go there." What "there" means is the self-contained world of the book. And what would make a reader ...

Meg Wolitzer discusses her new novel, The Interestings, a panoramic story about what becomes of early talent, and the roles that art, money, and even envy can play in close friendships. It follows a group of teenagers who met at summer camp in the 1970s into adulthood.

Flannery O'Connor said short stories need to have a beginning, a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order. But what about novels? Kate Atkinson seems to believe there can be a beginning, a middle and an end, and then another beginning, plus several more middles ... and ...

Meg Wolitzer talks about her latest novel, The Uncoupling. After Stellar Plains High School chooses to put on the play Lysistrata—the comedy by Aristophanes about women who stop having sex with men in order to end a war—a strange spell seems to be cast over the women throughout the school community. One by one healthy, normal women and teenage girls turn away from their husbands and boyfriends in the bedroom, for reasons they don't really understand.

The story of a secret, uncovered by four siblings, in new fiction from novelist Meg Wolitzer. Music from the Warsaw Village Band. A torrent of compliments from a complete stranger. And, finally, about as clear an explanation as you're going to get for Einstein's special theory of relativity.
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This week we 1) expose the myth of the tambourine man, 2) question the viability of veganism when you're eating from a dumpster, 3) encourage marriages to dissolve and, 4) once and for all, explain Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. Our first show of the year 2003 CE will change ...

Some very persuasive arguments about why you should vote, from people who should know - Mario Cuomo and Aunt Alice, among others. Plus a walk around the rock and roll block with record producer Jim Dickinson, and another round of "What's Your Word" with word diva Erin McKean.
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The Next Big Thing travels along the edges of September 11th, where things are a little quieter. We make stops at an open marketplace in Brazil - to listen to reports of the attack in medieval verse form - and then visit the collective unconscious in Meg Wolitzer's radio play ...

The Next Big Thing is death, longing, love ... in other words: Fado, music from Portugal that will take your breath away. It's being haunted by the old neighborhood with writer Philip Lopate. It's news that's not news, and how you feel when you're about to eat cake.
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We remember first crushes, 1980s style and vibe on the street, the lost minutes of September 11, and some lesser known moments in the life of Stephen Jay Gould. Plus another episode of "What's Your Word" with Erin McKean.

Back in the Days
In the 1980's, ...

In the weeks immediately following the attacks on the World Trade Center, we tried to capture the city's conflicted state of mind - fearful, defiant, optimistic and grief-stricken - checking in with people we knew and people we'd never met before. Their voices have stayed with us. Six months later, ...