May 30, 2013 David Sedaris is currently on an author tour for his new book, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls. He spoke with Chapter 16 by phone about his upcoming reading and signing at Parnassus Books in Nashville on May 31, 2013; the difference between his lecture and bookstore tours; and the true meaning of Christmas.

May 13, 2013 In this edition of Chapter 16’s podcast series, Stephen Usery talks with Kevin Powers about The Yellow Birds. Powers’s novel—which went on to win the Pen-Hemingway award, the Guardian First Fiction award, and was a finalist for the National Book Award in Fiction—follows a young soldier through combat in Iraq and his rocky adjustment to life at home and away from the battlefield.

April 19, 2013 This week novelist Adam Johnson won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction—a prize no novelist took home in 2012—for The Orphan Master’s Son, which was released to wide critical acclaim in January of last year. Johnson is also the author of a story collection, Emporium (2002), and another novel, Parasites Like Us (2003). Today he speaks with Chapter 16‘s Stephen Usery about The Orphan Master’s Son, the story of a North Korean boy living in a Soviet-built and now largely lawless city far from the nation’s center of power in Pyongyang.

April 15, 2013 Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2012 (a year in which no prize was awarded), talks with Chapter 16 about her new collection of short stories, Vampires in the Lemon Grove. In her fiction, Russell toys with the line between fantasy and reality, and she is wary of fantasy’s association with young-adult novels.