A prescription to modernize public health

Lea Carpenter explores what happens when the business of spying gets personal

Who knew boring could be an asset?

In Lea Carpenter’s new spy novel, “Ilium,” we meet our young and restless unnamed narrator on a day when she’s urging herself to be less mundane, to take more risks.

She has no idea that the spies she’ll soon be working for want her precisely because she’s inexperienced, untested and ordinary.

She quickly gets pulled into a high-stakes mission against a target who has a complicated backstory when it comes to American intelligence forces.

Carpenter joined spy novel enthusiast Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. They talked about how Carpenter’s own family history inspired her interest in America’s intelligence agencies, why women are exceptionally good spies, and how family life both complicates and clarifies the work.

Guest:

• Lea Carpenter is a novelist and a screenwriter. Her new book is “Ilium.”

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Lydia Millet writes a devotion to the species disappearing from our planet

Birds, bats, freshwater mussels and a small catfish. They all slipped away in 2023, among the 21 species declared extinct by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Grief is a rational response. So are the questions novelist and conservationist Lydia Millet articulates in her new book, “We Loved It All.” A blend of memoir and ecological truth-telling, Millet’s first nonfiction work examines what the vanishing will mean for the coming generations and for our sense of self.

“No one wants to tell our children how glorious it was before you were around,” she writes.

Millet joins host Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas to talk about how she carries hope, even as she mourns the destruction in the natural world.

Guest:

• Lydia Millet is a novelist and conservationist. Her new book is, “We Loved It All: A Memory of Life.”

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Minnesota’s best writers on Big Books and Bold Ideas

Big Book and Bold Ideas talks with authors from around the globe.

But our favorite moments come when host Kerri Miller sits down with Minnesota writers to talk about story, craft and how calling this state home influences both.

This week, we took a look back at some conversations with notable Minnesota authors, including Shannon Gibney, who just won her third Minnesota Book Award, Hmong writer Kao Kalia Yang and not-ashamed-to-be-a-mystery-writer William Kent Krueger.

Author Jamie Figueroa on reclaiming an identity her mother tried to shed

Jamie Figueroa’s new memoir, “Mother Island” is stylistically unique. She combines prose and creative nonfiction, myth and short stories to explore her memories.

But the heart of the book — her push-pull relationship with her mother and her process of uncovering a true self — is as old as time.

Figueroa’s mother was taken from Puerto Rico as a young child and raised in a New York City orphanage, separated from her native language, culture and ancestry. As many immigrants before her, she learned to keep her heritage distant, as a way to assimilate into a new country.

But Figueroa chafed at the disconnect — “my mother did not know how to define herself on her own terms” — and set out to remember.

As she tells Kerri Miller on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas, “[My mother] was concerned about how we were seen. She wanted to be included. Anything she could do to get closer to ‘white identity’ made it easier for her.”

“As a daughter, I respect those were the choices she was forced to make — and I feel like my life is lived in opposition to that.”

Guest:

• Jamie Figueroa is the author of the acclaimed novel, “Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer.” Her new book is “Mother Island.”

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Alexandra Fuller on ‘the braid, the spiral, the knot of grief’

Alexandra Fuller’s new memoir begins with the death of her 21-year-old son, Fi, and chronicles her attempts to grieve well in the searing aftermath of his loss.

Among other things, that meant acknowledging her kinship with others who had gone before her.

In her gorgeous new book, “Fi: A Memoir of My Son,” she writes: “The way a pilot sees wind and clouds, or a sailor reads currents and water, I look unconsciously for stories to remind me where I am, to remind me that, whatever I’m going through, millions have been here before, are here now, will be here again.”

She talks about finding solace in that continuity on this week’s Big Books and Bold Ideas. As she tells host Kerri Miller: “As I was running to my son’s body … I knew that I would be ‘over the grief’ when I was able to find gratitude for the grief. I knew I would find out the quality of my God, for real. And I knew I had joined the vast throng of women who had raised me on the Southern African continent who had been here before.”

Don’t miss this thoughtful, tender and vulnerable conversation about non-linear grief — grief that is “a braid and a spiral and a knot.”

Guest:

• Alexandra Fuller is the author of many books, including “Don’t Lets Go to the Dogs Tonight,” and "Quiet Until the Thaw.” Her new memoir is “Fi: A Memoir of My Son.”

Subscribe to Big Books and Bold Ideas with Kerri Miller onApple Podcasts,Google Podcasts,RSSor anywhere you get your podcasts.

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