Ep. 35 Prodigies, Time Machines, and Beautiful Writing with Aja Gabel

This week on The Stacks our guest is author Aja Gabel. Aja's debut novel, The Ensemble, came out in 2018, and she talks with us about writing her book, cover design, which writers inspire her, and why she got a PhD in creative writing. We also talk music prodigies and time machines, which is to say, we talk about a little of everything.

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Everything we talk about on today’s episode can be found below in the show notes and on Bookshop.org and Amazon

• The Ensemble by Aja Gabel

• Alexander Chee

• Antonya Nelson

• On Beauty by Zadie Smith

• Open Secrets by Alice Munro

• The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

• Freedom by Jonathan Franzen

• Toni Morrison

• Chalk by Joshua Rivkin

• Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah

• Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

• Lot by Brian Washington

• Alice McDermott

• Zadie Smith

• Swing Time by Zadie Smith

• The People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry

• Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku

• The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer

• The Emissary by Yoko Tawada and Margaret Mitsutani

• Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi

• George Saunders

• Ted Chiang

• The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish

• The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

• This Will Only Hurt a Little by Busy Philips

• Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang

• Ulysses by James Joyce

• The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump and Tony Schwartz

• The Babysitter's Club

• Nancy Drew

• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

• The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

• How to Write An Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee

• Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders

• Saturday by Ian McEwan

• Atonement by Ian McEwan

• The Lover by Marguerite Duras

• John Cheever

• Raymond Carver

• The Hours by Michael Cunningham

• My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante

• Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado

• The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin

• Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama

• The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

• Aja Gabel's Website

• Sarah Fong on The Stacks (Ep. 3)

• Curtis Institute of Music

• Grey's Anatomy

• "Latin Ballroom-Kids- Antonio & Maria Rosario" (YouTube)

• "Yasha and Daniela at Atlanta Open 2011" (YouTube)

• Helen Yentus (Cargo Collective)

• Fiddlehead Ferns

• Tom Holland

• Tobey Maguire

• Brit Marling

• Rooney Mara

• Peggy Olson

• Mad Men

• Jonathan Franzen's 10 Rules for Novelists (Literary Hub)

• Cy Twombly

• "Waugh" (Bryan Washington, The New Yorker)

• Riverhead Publisher

• Ten Non-Fiction Books for Fiction Lovers (Traci Thomas, The Stacks)

• National Book Award: Translated Literature

• Amazon Kindle

• Busy Philipps

• Dixie Chicks

• Arrival (Paramount Pictures)

• Amy Adams

• Scarlett Johansson

• Jennifer Lawrence

• Passengers (Columbia Pictures)

• "A Glimpse into the Ideological Monoculture of Literary New York" (Matthew Binder, Quillette)

• Atonement (Universal Pictures)

• The Bachelor (ABC)

• The Hours (Paramount Pictures)

• My Brilliant Friend (HBO)

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