What's the inspiration behind James McBride's new novel? He'll join us in the studio to discuss Deacon King Kong.

And how does Rebecca Solnit approach writing memoir? She'll be here to talk about her new book,

Recollections of My Non-existence. Alexander Alter will give us an update from the publishing world,

we'll talk about what we and the water world are reading. This is the Book Review Podcast

of the New York Times. It's March 6th and I'm Pamela Paul.

James McBride is here now. He was last here for his last novel in 2013, The Good Lord Bird.

There was a short story collection, Five Carat Soul, and his new novel is Deacon King Kong.

James, thanks so much for being here.

I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.

All right, so I mentioned this in the introduction. Your last book was a story collection.

Before that, The Good Lord Bird came out in 2013. So it's been seven years since you've had a novel.

People have been waiting. They're very excited. How do those seven years in between work?

Are you writing the novel at the same time that you're working on the short fiction,

or did you kind of wait to finish that collection before you started work on this?

Well, you always have four or five things rolling at the same time.

Some of the short fiction was stuff that I'd written years and years ago,

and some of it was new. This story, I'd been cooking in my conscience for some time.

And as soon as I got the short story done, let me just, I was feeling this.

So I just pushed in hard, and you know, they always waiting for the magic to happen.

And it kind of started up, and then I just followed the muse.

All right, I'm going to ask you a question about the magic.

Hopefully not demystifying all of it.

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