Welcome to Literary Fiction on NTS. I'm Carrie Plitt, here as always with my co-host, Octavia Bright.

Hi, Octavia. Hi, Carrie. Each week, we seem to get more news about violent deaths in America.

Last week, it was from Charlotte and New York, and next week, it's sure to be somewhere else.

What is it with America and Violence, America and guns? And what can books tell us

about it? Today we're going to talk about how violence manifests itself in American literature,

from the brutal westerns of Cormac McCarthy, to the insightful nonfiction of authors like Stephen

Pinker and the hard-hitting journalism of Dave Cullen. Our guest today is journalist Gary Young, and he's tackled the gnarly topic of gun violence

in the United States. Gary is an author, broadcaster, and award-winning columnist for The Guardian,

who is based in Chicago for several years until recently moving back to Hackney in London with his

family. He also writes a monthly column for the Nation magazine and is the Alfred

Nobler Fellow for the Nation Institute. Born in Britain to Barbadian parents, Young reported

all over Europe, Africa and the Caribbean before being appointed the Guardian's US correspondent

in 2003. And in 2009, he won Britain's prestigious James Cameron Award for combined moral vision and professional

integrity. Very serious. Pretty serious and awesome. He's a nice guy. Yeah, he's super laid back.

In his moving and important new book, Another Day in the Death of America, he tells the stories

of 10 children who died from gun violence in America on a random day in 2013.

So we'll be interviewing Gary, talking more generally about the theme, and, as always,

recommending some books at the end with Gary. So stick around for the next hour of literary friction.

Gary Young, thank you for coming on literary friction. We've asked you to start with a reading. Could you please set it up?

Sure, this is from the introduction of my book, Another Day in the Death of America.

The most common adjective employed by weather reporters on Saturday, the 23rd of November 2013 2013 was treacherous. But in reality there

wasn't a hint of betrayal about it. The day was every bit as foul as one would expect the

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