Hey, it's Empire's book at the day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Today on the pod, we've got Morgan

Talty. His debut novel, Fire Exit, has gotten galling reviews from the LA Review of Books, the New York

Times, and us at NPR. It's a book that centers around this question of blood quantum. That is how

indigenous Americans trace their heritage, their bloodline to show

how native they are. It's a complicated and contentious issue, and Talti chose to make it

even more complicated by having a white man be the protagonist of this story. We had a great chat

and talked a bit about his own blood quantum with regards to his son.

But first, I want to play you this interview he did with NPR a few years prior.

When his short story collection, Night of the Living Res came out.

Then he spoke with NPR's Melissa Block about balancing, representing the Pinobscot people,

without putting his own characters in a box.

That's coming up after the break.

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A woman leaves her husband, takes their young son, and returns to the small Penobscot Indian

Island Reservation in Maine.

She takes up with a volatile alcoholic, and through the 12 interconnected short stories

in Morgan Talti's new book, Night of the Living Rez, we witness how life unspools as her boy grows up.

Riding over the bridge to the island, I sense that even though their problems were

...