Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limba. Something I've been chewing a lot on lately

is that, you know, for my taste, if I'm reading something dark and heavy, it has to be at least

a little funny for me to like it. And I don't even mean it has to be like, ha ha funny. It can

just be like, oh, that's funny, you know, kind of funny.

Nailing that balance is something Morgan Talty talks about in today's interview.

He's a debut author and his new book, Night of the Living Res,

goes into addiction and violence and death and all of these heavy themes.

I should say, Talty is part of the indigenous Penobscot

nation, and that's who he's writing about. So these themes are a real part of his character's lives.

But something that stood out to me is that he told NPR's Melissa Block that he didn't want to exploit

these moments of struggle, which I think can be hard to pull off when you're

writing fiction.

In the U.S., national security news can feel far away from daily life.

Distant wars, murky conflicts, diplomacy behind closed doors on our new show, sources and methods.

NPR reporters on the ground bring you stories of real people, helping you

understand why distant events matter here at home. Listen to sources and methods on the NPR app or

wherever you get your podcasts. 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

their own, there was no escaping how those problems shaped us all, no escaping the end,

...