Hey, it's NPR's Book of the Day. I'm Andrew Limbaugh. I love books where you can tell the writer is going for it.

You know, just like walking up to bat, pointing at the sky and saying, this book is going to be a home run.

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is one of those books. It's the debut novel from poet Henri Fanon Jeffers. It's about a young

black woman, Ailey, and her coming to terms with what that means in America. A lot has been made

about the book Scale, and in this interview, former NPR host, Noel King, really sells it as

an epic. But what's funny is that Jeffers instead calls it a kitchen table epic, which to my mind

means less, you know, reading Beowulf or whatever to get through your AP English class, and more

sitting down for hours, listening to your grandma or aunt telling you some wild story about your

family. 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.

History.

The love songs of W.E.B. Du Bois is epic in its scope. Over the span of almost 800 pages,

the writer Honoré Phenon Jeffers traces the story of a family, the town in Georgia, where they come from, and their migration

outward over generations. The word epic is overused these days, but this book was meant to be

an epic, and it is. I asked Jeffers, who is a poet, how she took to writing a work of such

length that takes place over centuries.

She said a lot went into it, and there was even a point where her characters started talking

to her in her dreams.

You know, when I would wake up and the words would come to me, it was almost like a very

long prose poem.

...