This week on The Stacks our guest is author Aja Gabel. Aja's debut novel, The Ensemble, came out in 2018, and she talks with us about writing her book, cover design, which writers inspire her, and why she got a PhD in creative writing. We also talk music prodigies and time machines, which is to say, we talk about a little of everything.

You can find everything we talk about this week in the show notes below. By shopping through the links you help support The Stacks, at no cost to you. Shop on Amazon and iTunes.
BOOKS

The Ensemble by Aja Gabel
Alexander Chee
Antonya Nelson
On Beauty by Zadie Smith
Open Secrets by Alice Munro
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Toni Morrison
Chalk by Joshua Rivkin
Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Fruit of the Drunken Tree by Ingrid Rojas Contreras
Lot by Brian Washington
Alice McDermott
Zadie Smith
Swing Time by Zadie Smith
The People Who Eat Darkness by Richard Lloyd Parry
Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku
The Female Persuasion by Meg Wolitzer
The Emissary by Yoko Tawada and Margaret Mitsutani
Stamped from the Beginning by Ibram X. Kendi
George Saunders
Ted Chiang
The Last Black Unicorn by Tiffany Haddish
The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell
This Will Only Hurt a Little by Busy Philips
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
Ulysses by James Joyce
The Art of the Deal by Donald Trump and Tony Schwartz
The Babysitter's Club
Nancy Drew
Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
How to Write An Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
Saturday by Ian McEwan
Atonement by Ian McEwan
The Lover by Marguerite Duras
John Cheever
Raymond Carver
The Hours by Michael Cunningham
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
The Immortalists by Chloe Benjamin
Dreams from my Father by Barack Obama
The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

EVERYTHING ELSE

Aja Gabel's Website
Sarah Fong on The Stacks (Ep. 3)
Curtis Institute of Music
Grey's Anatomy
"Latin Ballroom-Kids- Antonio & Maria Rosario" (YouTube)

"Yasha and Daniela at Atlanta Open 2011" (YouTube)

Helen Yentus (Cargo Collective)
Fiddlehead Ferns
Tom Holland
Tobey Maguire
Brit Marling
Rooney Mara
Peggy Olson
Mad Men
Jonathan Franzen's 10 Rules for Novelists (Literary Hub)
Cy Twombly
"Waugh" (Bryan Washington, The New Yorker)
Riverhead Publisher
Ten Non-Fiction Books for Fiction Lovers (Traci Thomas, The Stacks)
National Book Award: Translated Literature
Amazon Kindle
Busy Philipps
Dixie Chicks
Arrival (Paramount Pictures)
Amy Adams
Scarlett Johansson
Jennifer Lawrence
Passengers (Columbia Pictures)
"A Glimpse into the Ideological Monoculture of Literary New York" (Matthew Binder, Quillette)
Atonement (Universal Pictures)
The Bachelor (ABC)
The Hours (Paramount Pictures)
My Brilliant Friend (HBO)

Connect with Aja: Aja's Website|Aja's Instagram|Aja's Twitter

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