Host Megan Labrise reveals her favorite interviews of 2022.

On this special episode of Fully Booked, host Megan Labrise looks back on another year in conversation with the amazing authors of some of the year’s best and buzziest books. Drawing on our top 10 interviews of 2022, here are two of the crème de la crème, reintroduced:

In September, Ling Ma joined us to discuss her new story collection, Bliss Montage (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sept. 13), and reminisce about the surreal experience of receiving the 2018 Kirkus Prize for fiction for her apocalyptic debut novel, Severance—which, coincidentally, began as a short story. Ma shared that several of the stories in Bliss Montage, incorporating “elements of the fantastic” but grounded “in a reality that is more recognizably our own” (starred review), grew from dreams. We delved deeply into collection opener “Los Angeles” and the story “Returning,” and explored what it takes to write fearlessly.

Back in March, for the International Episode of the podcast, Anton Hur discussed his then-forthcoming English translation of Violets by Kyung-sook Shin (Feminist Press, April 12). This slim novel by Shin, a winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize, tells the heartrending story of San, a young woman who works in a flower shop in Seoul in the 1990s. Hur and Labrise discussed its themes of isolation, oppression, friendship, and longing, and why he chose Violets for his latest translation project. In a rollicking conversation, they covered the Korean literature translation community, glossing, footnotes, and why translators’ names belong on the covers of books.

Thanks to our sponsors:

Becoming Guise-Wise by Michael Waters

How to Survive Ghosts, Cats, and Psychopaths by Diana K.C. Gill

East Winds by Rachel Rueckert

Karma Under Fire by Love Hudson-Maggio

Fully Booked is produced by Cabel Adkins Audio and Megan Labrise.