Novelist, memoirist and biographer Edmund White joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about his recent book, The Loves of My Life: A Sex Memoir. White talks about the changes he has witnessed the LGBTQ+ community go through over the years and the hostility the transgender population faces under the Trump-Vance regime. He discusses a general concern older members of the community have about losing Social Security and health coverage should gay marriage become Trump’s next target, as well as this administration’s attempt to erase queer language from governmental archives. White previews his forthcoming novel about Louis XIV’s gay brother titled Monsieur and reads from The Loves of My Life.

Novelist and former Huffington Post climate reporter Sarah S. Grossman joins Fiction/Non/Fiction co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to talk about the Los Angeles wildfires. Grossman, who lives in Los Angeles and whose 2024 novel A Fire So Wild centers on a wildfire in Northern California, discusses how communities are coming together to support each other in the wake of the devastation.

White Women LOL is included in Show Don't Tell, the new short story collection by author Curtis Sittenfeld.

Bestselling fiction writer Curtis Sittenfeld joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about her new collection of stories, Show Don’t Tell. Sittenfeld discusses the title story, which depicts graduate students in creative writing competing for funding, and its connections to her time at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, when that practice was common. She also considers how President Trump’s attacks on DEI reveal some people’s true natures, and what it means to write about “the hypocrisy of being a person.”

Professor Karen Weingarten talks about medicine before and after Horatio Storer, a slice of history included in the anthology: Abortion Stories. @fictionnonfiction205

Professor Karen Weingarten joins co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to talk about a new anthology she has edited, Abortion Stories: American Literature Before Roe v. Wade. Weingarten reflects on the complicated history of abortion, the varied use of abortifacients, abortion’s ties to eugenics and state control of bodies, and the rise of the anti-abortion movement. She discusses how access to abortion facilitates other kinds of resistance, and explains how the book came to include authors like Maria Sybilla Merian, Langston Hughes, Dorothy Parker, Lucille Clifton, and Eugene O’Neill alongside oral histories from formerly enslaved persons and groundbreaking politicians like Shirley Chisholm.

Kai Thomas talks about Canada's underground railroad and the role it plays in his novel In The Upper Country.

Canadian authors Suzette Mayr and Kai Thomas join co-hosts V.V. Ganeshananthan and Whitney Terrell to discuss the repercussions of President Trump’s recent threats to annex and tax Canada. They talk about the possible empowerment of the Canadian right as a result of Trump’s extreme remarks, as well as measures their communities are taking to unify in the current political environment. Mayr and Thomas read from their recent novels, The Sleeping Car Porter and In the Upper Country.

Canadian author Suzette Mayr talks about the harsh working conditions in her novel The Sleeping Car Porter