Late Night Lit: Hernan Diaz | Maggie Tokuda-Hall

0:06Hi, everyone. I'm Sarah Jenks-Daly, supervising producer at Late Night, and welcome to our fall semester episode of Late Night Lit. On this episode, we speak with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hernan Diaz, whose new novel, Ply, is available now. We'll also hear from author and a founding member of the organization Authors Against Book Bans, Maggie Takuda Hall.

0:38I was first introduced to Hernan Diaz's work when I read his novel Trust, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2023. His latest novel, Ply, is decidedly different but no less impressive. Set in a future where societal norms no longer exist, it follows a young woman, referred to as the pincher, who makes a living providing electricity to musicians for their concerts, all while struggling to survive and find connection. Hernan speaks to us about incorporating elements of physics and researching scientific theory, why he wants to push back at the use of the word dystopia in relation to the novel, and how much fun he had coming up with fake band names to sprinkle throughout the story.

1:23Now here's my chat with Ernan. Ernan, welcome to Late Night Lit. I'm so thrilled you're here. What a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Sarah. So this is your third novel, Ply. I loved it. Congratulations. Many thanks. And I want to talk a little bit about it. And I thought we could start with the setting, which is this dystopic, near, maybe distant future where there was this thriving metropolis, which to me looked a lot like New York City or sounded a lot like New York City. It does. I'm going to quibble later on with dystopia. I hope we get to talk about that. Oh, great. Okay, good. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

2:00Let's do that. But yes, it is very much inspired in New York, which is where I've lived for almost 30 years now. But I wanted to give readers as much latitude as possible to be able to imagine the place freely and unencumbered with referential signs. So I left it floaty on purpose, but it takes place mostly in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. Right. So we follow the pincher, who is the main character here. She's a young woman who's surviving in this world where the government has disappeared and the world is being run by corporations. And you call her the pincher because she's pinching electricity from these power grids and she makes a living providing electricity to musical performance acts.

2:44That's right. Because this is so different from your novel Trust, which I really loved. I was curious in terms of what you've been drawn to either in literature and film and television that maybe made you or inspired you to kind of write a story that was this, which is so different from what I know you to have written in the past. Yeah, well, there are many angles of approach to your question. The first one is that I have set one and only one imperative to myself, which is to try to do something different each time and to keep it as complicated for myself as possible and not be my own epigon or sort of derivative of myself.

3:27Hopefully it would be impossible to train any kind of AI platform with my books for my voice, because I don't want to have a voice or a world. So this was, I think, the least expected thing I could possibly have done after my previous two books. And that's why I was drawn to it. So that's the first angle of approach toward the question. I hope to keep this brief. The second one has to do with my minor, gentle, very kind quibble about the use of the word dystopia, which is I think we at some point we have lost our ability to imagine a better future for ourselves as a race, as a species. And I wanted to do just that with Ply, but not sort of in a garland wearing circle dancing hippie kind of way, which would have been incredibly depressing to me.

4:25I think the title, Ply, refers also to a historical fold. We're at the end of a long historical epoch that we could define as modernity, you know, widely understood. And the beginning of a new one. We don't know what that is going to be, but we're on the brink of the birth of this new historical period. And I would say you said it was a world run by corporations. They're just two corporations that hold a monopoly for water and electricity. If you choose not to engage with them, you actually lead a very unsupervised and free and unalienated existence. So these people have lost a lot of things that are very, very painful to lose, right?

5:15The rule of law, health care, education, all of these services that the state as an institution provides. And that is, you know, again, a very painful thing. But they have also lost things that are totally worth losing. Right. Their lives are not commodified anymore. They're not under constant supervision. New economies thrive, new forms of sociability, new forms of family, actually. And art is flourishing everywhere. So I think it's a little bit more complex than that. Well, I hope, I hope it's a little bit more complex. Well, I think that that is so interesting because I wanted to ask about family and community because there is quite a bit of science in it, which I want to get to.

5:57But there are larger themes that you're writing about, which you just mentioned, family, but also who we choose to be our family if our immediate genetic relatives are no longer there and how you connect and find connections when these social constructs are dismantled. Can you talk a little bit about your approach to that? Because like you said, it is hard to imagine something that we've never imagined. But how did you go about doing that? Toward family specifically or toward imagining this world more generally? I think family specifically, because I think that was a really interesting part to me was the relationships that the pincher is involved in as we follow her over the course of these few years.

6:37Okay. I'm very interested in the family as a unit and as our first experience as humans of intimacy. Like that is our first connection or approach to that, what it means to be extremely close to someone both physically and emotionally. I think this notion of sort of the bourgeois patriarchal family wasn't always such a stable institution at all. It buries culturally and it has changed its shape historically. So I was trying to think of these units that are still sort of brimming with emotion and where one goes to find safety and comfort and shelter in physical and emotional ways, but that were sort of unmoored from the family structures as we know them.

7:34I think it's very important that there are really no fathers in this book, right? It's a very matriarchal book. I think it's also important that the Pinscher is... And also, I left her unnamed, which I understand it's mildly annoying at first. But I wanted, just very much as the case with New York, as we were talking about, I wanted to leave her identity suspended as much as I could. And toward the end of the book, her namelessness becomes very, very, very important, obviously. So it's a buildup toward that. But the absence of a name also has to do with sort of a very transformed family structure.

8:16Like that's one of the first things that we are given within this patriarchal structure, which is a name that labels us as individuals. So much of our identity is attached to that name. So by making her nameless, I was hoping to also be making a comment on that. I think that the novel is also peppered with different families that have different configurations. There isn't just one kind of family that has taken over. They're mentioned fleetingly, but they're there. And I should also say, since we're talking about family, I think one of the most interesting writers for me to write about family is Charles Dickens.

8:56And this book is very obviously sort of a very precarious, rickety shrine to Javarles Dickens. I love his work so, so much. I've read everything he has written. And you know what? Also, Sarah, I was thinking the other day as I was walking around Brooklyn. I live in Brooklyn. I've lived in Brooklyn for almost 30 years. And I thought to myself, I've never written a novel about bourgeois characters ever. And trust is clearly not bad because these people are not bourgeois. They're something completely different, these hyper-wealthy people. And ply is obviously not bad either. And I think this is also a comment on how our subjectivities have been shaped by bourgeois institutions, beginning with the family itself.

9:46I'm sorry, I'm being long. No, that's so interesting. No, no, I love hearing it. I wanted to ask about the science piece because that is another crucial part of this story. And I was very curious because it's dense enough in terms of theory and conceptual sort of understanding of this science that I was going back and rereading paragraphs because I was like, I don't know what he's talking about here. I really have to dive in and make sure I'm paying attention. So I was wondering how much research this required you to do and understanding of scientific theory. I guess that's my first part of the question.

10:22The second part would be, did you feel as though you had to understand it to write it? Okay, I think that the modern novel, at least since the 17th century, has always been the natural home for big ideas and to try to present them as beautifully and as compelling as possible. The novel is really good at doing this. I don't know at what point, I know it's very recent, that we have been told by some kind of higher umpire, literary kind of umpire, that novels ought to be kind of page-turning and propulsive. I, as a reader, I love experiencing different gears and when books slow down. I agree. Yeah, right?

11:05To be presented with a certain viscosity of language. I enjoy that very much. As much as I enjoy also when it picks up and it becomes, you know, wild and fast. And I like, because I'm greedy, I want all of those things in the books that I read and the ones that I write. And speaking of unexplainable dictums in the world of literature, another one is write about what you know, which I think is a very pernicious piece of advice. I run very eagerly to the unknown. And I think it's the duty of literature to expand sort of the horizons of experience and the realm of the utterable. So I wrote kind of a Western without knowing how to ride a horse.

11:48I wrote a novel about capital with being a money idiot. I had to learn. And now particle physics plays an important role in this. I can tell you that if you're not drawn to the ideas that are presented in the book, which are presented very gently, and I think the longest exposition is like 10 pages, 12 pages, which I think is a reasonable ask to a reader. But you could even skip them and it's okay. I thought it was a respectful gesture toward the reader to make the machine at the core of the book believable, to make sure that this could work. It's impossible to build, don't get me wrong, from an engineering point of view, it cannot be done.

12:34But it's theoretically completely plausible as a machine. And I could have very easily just invented like a bunch of made up words, Like, we need to build the cyclotronic, retroactive whatever, you know, just as they do in science fiction movies and be done. But the ideas presented in quantum mechanics are just so gorgeous and so counterintuitive and so humbling that I thought, what a missed opportunity to not go there together, the reader and I. So it was uphill. I, you know, it was years of studying. And when I thought that I wasn't a complete imbecile, still far from being proficient, I sent, I had been following the work of a project leader at, have you heard of CERN in Geneva, Switzerland?

13:32Yes. So in case someone hasn't, it's the home of the largest machine ever built by humans, which is called the Large Hadron Collider, where they speed up particles, subatomic particles, to 99.999999997.9 % of the speed of light and smash them together and analyze the debris. And this has really changed our understanding of how matter is possible and how it is constituted. And so I reached out to a project leader there in whose work I was interested. And I said, hi, I'm an idiot. I'm working on this novel. I am building this bonkers machine on the page. This is what it does. This is how I think it should work.

14:24Will you be able to help me? Will you be willing to help me? Against all odds, she said yes. And that started a correspondence that led to a visit. I flew to Geneva. Oh, wow. Yeah, I spent a week 450 feet underground. They scanned my retina. Like, I got full access. Incredible. And yeah, and she and her team, you know, they were so excited to be building this thing that is unbuildable. So it was great fun. And it really changed my intellectual life forever. I don't want to start talking about this because I have a hard time stopping because I find it so fascinating. I mean, if you want to go, let's go.

15:03Well, I do want to know because I don't think this gives anything away, but there is a retinal scanner to get into the building where they are building this machine, the pincher. And so I was wondering, did you borrow that from your visit? Or was that in there before? Now, retroactively, thank you. That was a nice gift from you. I totally borrowed it from them. Like I wouldn't have thought about it if I hadn't done it myself there. Because I actually now remember it was a late addition. Like I went back and added the scanner. But I never put two and two together until you brought it up. But that's exactly why it's there.

15:39Thank you. Oh, that's so funny. My pleasure. My pleasure. I mentioned earlier, so the Pinscher's work is providing electricity for these bands. And she's a big music fan. And you mentioned these, the arts are flourishing in the book. And I wanted to talk a little bit about the bands because this story allows you to come up with some really creative band names, which were so fun to read about. And so I was kind of wondering, I loved Edward Allen Pau was one of my favorites and also just Mucho Palo. And so I was wondering what were some of your favorites and if there were any that kind of didn't make the cut and how you went about coming up with these crazy band names.

16:13Oh, Sarah, I have a whole document with band names. Band names are hard, man. They're very, very tough. And I have enough friends in bands to, you know, to know that they agree and that that is the case. But it was great fun and it was relentless. Like I would be producing pages, but on the back of my mind, I was trying to improve the band names. That was really a big deal. I think there was a band name I was unhappy with. And then I came up with, I think my favorite, I like Mucho Pelo too. I think that is pretty good. Mucho Pelo is great. Yeah. I think it's a pretty good band name. But I think my favorite, if you read an advanced review copy, you didn't get this.

16:59And I can't believe this is not taken, but it's now in the book. So sorry, if anyone likes it, they're late. So I added this in a very late pass. It's a band that's called Burroughs. spelled like the Burroughs in Brooklyn, but also for most of these punk bands and post-punk bands, Burroughs, William Burroughs, the writer, was a decisive influence. So I just love the superposition, which is a very quantum physics word, by the way. I love that superposition between the two Burroughs and the two homophones. So that's a geeky, nerdy band name that I'm fond of. Oh, that's great. It's so fun. Well, this novel is fantastic.

17:43It's very moving and thoughtful. And I really loved being immersed in this world that you created. So lastly, I'd just like to ask, we close with book recommendations for our listeners. If you've got a book you love that you'd like to share, we'd love to hear it. Can I share two? Is that too greedy? Yes, go for it. Okay, two. One came out like four months ago. And it's Sigrid Nunes' short story collection. And it is called It Will Come to You. Yes, I loved it too. Oh, you read it? I loved it, yeah. Isn't it amazing? Beautiful. Because it's so profound and transcendental, but it's also so light and funny.

18:22Hell, I don't understand. She's so great. And then the second one is not out yet. I read it in proof. It's coming out in March, and we were talking about music. This one is called Serious Music, and it's Percival Everett's latest book. And he writes so gorgeously about music and about the horrors of American history. And again, making you just crack up with laughter as he does this. And it's a talent all of his own. We are very aligned because I got an early copy of that, too. And I'm about 100 pages in and I am so enjoying it. I love it. Right? Yeah. Okay. Look, we should start. I agree with both of those.

19:07We should have a podcast. This is our first episode. We did it. Yeah, okay. Great. Ernan, thank you so much. Ply is available now wherever you buy your books. And it was such a pleasure to see you again and talk to you today. Thanks again. The pleasure was monopolistically mine. Thank you, Sarah. After the break, we'll hear from author and a co-founder of Authors Against Book Bans, Maggie Takuda Hall.

20:01Thank you. than someone who is working tirelessly to make literature available for whoever wants to read it. Maggie speaks to us about the successes the organization has had, the challenges we face with book bans, and the surprising amount of legal jargon she has had to contend with. And on a less serious note, we also talk about her upcoming picture book, Bath Time for Snow Monkeys, which was illustrated by Yaz Imamura. Now here's my conversation with Maggie.

20:34We're here with Maggie Takuda Hall. Maggie, thrilled to have you here. Welcome to Late Night Lit. Thanks for being here. Thank you so much for having me. So this week that the podcast is being published is National Band Books Week. And you are a founding member of Authors Against Book Bands, which is an organization that fights for books to stay on bookshelves. So I thought we could start with talking about the genesis of the organization because it was founded a couple years ago. Relatively new, right? Yeah, we only started in 2023. And basically, a group of us kept looking around as book creators and going, you know, this problem is rising and it impacts us directly.

21:13And we would get called on now and again by different organizations to come in and help on sort of an ad hoc basis. But we realized that there was like a real dearth of centralized organization for us. And so we created Authors Against Book Bans with the hope that we could just sort of, you know, be the author army that was deployed by all the grownups in the room to go where it was necessary to fight. But what became clear to us within like probably a month or two of starting the organization was that there kind of were no generals in the fight and that we were going to have to be much more hands on than we were originally anticipating.

21:48And so I think, you know, all of us, when we first started it, we knew it was going to be a lot of work, but we didn't realize it was going to be like a full-time job for the next three years. Well, now that you've been operating for a couple of years, I mean, you mentioned that it became bigger, I think, once you dove in. But has the mission changed at all, or has your focus shifted now that you've been operating for a couple years? Yeah, that's a really apt question because it had to change almost immediately. When we first started, we were really preparing people to go speak at school board meetings because at the time that was where all of the book bans were happening.

22:23And so we would do things like assemble school board testimony from authors who had done this kind of work before and, you know, teach people how to find that information in their school district's website, you know, that kind of thing. But the problem had really shifted from being just at the school board level to being at the state level. And we see all of these book banning bills coming from the state. And according to the American Library Association, in 2025, I believe, 71 percent of bans weren't coming from, like, concerned parents bringing surfacing things to their community. It was coming from the government.

22:57It was coming from city councils. It was coming from state legislatures. And so we had to, like, learn very quickly and on the fly how to do the advocacy at the state level as opposed to the school board level. And now we're even having to learn how to do it on the national level because there are four national book banning bills that have been introduced in Congress, one of which has already passed the House. For those who aren't really aware, can you tell us just a little bit about how these book bans begin, how they happen, who's banning what books? Like you mentioned state level and national level and school boards, but what does it look like?

23:31How does it come down? Like how do we see it as individuals here? You'd see it a lot of different ways. So if it's coming from, like, from the state level, let's say, because that's what's happened the most. You look at a bill like SB 13 in Texas that was really broadly written and unclear. And so a lot of schools overcomplied out of fear that they would lose all of their state funding if they had anything on the shelf that was inappropriate. And it led school districts like New Brunsfels in Texas to use AI, basically, to remove 1 ,500 books at once from their middle school and high school collections, including several that I had written.

24:09But at that point, the list is so long that it kind of individual titles don't even really matter at some point. It's not really about the books anymore. Right. And the other way that it will happen, because that was one that was like actually pretty well recorded and there was some transparency about. but what is hardest to kind of quantify and to understand and why those of us who are doing this work all the time try to remind people that the numbers you see are like just the tip of the iceberg is that a lot of it happens quietly because administrators and librarians and educators are just afraid of what's going to happen to them if they don't pull these kinds of books and so they don't go through all the proper routes that you're supposed to go through they just quietly pull as many books as they can out of fear.

24:53And we have no way of quantifying that. But that is an overwhelming reaction of many people, especially in places where state legislation has passed, where they're worried that they're going to have to close the doors to the school if they don't pull every single book that anyone might find offensive. Are those fears justified in the sense that people have seen punishments be doled out in those types of ways and that fear makes sense for the way that people are reacting? Yes and no. I think it's one of those situations where the more educated the people who work in the schools are about what their rights are and what the correct processes are, the more protected they are.

25:31But it is also true that librarians and educators and administrators have lost their jobs and received death threats and been doxed online and have suffered all sorts of abuse on the regular basis because of this issue. And so I do not think that the fear is unfounded. And we've even seen the police be called on librarians in both Texas and Florida. And Arkansas has just passed a new bill that will also legally imperil librarians for having certain types of books on their shelves. So it's not completely unfounded, but it is why being educated as to what our rights are is paramount right now. Yeah.

26:09Well, that's terrifying. I wanted to ask also if you're comfortable talking about it. You mentioned threats and intimidation factors. I know that you've been to plenty of these meetings, school board meetings. And have you ever experienced anything yourself that is remotely scary or in the capacity of being someone maybe that is a more public figure in this platform? Yeah. I mean, I will say I live in Oakland. So when I go to my school board meetings, I'm mostly just giving out high fives and receiving cookies. It's like not a big deal. But I did this summer fly to New Brunfels, Texas, the school board I mentioned before that had removed 1 ,500 books at once.

26:47Right. To just sort of gently try to say in the politest way I could, like, that's crazy and this is a terrible decision and what are you doing? And somehow a local right-wing extremist group got wind that I was going to be there and they sent a couple of like really large scary guys to just sort of physically intimidate me. And it worked. They were really scary and large, and one of them was wearing a T-shirt with guns all over it and stuff and had like a huge 1776 tattoo on the back of his arm. Oh, boy. I did the thing that I always do when I see someone scary, which is just to be like, hi, to try to like, you know, make it feel de-escalated for me.

27:23And he wouldn't even talk to me, and I was like, oh, this is weird. And then the whole time I was speaking, they were videotaping me even as I like came to sit down. and I could hear them talking about how Satan was in the building and demons were trying to groom their children while they were kind of like looking meaningfully over at me and trying to make it clear to me that like we think you're the literal devil. Yeah, you're the demon. You're the one who's here to harm our children. And, you know, often people ask us like, how do you reach out to book banners? How do you change their minds?

27:55And I completely appreciate the necessity of that, But you can't change someone's mind who thinks you're the literal devil. Like that's a really difficult belief structure to infiltrate from the outside. Yes. And so it is one of those things where like unfortunately it falls really heavily on the people who share community with the people who believe this stuff. If that's your family member or that's your neighbor to slowly start having these arduous and exhausting conversations with them. because I can't come in from on high and just sort of demand that they stop thinking I'm a demon. I can present myself as the person who I think I am, which is just a lady who really loves kids and believes that they should have access to a good education.

28:41But that is not convincing to a lot of people. Yeah, it's dismantling that belief is not something you can do at a 10-minute interaction at a school board meeting. No. Well, I'm very impressed that you were able to be there and maintain composure amidst all of that. That's very kind. And thank you for all the work that you do. Thank you. I should say that we have a lot of members who've had to do a lot more of this kind of work than I have because I'm in California. So I'm helping coordinate stuff. But we have members who live in Texas and in Florida and in Idaho and in South Carolina and in Utah and the places where it is really frightening to even publicly say you're against these things.

29:19Yeah. And so the bravery required from the people in red states is profound and shouldn't be doubted. Have you noticed that more people are joining the fight as the bands get bigger and they become more nationally focused as opposed to maybe more local? You know, honestly, I think that the parade of atrocities is just so profound right now that it is actually really difficult to get people to tune into this. And I have infinite empathy for that. Like for people who have not made book bans, their number one concern. I am also more concerned about my neighbors being kidnapped or illegal warriors and girls schools being bombed.

29:57Like I get why it has been difficult to shift focus to this. And so even though it has reached the national level, so has basically every other waking nightmare that we're living through. And so people are really tired. And by the time you get to book bans and you're like, and another thing. They're like, oh, my God, please just leave me alone. And so the people who care care really deeply. And I do find that with, like, young people, this is an incredibly galvanizing issue because it affects them directly. And so for, like, high school students, this is the issue that affects their day-to-day most profoundly.

30:35And so they are often our best and most profound allies in this fight because they just want to be able to read the books that they like to read. And there are adults standing in the way of them doing that. And they don't take kindly to that. When you look at what you've accomplished since you began, what are you most proud of, either individually or as an organization, or maybe both? Yeah. I would say as an organization, there's like a couple things. One of them is we helped block a bill in Florida that would have undone the burden of the Miller test. And the Miller test is basically the precedent that we use to evaluate basically anything, any written materials for whether or not they're obscene.

31:18Because if they are considered obscene, there's like a different – it falls under a criminal statute. And if you undo the burden of the Miller test, which is to say like you stop saying it has to have artistic merit in order to not be obscene. if they say we don't actually have to care whether or not it has artistic merit or not. It puts every creator in the country, people like me who are obscure to people like Seth Myers who are not under potentially criminal charges for the things that we have said and done and created in public. And we helped block that. And to me, the subversion of the Miller test is one of my red flags for like, oh, I might need to leave the country.

31:54Like I'm a paranoid Jewish person. I'm aware that when this happens if this happens I'm no longer safe I will no longer enjoy the protections of free speech and I can be you know rung up as a criminal because I've written queer young adult books and this bill in Florida was trying to do that and we were part of like a very large coalition of people who organized really rapidly and a really like broad coalition of people to stand in the way of it and it didn't pass and that was one of those days of like okay It was so much work and it was so crushing and it was so hard on the day to day because we felt like we were losing.

32:31We felt like we were losing. And when it just sort of fizzled out and died, I remember I like ordered myself a sundae just for me. No one else in my family like to be delivered to my house because I was like, no, I've earned this. One spoon, one sundae. This is mine. Yeah, exactly. Like I'm not sharing. It was great. And then our members have done like really profound work. Like they really just so many creators in the country just needed a flag to march behind. They were already doing this kind of work. And we just gave them an excuse and some loose organization to go with. And so our members in Rhode Island and the state leaders specifically Jeanette Bradley and Padma Van Kacherman got past the single most aggressive proactive freedom to read bill in the entire country that actually allows creators to sue for their First Amendment rights if their books are banned in Rhode Island.

33:21which is a huge deal and really different than any other bill that exists in the country. Oh, wow. And because of the work that they did, then our members in Massachusetts, including state leaders like Michelle Cusolito and Nick LaRue and Colleen A. F. Venable and Melinda Lowe, were able to get really similar legislation passed in Massachusetts. And right now in Austin, Texas, two of our members got Austin, Texas to codify being a book-safe harbor city. And that's incredible because that's in Texas. And we all know that Austin's like a little more blue. But right now in Florida, they're trying to argue and they're arguing successfully in court that the First Amendment exists to protect the free speech rights of the government as well.

34:05And that banning books is the government's exercising their First Amendment rights, which is a crazy subversion of the way that we have understood it. And so I'm hoping that with like more of these books, Safe Harbor Cities, popping up in red states but in blue cities, we can complicate the legal argument for that and say like, okay, well, it's also government speech to say we would absolutely never do that. So what does that even mean? Government speech isn't a monolith. And so getting it passed in Austin in one of the book banningest states in the country was like a huge coup. So a lot of really great work is being done.

34:40And I just I'm very proud of both the organization and the individual members who've made stuff like that happen. Yeah, absolutely. Have you had to dive into a lot more legal briefs and law adjacent documents than you ever thought you might have to in your career? I can't stress enough that I write books with titles like Bathtime for Snow Monkeys and that I was in no way prepared to have to read legislation on a regular basis. and legal briefs and things like that. And I've had to learn really fast how to parse that language and to lean very heavily on people who are in our coalition to be like, can you explain this to me like I'm a small child because this is not my strength.

35:25Like just looking at that text sometimes makes my eyes go cross. Like I can't even begin to parse it. Yeah, you're rubbing your eyes right now thinking about it. I know, just even considering it stresses me out. Oh my gosh. It's been a lot. Well, you mentioned some of the books that you've written, and you are an author. You've written YA books and picture books. And I was wondering what it's like, because I read that you've personally had some of your own books banned. So I was just wondering what it's like as a person to receive that news and what it feels like. it's really heartbreaking there's kind of no other way around it like I write specifically queer young adult books for kids who like I always say like I'm writing for me in the past in some capacity like the kinds of books that I wished had been around when I was that age so that I would just know I wasn't alone and that I wasn't these things that I felt weren't so strange and in fact there were all kinds of other people in this broad community that was there to welcomed me into it.

36:25And I had no concept of that as a teenager. And so when a book that is about queerness or a book that's about like any aspect of identity, which is usually what it is, these are attacks on identitarian politics, gets banned, what that community is saying, what the adults in the room are saying to all the kids who are there is that who you are is wrong. And not only is it that I don't like you. It's that I don't think that you should exist at all. And that's a really painful thing to be aware is being said to children on a regular basis. And, you know, book bans vary from state to state. And in some ways, they're just kind of a barometer for what the culture war issues are in that state.

37:12Like the examples that I give usually are like in Utah, they ban books that are sex positive or have a feminist perspective or in any way sort of like center female characters, especially ones who are experiencing any kind of sexual assault. And in South Carolina, they ban books by Black creators, like, really aggressively. And in California, they ban books by and about Palestinian people really aggressively. And so you can kind of tell, like, by state, what are the issues that are the most sort of, like, profound battlegrounds for these culture wars. And in many of those places, violence against the communities where those books are being banned are also higher.

37:55And it's not that these are like exactly correlated and there's certainly, there's no argument that they're causational, but like it's not a coincidence. Do you know what I mean? Like of the fact that there are so many hate crimes against LGBTQ plus people in Florida and they also ban all of the books about those people is just a like a really sad barometer for what sort of violence we are comfortable with in each one of these states. Yeah, that makes sense. There's obviously just a direct line there. Yeah. You sort of answered this a little bit, but I was wondering, aside from writing books that maybe you would have wanted to read as a kid, do you think that there's a message that maybe, because I know all your books are very different and the stories are different and the characters are different.

38:42Do you think that there's a message that maybe a theme or something that you feel that you always want to instill in people that are reading, young people that are reading your books, aside from maybe that is okay to be exactly who they are? But is there something else that you feel like you're always trying to write for? I mean, my goal as a creator is to always tell the truth in some capacity. And so I believe very sternly that children and teenagers deserve the truth and that if you respect their intelligence, then you will respect them enough to tell it to them. Even if you're telling a story about werewolves or mermaids or whatever, there are all these different ways to tell the truth, right?

39:20And ways that can invite them in and make them feel like this is so much fun. I love reading. And also there is an adult who's willing to look me in the eye and tell me something real that I understand, but maybe didn't have words for in the world. And so it's less that I am ever concerned with moral education because I don't feel like that's my particular interest in literature. I appreciate that those kinds of books exist because morality is taught, but that is not my particular milieu. It's more just that I want to create the kind of art that makes kids and teenagers feel like their intelligence and their wisdom has been seen and respected.

40:02and that even if we're telling kind of a goofy story about some outlandish thing, there's something at the core of it that is emotionally or, you know, politically true about it. My favorite art as a teenager was always stuff that helped me identify and name things that I knew were happening and I just didn't have the vocabulary for. And I hope that the work that I create does that. That's great. You published a book in September, and you also mentioned Bath Time for Snow Monkeys, which is coming out mid-October. Can you tell us just a little bit about these two books since they came out in such quick succession, and what was their inspiration behind them?

40:44Yeah. One is called What Do People Do at the Science Museum, and it is about all the different STEM jobs that exist in science institutions. And when I wrote it, that was a completely uncontroversial thing. And now we're in a fun place where I'm like, oh, another political book. I didn't do it on purpose this time, I swear. But it was really fun to write because it was basically an excuse for me to track down every science communication expert on the internet and force them to have phone calls with me, which was really all I wanted. And then I have another book called Bathtime for Snow Monkeys, which is illustrated by Yaz Imamura that comes out in like a week.

41:21That's written entirely in haiku. And Yaz and I have worked before on a book called Love in the Library, which is the true story of how my maternal grandparents met in a Japanese-American incarceration camp. This is our second book together. I love working with her. I think she's so profoundly talented, and I am very lucky that I've been able to wrangle her into now two books, and we have a third one coming. And her illustration of these snow monkeys in Japan that hang out in the hot springs are so beautiful and winsome. And I have to be honest that it is really exciting to have a book to promote that is not like, hey, kiddos, you ever heard of fascism?

41:56Anyway, so that's nice. Yeah, that is nice. That's definitely nice. Yeah. Well, we like to end with book recommendations for our listeners. So if you have any that you've loved that you think people might enjoy, we'd be happy to hear it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if enjoy is the right word for it, but I just finished The Nerd Reich by Gil Duran, which is a book about the techno-fascists who are sort of leading the push toward AI and a lot of these other sort of potentially cataclysmic technologies who also don't believe that governments should exist and that actually corporations should run everything and we should have sort of like a techno-feudalist fascist arrangement globally.

42:38And I'm from the Bay Area, and so many of these people are also from the Bay Area. And so I was aware of a lot of their names. Like, there are big ones like Peter Thiel that, like, we've all heard of. But there were new names for me, too, like Curtis Yarvin, who's, like, a blogger who came up with a lot of these ideas that has profoundly affected these men with much more power. And it's, you know, it's a dark book, but I think Gil Duran wrote it really cogently and well, and it moves really quickly, which I appreciate from a nonfiction book. It's so funny because also on this podcast episode, we spoke to Hernan Diaz and he wrote a new book called Ply.

43:14And it's in a future where corporations are running the world and there is no government. And it's so funny that this is not funny, I guess, but interesting that these two things are coming together. Not funny at all, but interesting. Interesting. Yeah. I mean, I think science fiction has seen this coming for quite a long time. Like Octavia Butler's book that she wrote in the 90s, The Parable of the Sower, predicted a lot of this and even predicted a populist president running with the slogan, Make America Great Again. Oh, wow. Yeah. And it takes place in sort of like the economic and environmental collapse of California where everything's just on fire.

43:53And she wrote this in the 90s. And it was like, I think, so there's like a lot of science fiction authors who I feel like have understood that this is where we're going for quite some time. and it all felt really far-fetched. And yet here we are. Here we are. We'll encourage people to check out your website and if they are interested in supporting, they can sign up and become a member right off the site. Isn't that right? Yeah. So if you've ever had your name on the cover of a book in any capacity, we don't mind if you are traditionally or self-published. You should join us. Even if you just sign up to receive our emails and never do anything with us again, And your numbers help us go into places like legislatures and publishers to argue our points and to advocate for books all across the country.

44:39And it's very valuable to us. So thank you. Okay, great. So it's authorsagainstbookbans.com. That's right. Hopefully everybody will listen and go sign up. Maggie, thanks so much for joining us. It was so nice to speak to you. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

44:57This has been Late Night Lit. My thanks to Seth Meyers, Mike Shoemaker, Hernan Diaz, Maggie Takuda-Hall, Jay Johnson, and Andrew Guastella. Our theme music was written and performed by the 8G Band. For Late Night with Seth Meyers, I'm Sarah Jenks-Daily. We'll be back in January for the winter semester of Late Night Lit. Until then, thanks for listening and happy reading.

45:29Thank you.