This week’s episode features author and screenwriter Meryl Branch-McTiernan talking with TW Creative Director John Vogel about her recent novel What You Should Worry About. The book takes us back to before the COVID lockdown, the old normal. And it brings back all the anxiety, isolation, fear, and judgment that was rampant in the first year of shelter-in-place.

As protagonist Layla Moody hops around Sundance in February 2020, she connects with Diana Winn, a director who offers a meeting in New York for Layla to pitch a script. After the festival, she flies from her adopted home of L.A. to her childhood home of NYC and stays at her mother’s apartment. Unexpectedly, COVID shuts everything down, and she becomes stranded in New York.

As her married friends all refuse to hang out — even outside — isolation increases and she makes the unpopular decision to stay at a house share on Fire Island, one of her old happy places. Despite her worries, it turns out to be the right move and finally provides some human connection that had been absent since the onset of the pandemic.

Meryl also co-wrote the 2023 movie Katie’s Mom, which plays with the idea of The Graduate by putting the focus on the older woman instead of the younger male. Beverly Hills, 90210 fans might recognize two of the films starts, Dina Meyer and Jason Wiles, from their roles as Lucinda Nicholson and Colin Robbins.

During our interview, Meryl talks to John about how What You Should Worry About converges to and diverges from her real life during the era of social distance, how she’s been able to balance making art with needing to pay rent, and answers the Perfect Recognition questions.

For today's episode, YA author Erik J. Brown sits down with TW Creative Director John Vogel for Banned Books Week. Erik’s books have been banned in many school libraries around the US for LGBTQ+ themes, and just this past year the Malaysian government banned two of his books for the entire country.

The action and settings of Erik J. Brown’s books are all very different, but they all have one aspect in common: teenagers learning how to navigate romantic feelings towards a member of the same gender.

His bestseller All That’s Left in the World and its sequel The Only Light Left Burning take place in a post-apocalyptic world that’s been decimated by a Superflu, Lose You to Find Me is more of a basic rom-com, and Better the Devil is a thriller where the main characters are trying to solve the 10-year-old case of a missing child.

These books are all geared towards a young adult audience, a time period that can be very confusing for relationships in general. Finding affirmation — even within a book — surrounding feelings that might be guarded for social self-preservation could be a lifeline for kids that age.

Unfortunately, not everyone agrees.

For this episode best-selling author K'wan Foye sits down with TW Creative Director John Vogel to talk about his new book, House of the Rising Sun (Akashic Books, 2026). K’wan Foye gained major publishing attention after the success of his first novel, Gangsta (Triple Crown Publications, 2002), led to the beginning of a run with St. Martin’s Press, releasing over a dozen books. He has since authored over two dozen bestsellers, including the Animal series from Iceberg Slim’s Simon and Schuster imprint, Cash Money Content, and the Black Lotus series from Akashic Books.

While Gangsta was a gritty and somewhat realistic novel, K’wan started out writing stories with more of a supernatural bent. Being adopted by mainstream publishing, he was originally pigeonholed into thriller and crime drama. When he took a detour with Black Lotus, incorporating horror and the supernatural, his publishers weren’t having it.

Luckily, K’wan linked up with Akashic Books, who were excited to give his Black Lotus books a publishing home, leading to a very successful two-book release.

House of the Rising Sun also veers into the domain of horror and a hinted-at backstory that would be at home in old kung-fu movies. It represents the first book of K’wan’s Brotherhood of Blood series. One month after its release, K'wan put out Troubleman with Auwa Books, Questlove’s imprint under Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.