Hernan Diaz

This is American Masters Creative Spark, and I'm your host, Joe Skinner.

Our guest is Hernan Diaz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer who's back with his third novel.

The book is called Ply, and like his previous works, In the Distance and Trust, he's exploring America as an idea, but this time in a far distant future.

The expansive story covers a lot of ground, humanity's relationship to time and selfhood, the DIY music scene and art, friendship and the mother-daughter relationship, quantum mechanics, and more.

Thanks.

That's our show.

A big thank you to Hernan Diaz for taking the time to talk.

American Masters Creative Spark is a production of the WNET Group, media made possible by all of you.

It was pieces here and there, so I needed to get back into a good novel.

So I just finished Truth by Hernan Diaz, which was the 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner.

which was fascinating on so many levels, a couple of the big ones being one.

It's essentially four versions of the same story told in a single novel about, you know, this couple effectively.

And it was just really engrossing and didn't read like nonfiction at all.

And then currently I'm reading Trust by Hernan Diaz, which is also set in the Gilded Age and kind of a weird time slip, really cool story.

Definitely recommend.

Trust, is that what you said?

So, yeah, that'll be cool.

But then I'm on to Hernan Diaz's Ply already.

I was wrestling with what book to do next because I'm going to bring it to Minnesota, and Ply is not a small hardcover.

So, yeah, I was looking for a small hardcover or a Kindle, but I've just been reading regular books lately, and I have trouble going back to the Kindle right now.

The biggest thing that has changed in our lifetimes from grandma's washer to what we have today are bells and whistles.

Pulitzer-winning novelist Hernan Diaz lived in a windowless box in a Williamsburg doll factory, and it's haunted as fiction ever since.

There were two stories about what this place had been, a speaker factory.

The other theory was that it had been a doll factory, and I did find some doll eyes stuck in between the floorboards.

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Coming up, Pulitzer winning novelist Hernan Diaz shows you his old house.

One time we knocked so hard that the door came crashing down into their apartment.

And as you, I mean, you lifted the publishing schedule, right? Like September 29, if I can just go back to September 29, absolutely ridiculous day.

We have Hernan Diaz's Ply, The Radiance by Ayaan Akhtar, Dive City by Patrick DeWitt, American Hagwon by Min Jin Lee, a john grisham novel a john boyne novel it just goes on now just one day and i can only review one book a week you know and how do you decide there's another one of these pileups happening in october it is really tough i mean you just end up missing lots of great books you know yeah yeah

and also you end up feeling like oh that's the one i should have grabbed

I think people imagine that book reviewers read all the books and then decide which ones to review.

so local bookstore

and uh yeah that one was that one was fun people were very excited to chat with her and then hernan diaz whose ply has just come out i still haven't read it some of you have i've gotten some messages about it uh it was a fantastic conversation he was talking with a science writer who I was not familiar with, but I think they are friends.

So it was a really interesting conversation.

I guess this is his third book, so it was a little bit, a whole sweep of his oeuvre.