Fresh Air - Actor Danielle Deadwyler 'Overprepared' For 'The Piano Lesson'

Episode Date: December 10, 2024

Danielle Deadwyler stars in the Netflix adaptation of the August Wilson play The Piano Lesson. She spoke with Tonya Mosley about her journey from the Atlanta theater scene to the big screen, her three masters degrees, and playing Mamie Till, mother of Emmett, in the 2022 movie Till. Also, our book critic Maureen Corrigan shares her top 10 books of 2024. Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at autographcollection.com. This is Fresh Air, I'm Tonya Mosley, and my guest today is actress Danielle Deadweiler. She's known for her powerhouse performances in shows like the HBO Max dystopian series Station Eleven, the Netflix western The Harder They Fall, and the critically acclaimed film Till, where she portrays Mamie, the mother of Emmett Till, whose brutal murder in the fifties became a flashpoint in the civil rights movement.

Danielle Deadweiler now stars in the new Netflix adaptation of August Wilson's The Piano Lesson as Bernice, a widowed single mother living in 1930s Pittsburgh, locked in a fierce battle with her brother, Boy Willie, over the family's heirloom piano. It was a family production behind the scenes. Denzel Washington produced it, his son Malcolm directed it, and his other son John David stars opposite Deadwiler as the boisterous boy Willie, an enterprising sharecropper from Mississippi who wants to sell the piano to use the money to buy the land his ancestors worked on as slaves. Deadwiler's character

Bernice insists the piano stay in the family. As the siblings battle it out, they are haunted by the ghosts of their past. Danielle Deadwiler grew up performing, but didn't start her professional career as an actor. She has three master's degrees and spent time teaching elementary school before returning to the stage. Her first big break was as Lady in Yellow in the play for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enough.

Danielle Deadweiler, welcome to Fresh Air. Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here. I am very curious. You know, almost every black actor in theater that I've spoken to talks about this moment. There is a moment where they first experience Wilson's work, August Wilson,

and they talk about it in a romantic way, in a way that almost was like an awakening. Do you remember when you first encountered his plays? I remember seeing seven guitars on Broadway. You know those people, that is your uncle or that is your cousin or your aunt or whomever. It is an awakening, it's rupturing. To see that on stage,

blackness in its fullness, the rhythms and the silences and the beats and the combustion and the just the electricity of what it means to come from a certain private cultural space, to see that magnified, it is deeply awakening. And then I've seen it, you know, in numerous other ways, right? I come from Atlanta, and so a lot of my mentors, my OGs were people who did these works. Because you were in the theater scene in Atlanta. I am deep in the theater scene of Atlanta.

That's everything about how I approach art in all forms. But you know, Kenny Leon's True Colors Theatre Company, the Alliance Theatre, these are spaces where I was going to see Wilson's work. And I know that he worked, you know, extremely closely with Kenny. And so these are the folks who reared me. These are the people who I saw doing this work and understood the kind of performative quality that I wanted to inhabit. Those are the people who instilled quality that I wanted to inhabit. Those are the people who instilled in me how to do it.

Let's talk a little bit about the piano lesson because the story goes like this. There's Boy Willie who has this idea that selling the family piano and buying land in Mississippi with that money is going to maybe unlock power and prosperity. And your character, Bernice, wants to preserve this hard-won freedom by keeping the family piano. But there's this undercurrent, and the undercurrent is the fact that they're living during Jim Crow. Can you talk about the symbolism of the piano as an heirloom to articulate this larger story of this time period of black family in 1930s Pittsburgh? Yes, the piano is more so an altar, a spiritual representation of connectivity for the both of them.

Boy Willis is moving towards this notion of value and power, and Bernice is more erotic. And when you say erotic, you don't mean like sexual erotic. Well, I mean, those things hint, but it is about life force. It's about vitality. It's about manifesting a certain kind of self and the energy that you employ. And the piano is the conduit for both of them to get to that, even though they're both in denial of where they are to go. His presumption is to go towards economic growth, physical land growth, and a personal power, an individualistic power, which is very much driven in the moment of 1936 America, right? There's an industrial

happening in the North, but wanting to obtain a certain capital empowerment is what he's moving towards. Hers is moving towards the North, but not necessarily in the industrial manner. It's just a seeking of upward mobility and what it looks like to have a good job and to imbue that into Maritha with good schooling. And Maritha's her daughter. Yeah, yeah. Both of their desires through the piano

are stemming from trauma, stemming from grief and loss. And the conflict is over how to get to this upward mobility, whatever that really means. Right. That trauma, that loss, one of the losses is Bernice and Boy Willie's father, Boy Charles, who died over this piano. And I want to play a clip, it's a climactic point, in which you're speaking to your brother about the choices your father made and the harm

it caused. And in this scene, you're talking to boy Willie, played by John David Washington, who is really, really trying to persuade you to let him sell this piano. And let's listen. You always talking about your daddy, but you'll never stop to look at what his foolishness cost your mama. Seventeen years worth of cold nights in an empty bed for what? For a piano? for a piece of wood to get even with somebody? I look at you and you're all the same. You, Papa Boy Charles, Whiny Boy, Doaker, Crawley, y'all alike, all this thieving and killing and thieving and killing

and what it ever lead to. More killing and more thieving. I ain't never seen it come to nothing. People getting burnt up, people getting shot, people falling down their wells. It'll never stop. That was my guest today, Danielle Deadweiler, in the film, The Piano Lesson.

Oh, that was such a powerful scene, Danielle. And can you describe the burden you carry in this story, your role as, you're really the sole woman besides your young daughter in this narrative? Right. We've got a host of other beautiful women that are hanging out in the bar, right? Yes, right, right. They're kind of really killed.

Yes, yes. But the sole woman articulating a kind of agency in the space amongst men. And that burden is very much a gendered understanding of what it means to labor. What it means to, who are you laboring for and what are you laboring for? And in this moment, she's articulating that they do not understand what it means to be her mother. The loss that she endured as a result, which is as a result of their father fighting to get the piano, taking back power. But in that taking back of power, he is killed.

And that taking back of power sucks a kind of life force out of their mother and moves her into grief. And that is what Bernice had to witness. Bernice had to witness her mother wanting connection to her father in this spiritual capacity. And that became Bernice's job to be this conduit for her mother to connect to her father and to connect to whomever, whatever other ancestral spirits are inhabiting the space. I've heard you say that you overprepared for this role. And I was just wondering what that meant.

How did you overprepare? You know, with film, you can... I mean, you do different things for each project. Sometimes you take it day by day, and the scenes change and whatnot, but in this, this is... We're straight up doing the play. And so, I understood myself to prepare for a play. I need to know everything.

I need to know... because the guys were already, the majority of the guys had already come off of doing the Broadway production from 22. Right, John David had performed in the Broadway production and of course we know Samuel L. Jackson and many of the other characters as well. Yeah, Michael Potts and Ray Fisher, right? And so myself and Corey are coming in and you're gonna establish a new thing, but they're already rooted. And so it just took a lot of extra time to let the language sit in. And when you're talking about this caliber of work, when you're talking

about this kind of legacy, you want to honor it in that manner. And so over-preparing is living in it differently with regard to theater. It inhabits you every day, right? It's like it's with me all day long, resorting to it throughout the day. Does that mean like in a literal sense, like you're carrying the script with you? In a literal sense, it's with me all day. It's with me every day. Yeah. And referring to it, thinking about it all day. It's a ghostly figure in a way. In the same way that Bernice is haunted and the family is haunted by Sutter. It's on you until you're not with it anymore and it takes time to release that too.

Oh, I can imagine because you all have rapped from this production a while ago. You've now done probably many more productions since then. Just a few. It does a few. our production since then, but it takes you a minute to let it come off you, to truly exit from the work. Especially in this experience. This is one of the most beautiful experiences I've ever had on set. What made it that way?

The family dynamic. The family dynamic starts with who's leading. Malcolm Washington is our director. He's also a co-writer with Virgil Williams, and that's obviously felt. There's a family experience that is already happening and that the Washingtons are at every facet from producer to director to actors.

And then that feeling just, it weaves into every other aspect of filmmaking. You know, Danielle, everyone who has ever worked with you, including director Malcolm Washington, he calls you a physical actor. And I was trying to figure out what that meant. I think I understand it in the context of theater. There's so much physicality there. And it's very evident in watching you in all of your work, like, you convey so much meaning with your eyes. But what does it mean for you when you hear that you're a physical actor? What does that mean? The whole body is to be utilized, right?

So the eyes are deeply physical too. I'm up on it, I'm up in it. It's coming out. I feel it very deeply. I want to lean in for all of it, not just in the scene, but when I'm engaging with my director. I'm trying to find the language in the body,

not just out of the tongue, off the tongue. Yeah, I'm a dancer first. That's my first medium since I was four or five. You started off as a dancer as a young girl. Yeah, and so, and then that's a natural segue into theater. It's like those two things were happening almost at the same time. Dance is a first language.

It's an immediate language. You don't have to, if somebody says hello in various languages, you may not know it. But if someone raises their hand, that's a gesture that signifies hello, right? You can infer certain things from the way people look at you. Like, the totality of the human body can be a part of choreography. It is defining of who and how a person is. And so taking all of that in, I mean, I talk with my hands.

I move my whole body to have an experience, to have a connection. And it might be within stillness, it might be slight, but that communicates something too. Stillness is still a particular kind of motion or non-motion. It's something. Silence articulates something as much as a whirlwind communicate something.

And so I'm just trying to speak in all those ways. Can you take me to that moment when you realized, when you decided, I need to act as a career because you were on the academic track. So you were a dancer as a young child, moved into theater. It was always something you did and loved to do, but you never really saw it as a career. You went to school, got two degrees, teaching elementary school, and then-

Three. Okay, three, yeah. And then teaching. Sorry, don't wanna leave out that third one. No, I'm laughing at myself. Yeah. You did three degrees? Why? Well, you did three degrees.

I mean, you're deep in academia at this point, teaching kids. Take me to that moment when you decided, I need to be in this world as a performer. Here's the thing. I mean, Atlanta is just this great place. And my mom, you know, my sister, my mom is creating, you know, opportunities for us to be in these spaces. I'm seeing my sister, my sister has desires to do all these different things. And so I'm, you know, as the younger kid, you get to be a part of these worlds, even though you may not necessarily be doing them. And so then you do begin to enact them as you get older. And you, it's just your life. It's just my life.

I didn't necessarily think that that was something that I needed to do. I just know that it's art is a part of my every day. The Atlanta art scene is just, it's your quotidian experience. I'm going to dance over here. I'm doing, my mom's one of her great, great friends is a visual artist who would do

the National Black Arts Festival every year. It's just so much happening. Theater is happening and dance is happening. And, and I don't know, I felt like I needed to secure something steadier. And this idea that academia was it, education, to do it on a collegiate level, to be an educator on the collegiate level was the driving goal. I always knew art would be, I was like, oh, art should be a part of it, right?

I should blend these two things. I remember writing a grant for that. As part of your teaching practice. As part of my practice, yeah. Because what were you teaching in elementary school? Well, in elementary, you're teaching everything, right? You're doing math, science, English, and all these things. And so the critical thing is, oh, I're doing math, science, English, and all these things. And so the

critical thing is, oh, I'm doing read-alouds. And read-alouds are performative. Or at least I made them performative. And they would be completely in it. The kids, yeah? Yeah, they would. And then I would like to do- What grade? Sorry, I've like really asked you so many- I did fourth and fifth grade. Fourth grade, The first year, fifth grade, the second year. And so, I mean, yeah, like everybody wants to be red too. It's such a beautiful thing.

And so I'm doing this and I'm like, oh, parts of me are, you know, there's an undulation of energy that's happening that's not at its fullness, but it's happening. And I'm like, oh, I remember that. What's this feeling? And I'm doing after school programs where, you know, after school is very much arts driven. And so I'm like, something is missing, something is missing, something is missing. Because all through grad school, or at least my first masters, I was doing a play a year, at least. And through, you know, when I was an undergrad, a play a year.

It didn't dominate the entirety of the experience, but it surely was present. And so to get to a point where I'm teaching and I'm like, oh, this is my adult, like super adult responsibility right now, and I'm not having the one a year thing at least. And I was like, something's driving. Oh, it's this, it's this. Oh, I need this. I need this fuller. I need this more every day.

I need this in all the ways. And I went to an audition and I leapt from there. You went to the audition, did you get the role? I sure did. I sure did. I sure did. I got Lady in Yellow for Jasmine Guy's directorial debut. For a colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enough. Is enough.

Did you quit right on the spot teaching or? Did I? I think that was, I think it was in the, that may have been the summer. I knew I wasn't going back. I knew I wasn't going back. I told my sister, I said, I need to do, I need to do more. And she's like, yeah. And I was like, yeah.

And so I didn't go back. I went to something else. Our guest today is actor Danielle Dedweiler. I'm Tonya Mosley, and this is Fresh Air. Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, offering over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else.

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My guest is Danielle Dedweiler. She stars in The Piano Lesson, a new film on Netflix. It's an adaptation of August Wilson's Broadway play, directed by Malcolm Washington. Dedweiler plays the character of Bernice, a widowed single mother in conflict with her brother, Boy Willie, over the family piano. Boy Willie wants to sell it to buy the land the family was once enslaved on, and Deadwiler's character Bernice wants to keep it. Deadwiler is known for her ability to take on historical narratives. In 2022, she starred in the biographical film Till as Mamie Till, an educator and activist who pursued justice after the murder of her 14-year-old son Emmett, and the Canadian post-apocalyptic thriller

40 Acres. Deadwiler has also performed in several shows and miniseries including Station Eleven and Watchmen. She got her start in theater performing the role of Lady in Yellow in the play for colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enough. Atlanta is such a, I mean, of course it's your hometown. It was where you were born, where you were raised, but it's also like you keep your feet firmly on the ground there. Even though, you know, you now, you're a bona fide award nominated actor, you could be in LA, you can be in New York, what keeps you grounded in your hometown? Family.

But you can move your family to LA. No, no I can't. I've got a rhythm that I'm connected to in that space. It's beyond just Atlanta. I'm very much connected to a certain natural land, a certain land experience, a certain history, and a certain quietude, all of those elements are necessary for me in this moment. And are they necessary for your work?

Yeah. I think they are. Yeah, yeah. Whatever I'm transitioning into. I need that recovery when I do the various kind of works I do. And I tend to travel to different places anyway. So it's almost like moving to another place just to do the thing that you're already doing, traveling incessantly to be in these spaces to do the work.

And so my own personal work, my personal performance art and visual artwork is about this place. It's about a Southern experience. And I need to be with this Southern experience in order to express those things. And it happens to connect to the television and film experience as well. I want to talk to you a little bit about the film Till. It was critically acclaimed, 2022 directed by Chinoya Chuku. You starred as Emmett Till's mother, Mamie Till Mobley. And just to remind folks Emmett was murdered in 1955 when he was 14 for allegedly flirting with a white woman

while visiting his family in Mississippi, Money, Mississippi. I want to play a clip from from this movie. So the movie starts with Emmett preparing for his train trip from his home of Chicago to Mississippi and Mamie, his mother, makes a point to give him some directives on how to be while he's down there. So in this scene, you're talking to him. Emmett is played by Jalen Hall on how to act while he's down south. Let's listen. All right, now you're going to miss your train. Bo, when you get down there.

Oh, not again, mama. I've already been to Mississippi. Only one time before, and you started a fight with another little boy. He was picking on me. You're in the right to stand up for yourself, but that's not what I'm talking about. Oh. They have a different set of rules for Negroes down there.

Are you listening? Yes. You have to be extra careful with white people. You can't risk looking at them the wrong way. I know. Oh. Be small down there. Like this?

That was my guest today, Danielle Dudwiler, along with actor Jalen Hall in the 2022 film Till. And in that moment that we just hear, when you tell him to make himself small, then he kind of does it like a joke. He's a 14 year old boy, like he squintes down and kind of makes fun of it. And there's so much power in that scene, in his performance, in the performance that you give, because it's everything that you're saying in between the words, the nervous way that you fuss with his tie, the way that you're trying to save his life, you know, casually saying these things, but you're trying

to backstop something that you know is a potential. And is it true that you, that for the audition you submitted a real self-tape using your own son as a stand-in for this very scene? Yeah, it's true. I had to do the tape, the self-tape, and I needed some help. And my son has done some work with me before. And I just employed him to give a girl another But it, it, it, it, it, it's such a tender scene. Because you think about legacy across all, you know, across these two works that we're talking about. We're talking about 1936 Pittsburgh and people

who have moved from Mississippi to Pittsburgh. And then we're talking about 1955 Chicago, where Emmett and, and Mamie lived and where they are in that scene and how their family moved from Mississippi to Chicago. And then I'm having an experience in my present time in the making of, in the buildup to the making of this scene with my son. And in that moment, it's just, it's light. In that moment, it's light.

You feel the weight and the buoyancy of it too. The children make it lighthearted. And to do it with my son is just, you know, it makes it that much more deep and real that the emotion comes from. Yeah. Even if it's not like a particular kind of sadness, grief, loss, blah, blah, blah, it's more, you know, what you fear, what you want to do to just keep them alive. In the same way Bernice is trying to keep Mar Marita alive in a certain way and pushing her upward. It's like just in that moment. She's just trying to keep him alive

You know what's remarkable with this film is that you? you all chose to show us the interior of Mamie and You know the thing about Emmett Hill story is that I think for so many Black Americans, like he's deeply embedded in our consciousness because we know that story as a cautionary tale, but we also just learn it as a piece of history. It sparked like what we knew as the civil rights movement. And how did you prepare to play her?

I know it's bigger than a cautionary tale. It's changed the way a generation of people move through the world. It changes the way mother's mother. You're literally rearing for survival. And everybody that I've talked to of a certain generation knows, oh, that could have been my cousin or that could have been me or I see myself, not just men, women as well. And so in preparing, I have that understanding. I have a history of working and learning under the Southern

Christian Leadership Conference. Did you go to that as a child? And can you talk a little bit about what that is? The Southern Christian Leadership Conference, SCLC, is an organization that was, you know, started by Dr. King and Joseph E. Lowry and others, for activism. My siblings and I, my sister first, of course, essentially interned in this space, learned so much about their work, did, you know, youth work with the organization. And then therein you learn about history, you learn about Atlanta's place, you learn about the South's place in activating, you know, fight for civil rights. And so that knowledge, that very personal knowledge is informing what I understand in bringing that artistic form to life, and is a driving force

for me as a person, you know. And the women who were integral, so many women, male leaders tend to be, you know, platformed. And yet, I was learning from a host of women in these spaces, mothers in these spaces. And so I take that, I take that very subconscious understanding of the experience, as well as the historical knowledge, as well as my own, as well as other unknowns and put them into the work. If you're just joining us, my guest is award-winning actor Danielle Deadweiler. We'll continue our conversation after a short break.

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Find out on the latest episode of NPR's All Songs Considered There's a lot of people who could sing that exact line and I would be like, you're under arrest. But she pulls it off. Download new episodes of All Songs Considered every Tuesday, wherever you get podcasts. This is Fresh Air and today my guest is actor Danielle Dedwiler. She stars in the new film, The Piano Lesson, an adaptation of August Wilson's Broadway play.

She's also appeared in the HBO Max dystopian series Station Eleven, Watchmen, the Netflix western The Harder They Fall, and the critically acclaimed film Till, where she portrayed Mamie, the mother of Emmett Till, whose brutal murder in the 50s became a flashpoint in the civil rights movement. One of the most powerful scenes in Till was watching your character Mamie see her son's mutilated body for the first time. And it's such an intimate scene,

because of course, Mamie sparked this new era of civil rights movement by deciding to have an open casket so we could see, so the world could see what was done to her son. And the intimacy though of being able to see it first with you, it was such a powerful scene. Can you take me to when you first saw this, it was a prosthetic, it was makeup, but the full result of that and seeing his body for the first time, even as an, you know, you're an actor, but as a person who had lived with this story all of your life? I didn't see it until we did the first take. So when I first saw it was when you first saw it.

I remember reading her detailing what that experience was like, kind of mapping of him and their history, starting at his feet and going to the top of his head. And I just, I followed her path, her kind of spiritual cartography of his being and recalling all of the things that she recalled. It's what you know, where you know scars from, where you know the DNA has really imprinted itself in this place, because it just looks just like, you know, like her or, and her also understanding or trying to understand where the violence was enacted on him at the same time, in these places of fondness of memory,

coupled with an unknown, with the unknown violence. So it's this duality of the experience. And how she said she needed to be a scientist of sorts, a doctor of sorts, and looking at his body and seeing what had happened to him. And not just seeing what had happened to him and not just seeing what had happened to him, but also seeing, remembering who he was. And so I traveled those lines with her and that was what was revealed in the scene. You take on historical characters so well and you shed some light on like that infusion of history that you learned as a young person growing up in the South. Like I can feel all of that in your work.

Do you have a soft spot for period pieces? Is this intentional work? Like will we see you take on everybody from reconstruction on? You will not. You will not. I have a soft spot for connecting dots. That's what I have a soft spot for. And I think you have to understand history in order to connect dots to how and why we activate our lives the way

we do presently. And so I have a plethora of other sci-fi or contemporary works that can go in tandem with these. But I just, these are just works that really spoke to me, right? And I have a soft spot for understanding Black womanhood and Black Southern womanhood in myriad disciplines and am continuing to explore that happily, you know, intensely in some of the works. And they tend to, they've come out in this film, in these two films at least. And I hope to do more. I think we have to encourage this understanding.

Are you taking on Otis Redding's story, his wife? Is that right? That is right. That is true. Otis and Zelma. When will that happen? Probably sometime next year. But yeah, you know.

I think it's a beautiful story about the women behind these monumental figures, these iconic figures and the love that they had between each other in such a short period considering he transitioned at such a young age, and yet left this massive imprint and she upheld that legacy. That's the connective tissue. These stories are about legacy. How do we hold them? How do we extend them? How do we connect them to others? It's like how do black women create a grand web? That's what my exploration is.

Danielle Deadweiler, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Danielle Deadweiler stars in the new Netflix film, The Piano Lesson. This is Fresh Air. Our book critic, Maureen Corrigan's picks for the best books of the year range from alternative history to suspense and satire to some of the most extraordinary letters ever written. Here's her list. Unprecedented surely was one of the most popular words of 2024. So it's fitting that

my best books list begins with an unprecedented occurrence. Two novels by authors who happen to be married to each other. James, by Percival Everett, reimagines Huckleberry Finn told from the point of view of Jim, Huck's enslaved companion on that immortal raft ride. Alternating mordant humor with horror, Everett makes readers understand that for Jim, here called James, the Mississippi may offer a temporary haven, but given the odds of him making it to freedom, the river will likely be a vast highway to a scary nowhere. Everett is married to Danzie Senna, whose novel Colored Television is a revelatory satire on race and class.

Senna's main character, Jane, is a mixed-race writer and college teacher struggling to finish her second novel. Desperate for money, Jane cons her way into a meeting with a Hollywood producer who's cooking up a biracial situation comedy. Disaster ensues. Senna's writing is droll and fearless. Listen to Jane's thoughts about teaching. One of the worst parts of teaching was how, like a series of mini strokes, it ruined you as a writer. A brain could handle only so many undergraduate stories about date rape and eating disorders, dead grandmothers, and mystical dogs. Two other novels invite readers to catch up with familiar characters.

Long Island is Colm Tobin's sequel to his 2009 bestseller, Brooklyn, whose main character, Eilish Lacey, is now trapped in a marriage and a neighborhood as stifling as the Irish town she fled. It's Tobin's omissions and restraint, the words he doesn't write, that make him such an astute chronicler of this working-class Catholic world. I've come to dread a new novel by Elizabeth Strout because I usually can't avoid putting it on my best-of-the-year list. Tell Me Everything reunites readers with writer Lucy Barton, lawyer Bob Burgess, and retired teacher Olive Kitteridge, all living in Maine.

Nobody nails the soft melancholy of the human condition like Strout, and that's a phrase she would never write because her style is so understated. Martyr is Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar's debut novel about a young man named Cyrus Shams struggling to make sense of the violent death of his mother and other martyrs, accidental or deliberate, throughout history. Akbar's tone is unexpectedly comic, his story antique, and his vision utterly original. Two literary novels on my best list are indebted to suspense fiction. Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake is an espionage thriller sealed tight in the plastic wrap of noir.

Her main character, a young woman, is a former FBI agent turned freelance spy who infiltrates a radical farming collective in France. You don't read Kushner for the relatability of her characters. Instead, it's her dead-on language, an orange threat alert atmosphere that draw readers in. In Cahokia Jazz, Francis Spufford summons up a femme fatale, crooked cops and politicians, and working class resentment as bitter as bathtub gin. He weds these hard-boiled elements to a story

about the actual vanished city of Cahokia, which before the arrival of Columbus was the largest urban center north of Mexico. Spufford's novel is set in an alternative America of 1922, where the peace of Cahokia's indigenous, white, and African-American populations is threatened by a grisly murder. One straightforward suspense novel sits on this list, Liz Moore's The God of the Woods. There's a touch of gothic excess about Moore's story, beginning with the premise that not one, but two children from the wealthy Van Laar family disappear from a camp in

the Adirondacks some 14 years apart. Moore's previous book, Long Bright River, was a superb novel about the opioid crisis in Philadelphia. The God of the Woods is something stranger and unforgettable. Nonfiction closes out this list. I've thought about A Wilder Shore, Camille Perry's biography of the bohemian marriage of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson ever since reading it this summer. In her introduction, Perry says something that's also haunted me. She describes her book as, an intimate window into how the Stevenson's lived and loved. A story that is, I hope, an inspiration for anyone seeking a freer, more unconventional life. That it is.

I began this list with the word unprecedented, and I'll end it with an unprecedented voice, that of Emily Dickinson. A monumental collection of the letters of Emily Dickinson was published this year. Edited by Dickinson scholars Chris Dan Miller and Donald Mitchell, it's the closest thing we'll probably ever have to an autobiography by the poet. Here's a thank you note Dickinson wrote in the 1860s to her beloved sister-in-law, Dear Sue, The supper was delicate and strange. I ate it with compunction as I would eat a vision. One thousand three hundred and four letters are collected here,

and still they're not enough. Happy holidays, happy reading. Maureen Porrigan is a professor of literature at Georgetown University. Find her list on our website, npr.org slash fresh air. ["Fresh Air"] To keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews, follow us on Instagram at NPR Fresh Air. Fresh Air's executive producer is Danny Miller.

Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Anne-Marie Baldonado, Sam Brigger, Lauren Krenzel, Teresa Madden, Monique Nazareth, Thea Challener, Susan Yacundi, and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly C.V. Nesper. Roberta Shorrock directs the show. With Terry Gross, I'm Tanya Mosley. Thank you.