Eva Langston and Holly Rizzuto Palker chat with Penny Zang, author of Doll Parts, about writing through grief, the “rights and wrongs” of motherhood, and finding inspiration in Sylvia Plath. For readers of The Virgin Suicides and I Have Some Questions For You, Doll Parts is a dual timeline suspense novel following one woman as she begins to uncover the truth of the death of her estranged best friend and the Sylvia Plath adoring sad girls they attended college with decades ago, all while holding a secret that will slowly unravel her new, suburban dream life.

Penny Zang is from Maryland and graduated with an MFA in Fiction from West Virginia University. Her work has appeared in the Potomac Review, Louisville Review, and South 85, among others. She is the 2024 Elizabeth Boatwright Coker fiction fellow via the South Carolina Academy of Authors. She lives in South Carolina, where she teaches English. Doll Parts (Sourcebooks Landmark) is her debut novel.

Author website: https://www.pennyzang.com/

Substack:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/pennyzang/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/PennyZangWriter/

X: https://x.com/Penny_Zang

Eva Langston and Amanda Fields chat with Ellen Wiles about her second novel, The Unexpected, published in November 2024 by HarperCollins. It follows two best friends, Robin and Kessie, who find themselves platonically coparenting a baby. It's a book about different species of love, including friendship and kinship, about motherhood and fertility, and about unconventional and queer families.

Ellen Wiles is a British novelist, sound artist, literary anthropologist, and Creative Writing professor at the University of Exeter, UK. She has previously worked as a barrister and as a musician. She is the author of two novels, The Unexpected (2024) and The Invisible Crowd (2017), and two non-fiction books, Live Literature (2021) and Saffron Shadows (2015). She also makes literary audio work engaging with nature and landscape, and is currently artist-in-residence at an environmental science center.

Author website: https://www.ellenwiles.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ellenwiles/#

BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/ellenwiles.bsky.social

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ellen-wiles-a8478951/?originalSubdomain=uk

Eva Langston and Amanda Fields chat with Emma Pattee, author of Tilt, about parsing capitalism and creative pursuits, powering large-scale climate activism, and questioning how to love something you know will die.

Emma Pattee is a climate journalist and fiction writer living in Portland, Oregon. She has written about climate change for The Atlantic, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, and her fiction has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, Idaho Review, Carve Magazine, and many more. Her debut novel, Tilt, was published by Simon & Schuster in March 2025.

Author website: https://www.emmapattee.com/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/emmapattee/?hl=en