Alice Hoffman
Today's episode is a conversation with the prolific, bestselling author Alice Hoffman, who joins us to talk about her engrossing new novel The World That We Knew. Hoffman is the author of more than thirty works of fiction, including The Rules of Magic, The Marriage of Opposites, Practical Magic, The Red Garden, and 1997's Here on Earth, which was an Oprah's Book Club selection, and she's written multiple works for young adults and children. In her novels Hoffman has drawn boldly on both historical fact and myth, folktale and legend, to create stories in which mystery and magic often suffuse an otherwise familiar world. For The World That We Knew, which follows a group of Jewish refugees struggling to survive and resist the unfolding terror of the Holocaust, Hoffman links ancient traditions of Jewish magic to the stories of hidden children she researched for her book. When she joined us in the studio, B&N's Bill Tipper asked her to talk about the alchemy of her storytelling, and how she was able to connect the traumas of the 1930s and 40s to tapestry of legends that spans centuries.