Anthony Doerr on NPR’s “All Things Considered”

An interview with faculty member Anthony Doerr, discussing his new novel All The Light We Cannot See, is featured on NPR’s “All Things Considered”:

On the very first source of inspiration for the novel

I was on a train heading into Penn Station from Princeton, N.J., and we started going underground. The man in front of me was on his cellphone call — this was in 2004 — and the call dropped. And he got kind of angry, a little embarrassingly angry, unreasonably angry.

And I just remember thinking, what he’s forgetting — really what we’re all forgetting all the time — is that this is a miracle. He’s using this little receiver and transmitter, this little radio in his pocket, to send messages at the speed of light rebounding between towers to somebody maybe thousands of miles away. He might have been talking to someone in Madagascar for all I knew. For me, that’s a miracle.

So … originally, the real central motivation for the book was to try and conjure up a time when hearing the voice of a stranger in your home was a miracle.

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Continue reading the interview highlights or listen to the full radio story online.