Alice Hoffman in Conversation with Vailey Oehlke

The Archive Project

In this episode, we feature the celebrated novelist and screenwriter Alice Hoffman. She’s in conversation with the former Director of the Multnomah County Library, Vailey Oehlke, at the Portland Book Festival in 2016.

Hoffman has published over 40 books, including the 2024 novel about Anne Frank’s life, When We Flew Away. Most of her books have been novels, but shas also published short story collections, and books for young adults and children. Her work almost always contains a magical element, something she attributes to her childhood, in which she was a veracious reader of fairytales. Hoffman was at the Festival to discuss her book Faithful, which had just been published.

She is perhaps best known for her novel The Dovekeepers, which Toni Morrison called quote “a major contribution to 21st century literature.” It is considered by many to be Hoffman’s masterpiece.

“A book you love makes you feel like you are known.”

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Alice Hoffman is the New York Times bestselling author of Practical Magic, Here on Earth, and The Dovekeepers, which was praised by Toni Morrison as, “beautiful, harrowing, a major contribution to twenty-first century literature.” Hoffman has published over thirty novels, three books of short fiction, and eight books for children and young adults. Her work has been published in more than twenty translations and more than one hundred foreign editions. Hoffman’s novels have received mention as notable books of the year by The New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, The Los Angeles Times, Library Journal, and People Magazine. Her short fiction and non-fiction have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe Magazine, Kenyon Review, The Los Angeles Times, Architectural Digest, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and other magazines. Hoffman’s latest installment of the Once Upon a Time Bookshop Stories series titled The Bookstore Keepers is released February 2025.