Our guest on today's episode is the novelist Erin Morgenstern, who joins us to talk about her new novel The Starless Sea. Every now and again a writer comes along with a story that seems to want to resist classification — a book that slips between the subjects and genres we tend to slot our fiction into, and there's no better example than Erin Morgenstern's best-selling 2011 debut The Night Circus, in which a deadly contest between two magicians is played out between their talented proteges, who fall in love despite their mentors schemes. Dreamlike, yet firmly grounded in its characters, heartbreaking yet funny, and manifestly unique, The Night Circus defied any classification other than addictive. It's no surprise that readers were eager to learn what its author would choose for her next act, and with The Starless Sea we finally get to return to a world created Morgenstern's thrilling imagination. She joined B&N's Miwa Messer by phone to talk about her new story, in which a strange volume leads a student into a labyrinth of discovery.