This week’s podcast continues our three month-long discussion of King Lear with a slight detour and an interview with Jean Hegland, the author of the Lear-influenced and -infused novel, Still Time. Plus, a new contest!

Windfalls can be the unexpected gifts that opportunity and good luck occasionally shake down upon us from the sky. Windfalls are also those fruits loosed from the tree, their ripeness untasted, that fall heavy from the limb and rot by the trunk. In Healdsburg-area author Jean Hegland’s new novel, Windfalls (Atria Books; $25), both the great deep surprise of good luck and the terrible waste of letting that which is ripe go wasted are closely observed.

One of the year’s most fascinating science fiction novels has nary a starship or extraterrestrial in any of its 193 pages. Instead, novelist Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest (Calyx, 1996) takes as its subjects Nell and Eva, two intelligent teenage girls trying to survive in an isolated house in the heart of a redwood forest, while outside society gradually falls apart and reverts to chaos. Nell and Eva’s priorities aren’t to seek out new life forms and new civilizations; they’re to figure out how to grow their own food, keep healthy, and defend themselves in a world suddenly gone low-tech and savage.