Tom Perrotta on Fresh Air

Tom Perrotta, who visits the Tuesday after Thanksgiving, 11/29, spoke to Terry Gross on NPR's "Fresh Air" in August about his new novel, The Leftovers....

"I spent a lot of time thinking about contemporary Christianity, and obviously the rapture kept coming up," he says. "My first impulse was ... to laugh it off — it's sort of a funny idea, people just floating away. But I kept thinking: What if it did happen? ... I thought, I'm such a skeptic that even if it did happen, I would resist the implications of it, and I also thought that three years later, everyone would have forgotten about it. No matter what horrible thing happens in the world, the culture seems to move on." More.