Podcasts by Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction

Naomi Klein : Doppelganger : Part Two from 2023-12-08T02:59:21

Today’s part two of the conversation with Naomi Klein about Doppelganger highlights the Jewish elements in the book, and looks at them through the lens of Palestine and Israel. We discuss Zionis...

Kate Zambreno&Sofia Samatar : Tone from 2023-12-01T14:11:46

In Kate Zambreno&Sofia Samatar’s Tone they construct a shared voice, that of the “Committee to Investigate the Atmosphere.” Yes, they do this to investigate tone, in the writings of everyone fro...

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore : Touching the Art from 2023-11-09T23:31:11

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore returns to Between the Covers to talk about her remarkable new book, Touching the Art. A mixture of memoir, biography, criticism, and social history, Touching the Art...

Bhanu Kapil : Incubation : A Space for Monsters from 2023-11-01T13:02:23

Bhanu Kapil’s postcolonial feminist road novel Incubation: A Space for Monsters has long been out of print. The book of hers that most engages with the mythos and reality of America, Incubation ...

Colleen Burner : Sister Golden Calf from 2023-10-23T03:07:55

Colleen Burner’s novella Sister Golden Calf is the story of two sisters on the road set in a world without men. Inspired, in part, by Vanessa Veselka’s essay “Green Screen: The Lack of Female Ro...

Kate Briggs : The Long Form from 2023-10-14T05:05:41

Essayist and translator Kate Briggs’ first novel The Long Form is a book about, and happening within, the relationship between Helen and her infant daughter, Rose. What does making a novel baby-...

Lydia Davis : Our Strangers from 2023-10-02T15:26:35

Today’s conversation with Lydia Davis about her latest story collection, Our Strangers, a collection of 143 stories, is a deep dive into storytelling. These stories, whether incredibly short or ...

Naomi Klein : Doppelganger : Part One from 2023-09-20T06:00:19

Naomi Klein’s new book, Doppelganger, is a departure for her. One some of her closest friends even cautioned her against. On the one hand, it is what we’ve come to expect from Klein, a brilliant...

Tin House Live : Matthew Zapruder on Story of a Poem from 2023-09-12T04:39:38

You could say that Matthew Zapruder’s Story of a Poem is about the revision of a poem, that it follows the life of one poem, from its first phrase to its final draft, and invites us, in the most...

Major Jackson : Razzle Dazzle from 2023-09-04T04:02:42

Poet and host of the The Slowdown podcast Major Jackson joins us to talk about Razzle Dazzle, his collection of new and selected poems that captures two decades in the life of a poet. Last year ...

JoAnna Novak : Contradiction Days from 2023-08-21T02:04:36

Five months pregnant, fearful of the future, and creatively blocked, JoAnna Novak becomes obsessed with the life, writings, and paintings of Agnes Martin. She fashions a three-week intensive wri...

Jorie Graham : To 2040 from 2023-08-09T05:46:41

Jorie Graham’s first appearance on the show in 2021, to discuss her collection Runaway, is one of the most relistened to episodes in the show’s history, a conversation that, with each revisitati...

Tin House Live : Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah on Surrealism from 2023-08-04T13:18:09

Today’s craft talk, “Why So Surrealism” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, was recorded at the 2022 Tin House Summer Workshop. Prompted by a journalist who asked him to talk about how surrealistic and...

Roger Reeves : Dark Days from 2023-07-26T23:54:51

Poet Roger Reeves calls the essays in his debut book of prose “fugitive essays.” And we explore what it means to write fugitively, to write into and from and toward fugitivity. If, as Fred Moten...

Isabella Hammad : Enter Ghost from 2023-07-08T14:16:54

Isabella Hammad’s latest book Enter Ghost is about a Palestinian theater group attempting to put on a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. The actors come from many different Palestinian exper...

Tin House Live : Max Porter on Shy from 2023-07-01T13:01:41

Even though each of Max Porter’s books is a stand-alone book, some have called Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Lanny, and his latest, Shy, a “trilogy of boyhood,” a framing Max himself embrace...

Megan Fernandes : I Do Everything I’m Told from 2023-06-20T04:43:02

Spareness, economy, and distillation are often put forth as obvious virtues in poetry. But what if there were a politics undergirding this aesthetic preference? In today’s conversation with poet...

Johanna Hedva : Your Love Is Not Good from 2023-06-10T05:17:01

What if you gave your fictional main character all of your own biographical details and family history but had them, at every point, choose “wrong”? At every point do the thing you yourself woul...

Tin House Live : Katie Holten on The Language of Trees from 2023-06-01T13:14:58

In Early Medieval Ireland there was a language called Ogham that was sometimes referred to as the “Celtic Tree Alphabet'” because its letters each corresponded to and depicted a different tree. ...

Tin House Live: Richard Powers on The Overstory from 2023-05-19T20:40:35

Back in 2019, when Richard Powers was a guest on Between the Covers for The Overstory, we also appeared together that very same night, in conversation again. This time, an onstage ticketed event...

Melanie Rae Thon : As If Fire Could Hide Us from 2023-05-10T05:04:15

Melanie Rae Thon’s latest book, As If Fire Could Hide Us, is described not as a novel with three chapters, nor as a collection of three stories, but as “a love song in three movements.” What doe...

Christina Sharpe : Ordinary Notes from 2023-05-01T13:02:48

There may be no writer, no thinker, who has shaped my conversations on the show more than Christina Sharpe. Whether her work is explicitly part of a conversation (in episodes with Ross Gay, Solm...

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o : The Language of Languages from 2023-04-11T21:53:12

Today’s guest, novelist, storyteller, essayist, playwright, scholar, translator, and perennial front-runner for the Nobel Prize in Literature Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, is an iconic figure in postcoloni...

Charif Shanahan : Trace Evidence from 2023-04-01T14:08:55

Early in poet Charif Shanahan’s latest collection, Trace Evidence, we encounter the lines: “I want to ​tell you what for me it has been like. // To speak at all / I must occupy a position // In ...

Sabrina Orah Mark : Happily from 2023-03-14T13:51:49

Today’s guest is poet, storyteller, and now essayist Sabrina Orah Mark. Her latest book, Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales, is an intriguing blend of two radically different forms, me...

Monica Youn : From From from 2023-03-03T05:36:38

In today’s conversation with poet Monica Youn we explore what it means to write from a poetics of difference rather than of authenticity, a poetics of deracination rather than identity. Youn’s l...

Jai Chakrabarti : A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness from 2023-02-20T05:14:40

Today’s conversation with novelist and story writer Jai Chakrabarti is unusually wide-ranging, touching on everything from classical Indian aesthetics to Jewish ritual, from poetry to cognitive ...

Mariana Enriquez : Our Share of Night from 2023-02-01T14:51:53

Today’s guest, Argentinian novelist, short story writer, and journalist Mariana Enriquez has been called the queen of Latin American gothic horror. She is in the vanguard of a generation of Lati...

Gabrielle Bates : Judas Goat from 2023-01-20T05:13:37

Today’s conversation is with poet, visual artist, editor, and podcast host Gabrielle Bates. The poems in Bates’ debut poetry collection Judas Goat feel both personal and mythic, violent and tend...

Georgi Gospodinov : Time Shelter from 2023-01-01T15:06:32

Today’s guest, Bulgarian novelist, storyteller, poet, essayist, and more, Georgi Gospodinov, is the perfect writer to bring in the new year. Gospodinov is a writer obsessed with beginnings and e...

Lucy Ives : Life Is Everywhere from 2022-12-22T19:41:37

Novelist, short story writer, poet, and critic Lucy Ives’ new novel Life Is Everywhere has been heralded by some of our most formally inventive and playful writers today, from Jesse Ball to Alej...

Crafting with Ursula: Neil Gaiman on Word Magic&The Power of Telling Stories from 2022-12-10T05:31:58

Who better to talk about the unique power of telling stories than one of our great contemporary storytellers, Neil Gaiman? One deep way Neil Gaiman and Ursula K. Le Guin are kindred spirits is h...

Sawako Nakayasu : Pink Waves from 2022-12-01T14:04:52

Of Sawako Nakayasu’s many literary endeavors—poetry, translation, performance art—it is hard to know where one begins and another ends. They each seem to not only be talking to each other but Sa...

Ama Codjoe : Bluest Nude from 2022-11-20T00:17:09

“On Seeing and Being Seen” is the title of an Ama Codjoe poem but it could just as easily be a description of her debut collection Bluest Nude as a whole. Bluest Nude is a book that engages with...

Crafting with Ursula : Gabrielle Bellot on The Power of Names&Naming from 2022-11-10T06:03:46

Writer and editor Gabrielle Bellot joins Crafting with Ursula to discuss the power of names and naming across Le Guin’s work. From the very beginning, with Ged in Earthsea, a boy-wizard who is n...

Hélène Cixous : Well-Kept Ruins from 2022-11-01T14:10:32

Today’s guest is poet, novelist, playwright, feminist theorist, literary critic, and philosopher Hélène Cixous. Perhaps best known for her iconic 1976 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous tho...

Billy-Ray Belcourt : A Minor Chorus from 2022-10-19T04:33:27

Poet Billy-Ray Belcourt has already transformed the memoir form, remaking it—strange, fresh, and new, in A History of My Brief Body. He does something similarly unexpected with his first novel, ...

Crafting with Ursula : Maria Dahvana Headley on Feminist Translation&Classical Retellings from 2022-10-10T23:33:08

One of Le Guin’s lesser known but lifelong practices was that of a translator. Her translations of the first Latin American Nobel Prize Laureate in literature (and the only Latin American woman ...

Dionne Brand : Nomenclature — New and Collected Poems from 2022-10-01T12:15:54

Today’s guest Dionne Brand, to borrow the words of John Keene, “is without question one of the major living poets in the English language.” Kamau Brathwaite called Brand “our first major exile f...

Elaine Castillo : How to Read Now from 2022-09-18T05:22:41

“White supremacy makes for terrible readers” says today’s guest Elaine Castillo, arguing that we are all overeducated in a set of fundamentally terrible reading techniques, ones that impoverish ...

Crafting with Ursula : Lidia Yuknavitch on The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction from 2022-09-08T13:48:55

Today’s conversation is about one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s most iconic and influential essays: The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, an essay that deserves an entire episode to itself. And who better...

Claire Schwartz : Civil Service from 2022-09-01T07:03:46

Claire Schwartz’ poetry collection Civil Service looks at the ways ordinary, everyday actions uphold and sustain state violence, the ways civility can and does serve extraordinary atrocities. Th...

Morgan Talty : Night of the Living Rez from 2022-08-20T06:14:58

Morgan Talty’s collection of linked short stories is set on the Penobscot Reservation on Indian Island in Maine. But Morgan is quick to point out that these stories are not Penobscot stories in ...

Crafting with Ursula : Julie Phillips on the Writing Mother from 2022-08-10T05:50:27

Ursula K. Le Guin’s biographer, Julie Phillips, joins “Crafting with Ursula” to talk about the writing mother, how Le Guin’s embrace of both writing and motherhood influenced her engagement with...

Daniel Mendelsohn : Three Rings — A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate from 2022-08-01T14:30:28

Daniel Mendelsohn’s latest book you could say is about digression and about ring composition, a form of storytelling with digression at its heart. And yet this book, about digression, is not onl...

Vauhini Vara : The Immortal King Rao from 2022-07-20T06:03:17

The Immortal King Rao is somehow three narratives in one, a historical novel set within a Dalit community in 1950s India, a near-future tech dystopia on the islands of the Puget Sound near Seatt...

Crafting with Ursula : William Alexander on Writing for Children from 2022-07-10T05:58:34

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by them,” says Ursula K. Le Guin. “From within.” This is just one of many quotes that arise from Le Guin’s high regard for the child rea...

Hernan Diaz : Trust from 2022-07-01T07:02:42

Hernan Diaz’s debut novel In the Distance went on to become not only one of the great debuts of the year, but a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and the PEN/Faulkner award. His follow-...

Rae Armantrout : Finalists from 2022-06-19T14:34:42

The first time Rae Armantrout came on the show, in 2017, we looked at her poetry through the lens of her interest in quantum physics. Now, five years later, with the release of this double colle...

Crafting with Ursula : Kim Stanley Robinson on Ambiguous Utopias from 2022-06-10T05:59:33

Today’s guest, Kim Stanley Robinson, is perhaps the living writer most associated with utopian literature today. And as a student of the philosopher, political theorist, and literary critic Fred...

Courtney Maum — The Year of the Horses from 2022-06-01T13:30:33

Courtney Maum’s latest book, her memoir The Year of the Horses, is about a writer at a rough point in her writing career, in her marriage, as a mother, as a woman, finding a way back to herself ...

Ada Limón : The Hurting Kind from 2022-05-20T04:58:49

Today’s guest Ada Limón discusses her latest collection of poetry, The Hurting Kind, whose poems ask and explore what it means to be a human animal among animals, and how language can be a means...

Crafting with Ursula : adrienne maree brown on Social Justice&Science Fiction from 2022-05-10T05:33:41

Today’s conversation with adrienne maree brown begins with the notion that all organizing is science fiction, and thus that social justice and science fiction are intricately linked imaginative ...

Cristina Rivera Garza : New and Selected Stories from 2022-05-01T12:56:06

Cristina Rivera Garza returns to the show to discuss her New and Selected Stories, which gathers together fiction across thirty years of her writing life. Some are stories translated into Englis...

Caren Beilin : Revenge of the Scapegoat from 2022-04-20T04:54:36

Today’s guest, Caren Beilin, talks about her latest novel Revenge of the Scapegoat. All four of her books—two nonfiction, two fiction—each stand alone but they each also share recognizable peopl...

Crafting with Ursula : Karen Joy Fowler on Experimental Women, Animals, Science&Story from 2022-04-10T05:33:32

Today’s guest on Crafting with Ursula, the award-winning writer of science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction Karen Joy Fowler, was a longstanding friend of Ursula K. Le Guin. And they bot...

Sheila Heti : Pure Colour from 2022-04-01T14:18:09

Sheila Heti returns to Between the Covers to discuss her latest unclassifiable novel Pure Colour. When something happens in your life that upends everything you thought you knew, that changes wh...

Alejandro Zambra : Chilean Poet from 2022-03-20T13:39:49

Today’s guest is Chilean novelist, essayist, literary critic, and poet Alejandro Zambra, talking about his latest novel Chilean Poet, a novel brimming over with, yes, Chilean poets and poems, bu...

Crafting with Ursula : Isaac Yuen on Writing Nature&Nature Writing from 2022-03-10T06:18:16

Today’s “Crafting with Ursula,” a conversation with nature writer Isaac Yuen, explores Le Guin’s writing of the nonhuman other in her fiction. Why might we consider decentering the human within ...

Solmaz Sharif : Customs from 2022-03-01T14:35:12

It’s been five years since Solmaz Sharif’s first appearance on Between the Covers, for her National Book Award–finalist debut collection Look. Since then, many listeners have pointed to this con...

Gabrielle Civil : the déjà vu from 2022-02-22T05:43:23

Writer and performance artist Gabrielle Civil talks about her latest book the déjà vu: black dreams&black time, as well as her chapbook ( ghost gestures ), chosen by Bhanu Kapil for the Gold Lin...

Crafting with Ursula : Molly Gloss on Writing the Clear, Clean Line from 2022-02-10T15:24:25

Today’s guest on the second episode of Crafting with Ursula, Molly Gloss, the acclaimed writer of both award-winning science fiction and fantasy as well as feminist Westerns, has a particular in...

James Hannaham : Pilot Impostor from 2022-02-01T15:39:16

Writer, critic, performer,&visual artist James Hannaham talks about his latest and most uncategorizable book Pilot Impostor. This book slips between the borders of prose and poetry, fiction and ...

Rabih Alameddine : The Wrong End of the Telescope from 2022-01-20T07:36:15

Rabih Alameddine talks about his new novel The Wrong End of the Telescope, which is set on the island of Lesbos amidst the medical personnel and tourist-volunteers involved with helping the arri...

Crafting with Ursula : Becky Chambers on Creating Aliens&Alien Cultures from 2022-01-10T13:20:56

Today’s guest, Becky Chambers, discusses her own work, and her own considerations when imagining alien cultures and the beings that inhabit them. She does this in light of Le Guin’s novel The Le...

Victoria Chang : Dear Memory from 2022-01-01T12:48:25

Poet Victoria Chang talks about her latest and most uncategorizable book Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. A book composed largely of essay-like letters, Dear Memory also cont...

Valerie Mejer Caso : Edinburgh Notebook from 2021-12-13T03:24:09

Today’s guest, Mexican poet, painter, and translator Valerie Mejer Caso talks about her latest book, the bilingual publication of poetry, collage, and photography Edinburgh Notebook, translated ...

Raymond Antrobus : All The Names Given&The Perseverance from 2021-12-01T11:46:32

British poet, educator, and writer Raymond Antrobus has two poetry collections out this year. The US release of his award-winning debut The Perseverance and his follow-up, just out now, All The ...

Tice Cin : Keeping the House from 2021-11-11T06:51:07

Tice Cin’s debut novel Keeping the House is set within the Turkish Cypriot community of North London. But while it is also set within the heroin trade there, this book is not a crime novel, or i...

Rosmarie Waldrop : The Nick of Time from 2021-11-01T07:01:26

Today’s guest, poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop, is best known for her prose poetry and for good reason. Waldrop is one of the great prose poetry practitioners and innovators over the course...

Percival Everett : The Trees from 2021-10-18T05:31:32

Today’s guest, Percival Everett, author of twenty-one novels, four short story collections, six collections of poetry and a children’s book, has also been a horse and mule trainer, a jazz guitar...

Myriam J. A. Chancy : What Storm, What Thunder from 2021-10-05T05:00:33

Haitian-Canadian-American writer Myriam Chancy is an acclaimed novelist but she is also a literary scholar who studies, among other things, storytelling. As a scholar instrumental in inauguratin...

Tin House Live : Negotiating the Love and Renouncing the Rest with Destiny O. Birdsong and Donika Kelly from 2021-09-20T05:04:21

“Negotiating the Love and Renouncing the Rest,” today’s Tin House Live conversation between poets Destiny O. Birdsong&Donika Kelly, was recorded at the 2021 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. Am...

Pádraig Ó Tuama : In the Shelter&Borders and Belonging from 2021-09-10T05:37:44

Irish theologian, storyteller, poet, conflict mediator, and host of the podcast Poetry Unbound Pádraig Ó Tuama joins David to discuss the role of both narrative storytelling and poetry in relati...

Adania Shibli : Minor Detail from 2021-09-01T13:25:21

The latest book by Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli, Minor Detail, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Shib...

Tin House Live : Writing On Your Own Terms with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore from 2021-08-19T14:43:39

Originally delivered at the 2021 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s electrifying talk “Writing On Your Own Terms” explores what it means to write against the canoni...

Kaveh Akbar : Pilgrim Bell from 2021-08-10T00:45:49

Today’s guest, poet Kaveh Akbar, discusses his latest poetry collection Pilgrim Bell. Given that Akbar once suggested that syntax was identity, how do the changes in Akbar’s own poetry, from his...

Callum Angus : A Natural History of Transition from 2021-08-01T15:53:53

Callum Angus’s A Natural History of Transition is described as a collection of short stories “that disrupts the notion that trans people can only have one transformation.” Angus talks about tran...

Douglas Kearney : Sho from 2021-07-12T04:56:31

Today’s episode with poet Douglas Kearney is about his latest book of poetry, Sho, and the poetry-performance album (with Haitian sound artist Val Jeanty) Fodder. Throughout Kearney’s career he ...

Arthur Sze : The Glass Constellation : New&Collected Poems from 2021-07-01T06:21:11

Arthur Sze, winner of the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry for Sight Lines, joins David Naimon to discuss his latest book, The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems. Together they step ...

Anakana Schofield : Bina from 2021-06-16T05:03:49

Today’s guest, Irish Canadian writer Anakana Schofield, joins us to talk about her latest novel, Bina, winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Bina was also shortlisted for the 2020 G...

Doireann Ní Ghríofa : A Ghost in the Throat&To Star the Dark from 2021-06-01T12:44:28

Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa joins us to talk about her latest poetry collection, To Star the Dark, and her prose debut, A Ghost in the Throat, a debut that has captured the imaginations (and ...

Abdellah Taïa : A Country For Dying from 2021-05-10T23:44:41

Today’s guest, Moroccan writer and filmmaker Abdellah Taïa discusses his most recent novel A Country For Dying translated by Emma Ramadan and winner of the 2021 PEN Translation Award. We talk ab...

Elissa Washuta : White Magic from 2021-05-01T13:38:53

Today’s episode of Between the Covers is with writer Elissa Washuta about White Magic, her new memoir in essays just out from Tin House. Elissa Washuta’s body of work, and White Magic is no exce...

Rikki Ducornet : Trafik from 2021-04-18T05:04:04

Writer, poet, and painter Rikki Ducornet returns to Between the Covers to discuss her latest novel Trafik which is her first foray into science fiction. Ducornet’s body of work—surrealist, alche...

Jorie Graham : Runaway from 2021-04-01T14:03:57

Today’s guest is poet Jorie Graham. We speak about her fifteenth book of poetry, Runaway. This latest book, along with the three that precede it—Sea Change, Place, and Fast—confronts our acceler...

Brandon Hobson : The Removed from 2021-03-16T14:08:25

Today’s Between the Covers conversation with Brandon Hobson is about his novel The Removed, his first book since his National Book Award finalist, Where the Dead Sit Talking. The Removed places ...

Viet Thanh Nguyen : The Committed from 2021-03-02T14:48:31

Today’s guest, Viet Thanh Nguyen, returns to Between the Covers after six years to discuss The Committed, his much-anticipated follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Sympathizer. The ...

Ross Gay : Be Holding from 2021-02-16T19:39:11

Today’s Between the Covers conversation is with the poet Ross Gay about Be Holding, his book-length poem that emerges from a sustained meditation on a mere few seconds of the basketball career o...

Teju Cole : Fernweh from 2021-02-01T14:47

Today’s guest is writer, photographer, critic, and curator Teju Cole. In this extended conversation, we use Cole’s latest photo book Fernweh as a lens through which to look at his entire career,...

Nnedi Okorafor : Remote Control from 2021-01-19T06:00:36

Today’s episode is with one of today’s great writers of science fiction and fantasy, Nnedi Okorafor. Using her new novella Remote Control (Tor Books) as a lens and a frame, we discuss the differ...

Vanessa Veselka : The Great Offshore Grounds from 2021-01-01T17:08:25

Vanessa Veselka returns to Between the Covers, eight years after her first appearance, to discuss her new novel The Great Offshore Grounds. Longlisted for this year’s National Book Award in Fict...

Tin House Live : Publishing, Power Structures&Creative Practice with Leni Zumas&Janice Lee from 2020-12-23T17:58:18

This Tin House Live conversation between Leni Zumas and Janice Lee, “Publishing, Power Structures, and Creative Practice,” was recorded at the summer 2020 Tin House Writers Workshop. Leni Zumas ...

Natalie Diaz : Postcolonial Love Poem : Part Two from 2020-12-10T06:22:23

Today’s episode of Between the Covers is a first for the show, a return to and extension of a recent episode with Natalie Diaz.  Today’s ‘part two’ does not entirely depend upon part one, but it...

Alice Oswald : Nobody from 2020-12-01T10:49:44

Today’s episode of Between the Covers is a conversation with poet and classicist Alice Oswald. Widely considered one of our great living poets, Oswald is the 46th professor of poetry at the Univ...

Tin House Live : Writing Pop Culture with Shayla Lawson&Hanif Abdurraqib from 2020-11-25T15:27:34

Join poet-essayists Hanif Abdurraqib&Shayla Lawson for an extended conversation on writing pop culture (and so much more).  This conversation was recorded at the 2020 Tin House Writers Workshop....

Elisa Gabbert : The Unreality of Memory from 2020-11-14T19:56:31

“Amid impending disasters too vast even to be perceived, what can we do―cognitively, morally, and practically? Gabbert, a tenacious researcher and a ruthless self-examiner, probes this ultimate ...

Ayad Akhtar : Homeland Elegies from 2020-11-01T12:23:10

“An urgent, intimate hybrid of memoir and fiction, Homeland Elegies lays bare the broken heart of our American dream turned reality TV nightmare. The book . . . brilliantly captures how we got t...

Natalie Diaz : Postcolonial Love Poem : Part One from 2020-10-23T00:25:16

Today’s conversation is with poet Natalie Diaz, author of the National Book Award shortlisted collection Postcolonial Love Poem.  We talk today about questions of postcoloniality, about love and...

Tin House Live : Getting Past the Gatekeepers with Mira Jacob&Kaitlyn Greenidge from 2020-10-14T15:43:09

In “Getting Past the Gatekeepers: How to Keep Writing in an Industry that Excludes Us,” Kaitlyn Greenidge and Mira Jacob discuss their combined 30+ years of experience navigating literary publis...

Jenny Erpenbeck : Not a Novel : A Memoir in Pieces from 2020-10-02T09:34:37

“This collection of essays, memoirs and critical pieces forms an intellectual biography of Europe’s most history-obsessed writer. Beginning with her childhood in East Berlin in the early ’60s an...

Mary-Kim Arnold : The Fish&The Dove from 2020-09-23T01:16:46

“In The Fish&The Dove, Mary-Kim Arnold’s lyrical scope sweeps across intersecting terrains, moving through time to capture the history of occupation and legacy war in Korea, through the delicate...

Tin House Live : Queer Beatitudes with Brandon Taylor&Garth Greenwell from 2020-09-12T13:43:11

A conversation between Brandon Taylor&Garth Greenwell about queer aesthetics, “problematic art,” representation, and much more.

The postListen

Jeannie Vanasco : Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl from 2020-09-03T15:25:48

“It’s hard to overstate the importance of this gorgeous, harrowing, heartbreaking book, which tackles sexual violence and its aftermath while also articulating the singular pain of knowing—or lo...

Tin House Live : Bassey Ikpi&Melissa Febos on the Anatomy of Melancholy from 2020-08-27T16:00:12

“Anatomy of Melancholy” is a conversation between Melissa Febos&Bassey Ikpi at the 2020 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop.  Febos&Ikpi talk about making narrative (and aesthetic) sense out of th...

Lauren Camp : Took House from 2020-08-20T21:42:36

“In Lauren Camp’s Took House we are enveloped in a poetry both precise and mysterious, intimate and sublime. Reading through these poems, I was reminded of the tenet that poetry is not like the ...

Joe Sacco : Paying the Land from 2020-08-01T13:15:05

“Sacco is a talent entirely unto himself, applying an exquisitely fine eye for detail to the urgent histories that define the world around us. . . . Now, Sacco brings that eye to the lives of th...

Lidia Yuknavitch : Verge from 2020-07-20T12:37:38

“Verge is a bouquet of dynamite: explosive, deadly, and spectacularly beautiful. These stories captivated me like modern fairy tales, and like those dark lessons they showed me how resilience is...

Tin House Live : Lacy M. Johnson On Likability from 2020-07-08T15:59:43

Today’s talk, “On Likability” by Lacy M. Johnson, was given at the 2018 Tin House Writers Workshop. It later became an essay, one selected by Rebecca Solnit for The Best American Essays 2019. Listen

Philip Metres : Shrapnel Maps from 2020-07-01T13:05:52

“Shrapnel Maps is so beautiful. Half dream, half nightmare, all real. Filled with the remnants of what people hope for and what they are willing to do, and everything that remains afterwards. It...

Tin House Live : Lidia Yuknavitch on “Writing from the Deep Cut” from 2020-06-17T12:15:10

Lidia Yuknavitch gave this craft talk, “Writing from the Deep Cut,” at the 2018 Tin House Writers Workshop. As Lidia says: “We are (always) living in tumultuous times. The despair and trauma fra...

N.K. Jemisin : The City We Became from 2020-06-11T11:47:57

“The City We Became is a wonderfully inventive love letter to New York City that spans the multiverse. A big middle finger to Lovecraft with a lot of heart, creativity, smarts and humor. A timel...

Nikky Finney : Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry from 2020-06-01T12:35:11

“Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a 21st-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life.” —Lit Hub “Her poems elide the generati...

Tin House Live : Rebecca Makkai on The Ear of the Story from 2020-05-25T12:56:37

Given at the 2019 Tin House Summer Workshop, Rebecca Makkai’s craft talk “You Talkin’ to Me?: The ‘Ear’ of the Story” looks at an important but underappreciated aspect of story craft, the flip s...

Fernanda Melchor : Hurricane Season from 2020-05-18T12:35:50

“Fernanda Melchor is part of a wave of real writing, a multi-tongue, variform, generationless, decadeless, ageless wave, that American contemporary literature must ignore if it is to hold on to ...

Hanif Abdurraqib : A Fortune For Your Disaster from 2020-05-08T13:51:44

“A Fortune for Your Disaster proves that, if you pay attention, Black people have defined and still define themselves for themselves amid roses and dandelions, cardinals and violets, the blues o...

Tin House Live : How to Write a Hoax Poem with Kevin Young from 2020-05-01T13:15:52

The New Yorker poetry editor and host of The New Yorker poetry podcast, Kevin Young, delivered this talk, “How to Write a Hoax Poem,” at the 2014 Tin House Writers Workshop. He discusses some of...

Rachel Zucker : SoundMachine from 2020-04-24T11:49:53

“Whether speaking about motherhood, grief, or poetry, Zucker’s unrelenting eye and wittily critical voice peel back these experiences to reveal insights that are both deeply human and uncompromi...

Tin House Live : Power&Audience, On Not Writing for White People with Ingrid Rojas Contreras from 2020-04-15T13:56:27

Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ talk “Power&Audience: On Not Writing for White People” was given at the 2019 Tin House Summer Workshop in Portland, Oregon. In this talk she references a 2019 Publishing ...

Tin House Live : On Dialogue with Dorothy Allison from 2020-04-08T13:30:17

Dorothy Allison treated the participants of the 2011 Summer Workshop to a spirited discussion of how characters should speak on the page. Not only “he said, she said, none of them said a thing,”...

Mark Haber : Reinhardt’s Garden from 2020-04-01T14:10:17

“Reinhardt’s Garden is one of those perfect books that looks small and exotic and melancholic from the outside but, once in, is immense and exultant in the best possible way. Think Amulet by Rob...

Jenny Offill : Weather from 2020-03-11T12:15:10

“Novelists don’t need to dream the end of the world anymore—they need to wake up to it. Jenny Offill is one of today’s few essential voices, because she writes about essential things, in sentenc...

Lance Olsen : My Red Heaven from 2020-03-02T15:52

“Lance Olsen locates his porous, alluring, heartbreaking, and haunted narrative in Berlin on a day in 1927. Poised at a moment of such hope and doom, it is a ravishing meditation on history, on ...

Tin House Live :“From First Draft to Plot”with Alexander Chee from 2020-02-21T15:07:55

Alexander Chee delivered this craft lecture, from “First Draft to Plot,” at the 2016 Tin House Summer Workshop. Chee is the author most recently of the essay collection How to Write an Autobiogr...

Garth Greenwell : Cleanness from 2020-02-14T15:02:01

“Garth Greenwell, whose first book is a masterpiece, amazingly has written a second book that is also a masterpiece. The great enterprise that Joyce and Lawrence began—to write with utter litera...

Carmen Maria Machado : In the Dream House from 2020-02-03T15:03:37

“In the Dream House . . . confronts the issues of credibility, self-doubt, and disbelief that all too frequently arise when survivors of domestic abuse speak out. But the work also stands as an ...

Tin House Live : Jericho Brown on Suicide&Joy from 2020-01-24T15:04:06

Jericho Brown gave these two talks, on suicide, and on joy, at the 2016 Tin House Summer Workshop in Portland, Oregon.  His latest poetry collection The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press) was a fin...

E. J. Koh : The Magical Language of Others from 2020-01-13T15:01:45

“In The Magical Language of Others, E. J. Koh writes of the boundary between anonymity and naming, between absence and abandonment, between cruelty and safety for four generations of mothers and...

Karthika Naïr : Until the Lions : Echoes from the Mahabharata from 2020-01-06T15:01:52

“In this retelling of the Mahabharata from the point of view of its hitherto minor female characters, Karthika Naïr uncovers a seminal feminist text. Until the Lions makes dazzling use of concre...

CAConrad : Resurrect Extinct Vibration from 2019-12-16T14:23:42

“CAConrad always argues (from the inside of their poems) for a poetry of radical inclusivity while keeping a very queer shoulder to the wheel. Their kind of queerness strikes me as nonpolarizing...

Daniel José Older : The Book of Lost Saints from 2019-12-01T15:33:38

“Older’s spellbinding novel is a fever dream full of magic and loss, wickedness and grace, faith and love, spirit and power.” —Marlon James;  “A lyrical, beautiful, devastating, literally haunti...

Jake Skeets : Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers from 2019-11-20T15:36:59

“Jake Skeets takes us to ‘The Indian Capital of the World,’ a landscape of erosion and erasure, where ‘boys only hold boys / like bottles’ and eros is a dangerous thing. In the brush and horsewe...

Tin House Live :‘Writing Towards Joy’Panel with Kelly Link, Garth Greenwell, Justin Torres from 2019-11-12T14:59:39

Recorded on the final day of the 2019 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, the panel “On Writing Towards Joy” ended the week on a high note.  Moderated by Tin House Assistant Books Editor Elizabet...

Richard Powers : The Overstory from 2019-11-01T14:34:38

“This book is beyond special. Richard Powers manages to turn trees into vivid and engaging characters, something that indigenous people have done for eons but that modern literature has rarely i...

Zadie Smith : Grand Union from 2019-10-21T17:35:35

“Grand Union is an unusual creature, combining all the experimental exuberance of a writer discovering a form with the technical prowess of one at the height of her abilities. The result is exhi...

Tin House Live : Readings by Garth Greenwell, Michelle Tea, Kaveh Akbar from 2019-10-16T14:07:13

Recorded at the 2019 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, today’s episode is a medley of readings from three different nights. Garth Greenwell reads from his up...

Rob Schlegel : In the Tree Where the Double Sex Sleeps from 2019-10-02T14:03:15

“Rob Schlegel has a voice you’d follow into the dark woods, knowing full well it’s hard, awful, daily, plain, living truth you’re running toward. The speaker in this book is a heartbreaker of a ...

Tin House Live : Revision Panel with R.O. Kwon, Karen Shepard, Danielle Evans, Jamel Brinkley from 2019-09-25T14:17:49

“Finding the Life of the Story: Vision&Revision” was recorded at the 2019 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. Panelists Karen Shepard, Danielle Evans, R.O. Kwon and Jamel Brinkley talk strategies...

Xuan Juliana Wang : Home Remedies from 2019-09-18T14:02:41

“Filled with characters who mirror the chaos and anxiety, exhilaration and despair, desire and fear of the world around them, Home Remedies offers searing portraits of millennial Chinese immigra...

Ayşe Papatya Bucak : The Trojan War Museum from 2019-09-04T14:10:18

“These are stories that reflect the author’s Turkish heritage and a curiosity about our human search for meaning as profound as it is lyrical. The stories are music. They beguile and illuminate ...

Brandon Shimoda : The Grave on the Wall from 2019-08-15T13:59:08

“If someone asked me what a poet’s history might look and read like, I would say Brandon Shimoda’s The Grave on the Wall. It is part dream, part memory, part forgetting, part identity. It is a r...

Elvia Wilk : Oval from 2019-08-01T15:48:42

“J. G. Ballard meets William Gibson meets Jeff VanderMeer. Oval is an up-to-the-minute story about the twilight zones of corporate design, aesthetics, pharmacy, and bioengineering, where there’s...

Max Porter : Lanny from 2019-07-15T17:39:38

“In Lanny Max Porter has expanded on his innovative hybrid mode while remaining faithful to our species-wide tradition of storytelling through myth, magic, and parable, but also through the harr...

Ted Chiang : Exhalation from 2019-07-01T17:41:15

“Ted Chiang has no contemporary peers when it comes to the short story form. His name deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Carver, Poe, Borges, and Kafka. Every story is a universe. Ev...

Miriam Toews : Women Talking from 2019-06-12T00:37:05

“An astonishment, a volcano of a novel with slowly and furiously mounting pressures of anguish and love and rage. No other book I’ve read in the past year has spoken so lucidly about our current...

Sophia Shalmiyev : Mother Winter from 2019-06-03T13:57:38

“Shalmiyev stubbornly, brilliantly pursues loss in this psycho-geography of immigration, grief displacement, and damage. A mother herself, Shalmiyev’s narrator channels the ghosts of Dorothy Ric...

Morgan Parker : Magical Negro from 2019-05-14T13:56:24

“Morgan Parker’s latest collection, Magical Negro, is a riveting testimony to everyday blackness. . . . It is wry and atmospheric, an epic work of aural pleasures and personifications that deman...

Cristina Rivera Garza : The Taiga Syndrome from 2019-04-30T19:56:58

“If The Taiga Syndrome is a book of illness, it’s also about exile, disappearance, borders, love, language and translation, desire, capitalism and its discontents, fairy tales, and what it means...

Lacy M. Johnson : The Reckonings from 2019-04-15T14:00:43

“Through prose that is at once passionate and percussive, Lacy Johnson’s The Reckonings demands that we place justice and discovery at the center of our conversations, memories, imaginations, an...

Christine Schutt : Pure Hollywood from 2019-04-01T14:02:52

“Nobody writes like Schutt . . . and her latest collection is the perfect entry point for readers new to her work . . . In each of the collection’s 11 stories, Schutt gives readers dissipated wo...

Mitchell S. Jackson : Survival Math from 2019-03-18T14:00:12

“A vibrant memoir of race, violence, family, and manhood . . . Jackson recognizes there is too much for one conventional form, and his various storytelling methods imbue the book with an unpredi...

Marlon James : Black Leopard, Red Wolf from 2019-03-04T15:00:15

“Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the kind of novel I never realized I was missing until I read it. A dangerous, hallucinatory, ancient Africa, which becomes a fantasy world as well-realized as anythi...

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore : Sketchtasy from 2019-02-12T08:00

“Sycamore paints an unsparing and unsentimental portrait of survival in a homophobic era, and her writing is beyond beautiful. Sketchtasy is a powerful firecracker of a novel; it’s not just one ...

Alicia Jo Rabins : Fruit Geode from 2019-02-01T08:00

“How does a body do what it does: make love, mistakes, create life, exist after life; how does a body evolve, celebrate, regret, reconsider its big and small moments: these are the passionate co...

Genevieve Hudson : Pretend We Live Here from 2019-01-13T08:00

“A terrific collection of stories. There are echoes here of Flannery O’Connor, Barry Hannah, and Denis Johnson, but Genevieve Hudson is her own writer—impressively and gloriously so. Her eye for...

Jeffrey Yang : Hey Marfa from 2019-01-02T08:00

“Yang rebuilds for the reader a town that is notable for its many stark contrasts: restored&ruined buildings, wealth&poverty, international art&border enforcement. Hey, Marfa makes a remarkable ...

Chaya Bhuvaneswar : White Dancing Elephants from 2018-12-17T08:00

“Bhuvaneswar is unflinching about the lives of those for whom identity is a constant battle&the act of being is an unavoidable challenge, but she doesn’t ignore the beauty in their strength . . ...

Layli Long Soldier : Whereas from 2018-12-02T08:00

“Long Soldier reminds readers of their physical and linguistic bodies as they are returned to language through their mouths and eyes and tongues across the fields of her poems.”—Natalie Diaz for...

Diane Williams: The Collected Stories of Diane Williams from 2018-11-14T08:00

“Williams’s short precise,&emphatic sentences build a strange society whose denizens are not quite familiar to us¬ quite comfortable with their own quietly disturbing evolutions. Not a single...

R.O. Kwon : The Incendiaries from 2018-11-01T07:00

“Every explosive requires a fuse. That’s R. O. Kwon’s novel, a straight, slow-burning fuse. To read her novel is to follow an inexorable flame coming closer&closer to the object it will detonate...

Tommy Pico : Junk from 2018-10-14T07:00

“Reading Tommy Pico’s Junk I kept thinking of Heather McHugh’s pronouncement that the main discipline of poetry is “to keep finding life strange.” Pico is the master of making the stone stony, o...

Dubravka Ugrešić : Fox&American Fictionary from 2018-10-01T07:00

Dubravka Ugrešić is considered one of Europe’s most distinctive novelists and essayists.  She is the 2016 winner of Neustadt International Prize for Literature for her body of work, joining lite...

Anna Moschovakis : Eleanor or The Rejection of the Progress of Love from 2018-09-24T07:00

“Anna Moschovakis takes the reader straight to the terrifying edge: that moment where one ages out of youthfulness&begins to flutter in the debris of middle living, flattened out by technology, ...

Dao Strom : You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else from 2018-08-22T07:00

In Dao Strom’s collection of poetic fragments, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, translated by Ly Thuy Nguyen as Mình sẽ luôn là người nọ đến từ nơi nọ, the fragments are wholly fi...

Catherine Lacey : Certain American States from 2018-08-07T07:00

“Lacey captures with eerie precision the strangeness of being a person in the world, living alongside other human beings with unknowable thoughts and feelings . . . Reading Lacey’s fiction feels...

Forrest Gander : Be With from 2018-07-19T07:00

“Forrest Gander’s life partner, the poet C.D. Wright, died suddenly a little more than two years ago, and this book is one result or record of the aftermath of that loss. In poems that are utter...

Chelsea Hodson : Tonight I’m Someone Else from 2018-07-06T07:00

“Hodson’s essays have such a sexy drama to them—and ultimately it’s the romance of just getting through life; the passion that comes from being a wholly alert woman and living to tell about it. ...

Molly Crabapple : Brothers of the Gun–A Memoir of the Syrian War from 2018-06-12T07:00

“From the anarchy, torment, and despair of the Syrian war, Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple have drawn a book of startling emotional power and intellectual depth. Many books will be written on ...

Sheila Heti : Motherhood from 2018-06-01T07:00

“This book is going to change how we think about life and women forever; like ancient Greek philosopher level of describing reality in a way that creates it. So, go or don’t go, read the book or...

Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi : Call Me Zebra from 2018-05-15T07:00

“Not many authors are compared to Borges, Cervantes, and Kathy Acker all in one breath, but that is exactly what we’re dealing with here: Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is a twisted, twisty genius...

Jen Bervin : Silk Poems from 2018-05-01T07:00

“Jen Bervin’s work—all of it—engages the eye, the hand, the ear, and the mind. Her artistry is vast and inclusive, by finesse and intelligence, by curiosity, forbearance, and vision. She knows t...

Cheston Knapp : Up Up Down Down from 2018-04-10T07:00

“Cheston Knapp’s Up Up, Down Down has the uncanny, welcome ability to make so-called mainstream or dominant culture—white, masculinist, Christian, frat boy,&so on—appear newly strange,&newly ope...

John Keene : Counternarratives, Playland, and Grind from 2018-04-01T07:00

“In Counternarratives, John Keene undertakes a kind of literary counterarchaeology, a series of fictions that challenge our notion of what constitutes ‘real’ or ‘accurate’ history. His writing i...

Vi Khi Nao : Umbilical Hospital&A Brief Alphabet of Torture from 2018-03-11T08:00

“These pieces are elaborate piecework—perforated, whip stitched, and distressed field-dressed dissections of language. Tortured? Maybe. But lusciously junked&juxtaposed, turned inside out&every ...

Micheline Aharonian Marcom : The Brick House from 2018-03-01T08:00

Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s The Brick House is a place where people dream of love and loneliness, of the world’s beauty, and of ongoing environmental degradation. Travelers confront their lives...

Terese Marie Mailhot : Heart Berries from 2018-02-13T08:00

“Heart Berries by Terese Mailhot is an astounding memoir in essays. Here is a wound. Here is need, naked and unapologetic. Here is a mountain woman, towering in words great and small . . . What ...

Carmen Maria Machado : Her Body and Other Parties from 2018-02-01T08:00

“Cross-pollinating fairy tales, horror movies, TV shows,&a terrific sense of humor, Machado’s work reminds me at different times of such wildly divergent figures as David Lynch, Jane Campion, Ma...

Eunsong Kim : Gospel of Regicide from 2018-01-14T08:00

“In Gospel of Regicide, Eunsong Kim develops a thrilling method for unwriting lyric even as she reimagines it, creating a socially engaged poetry of&for our time. Anticapitalist, feminist&anti-r...

Leni Zumas : Red Clocks from 2018-01-05T08:00

“Leni Zumas here proves she can do almost anything. Her tale feels part Melvillian, part Lydia Davis, part Octavia Butler—but really Zumas’s vision is entirely her own. Red Clocks is funny, mord...

David Biespiel : The Education of a Young Poet from 2017-12-01T08:00

“Biespiel’s supple memoir of becoming a poet will surely inspire other writers to embrace the bodily character of writing&feel the power&, sometimes, the emptiness of the act of writing poetry.”...

Rae Armantrout : Partly–New&Selected Poems from 2017-11-01T07:00

“For nearly 40 years Armantrout has made a poetics of not finding the right words–of finding, in fact, the ‘wrong’ ones . . . Armantrout restores the strangeness of experiences we take for grant...

Eileen Myles : Afterglow from 2017-10-19T07:00

“What is a dog if not god? In Afterglow, Eileen Myles steps up to the challenge for writers to function as prophets. Ghostwritten in part by deceased pit bull Rosie, this ‘dog memoir’ explores—a...

Celeste Ng : Little Fires Everywhere from 2017-10-05T07:00

“I read Little Fires Everywhere in a single, breathless sitting. With brilliance and beauty, Celeste Ng dissects a microcosm of American society just when we need to see it beneath the microscop...

Peter Rock : Spells from 2017-09-21T07:00

“Spells is a fascinating hybrid text, not simply illustrated by a collection of photographs but created in response to them, a collaboration between Peter Rock and five photographers. The result...

Safiya Sinclair : Cannibal from 2017-09-10T07:00

“Sinclair crafts her stunning debut collection around the beauty&brutality of the word cannibal, whose origins derive from Columbus’s belief that the Carib people consumed human flesh. Attacking...

Matthew Zapruder : Why Poetry from 2017-08-21T07:00

In Why Poetry,  award-winning poet, translator, and editor, Matthew Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. Anchored ...

Yanara Friedland : Uncountry from 2017-08-07T07:00

“As a descendent of Chantal Akerman and Unica Zürn—among others—Yanara Friedland reimagines the origin myth. Friedland’s permeable pages allow the reader entryway into a ‘mirror [that] becomes a...

Mary Ruefle : My Private Property from 2017-07-22T07:00

“Mary Ruefle’s careful, measured sentences sound as if they were written by a thousand-year-old person who is still genuinely curious about the world . . . She combines imagistic techniques from...

Yuri Herrera : Kingdom Cons from 2017-07-11T07:00

In the court of the King, everyone knows their place. But as the Artist wins hearts&egos with his ballads, uncomfortable truths emerge that shake the Kingdom to its core. Part surreal fable&part...

Gregory Pardlo : Digest from 2017-06-26T07:00

“[Gregory Pardlo] explores what is American, what is African American, what is the Other, what is city, what is suburban, what is personal&what is persona. Digest offers a changing, rich landsca...

Dani Shapiro : Hourglass from 2017-06-07T07:00

What are the forces that shape our most elemental bonds? How do we make lifelong commitments in the face of identities that are continuously shifting, and commit ourselves when the self is so of...

Jeff Vandermeer : Borne from 2017-05-23T07:00

“Here is the story about biotech that VanderMeer wants to tell, a vision of the nonhuman not as one fixed thing, one fixed destiny, but as either peaceful or catastrophic, by our side or out on ...

Thalia Field : Experimental Animals from 2017-05-02T07:00

“Thalia Field has now composed what very well might be her life’s work—a tragic, comical,&utterly fascinating tale of a marriage that vividly encapsulates not only the origins of experimental me...

Sallie Tisdale : Violation from 2017-04-19T07:00

“That Sallie Tisdale’s a treasure comes as no secret to lovers of the essay, and yet this happy gathering that spans the decades is revelatory, a fascinating look at the epic wanderings of a lif...

Morgan Parker : There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé from 2017-03-29T07:00

Morgan Parker uses political&pop-cultural references as a framework to explore 21st century black American womanhood&its complexities: performance, depression, isolation, exoticism, racism, femi...

Melissa Febos : Abandon Me from 2017-03-15T07:00

“Abandon Me is, in many ways, a story about how a woman’s body&the body of literature hold memory. In other ways, Abandon Me is a story about stories. Febos weaves familial stories, feminist sto...

Ursula K. Le Guin : Words Are My Matter from 2017-02-14T08:00

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society&its obsessive technologies to other way...

Susan DeFreitas : Hot Season from 2017-01-18T08:00

An outlaw activist on the run. A pipeline set to destroy a river. And 3 young women who must decide who to love, who to trust,&what to sacrifice for the greater good. Based in part on real event...

Solmaz Sharif : Look from 2017-01-04T08:00

In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards,&sequences, Sharif assembles fragmented narratives in the aftermath of war. Those repercussions echo in the present day, the grief for those kille...

Sofia Samatar : The Winged Histories from 2016-12-13T08:00

“If you love stories but distrust them, if you love language&can also see how it is used as a tool or a weapon in the maintenance of status quo, then read The Winged Histories.”—Marion Deeds, Fa...

Tyehimba Jess : Olio from 2016-11-16T08:00

“This 21st century hymnal of black evolutionary poetry, this almanac, this theatrical melange of miraculous meta-memory. Tyehimba Jess is inventive, prophetic, wondrous. He writes unflinchingly ...

Eliot Weinberger : The Ghosts of Birds from 2016-11-02T07:00

A new collection from “one of the world’s great essayists” (The New York Times), The Ghosts of Birds offers 35 new essays by Eliot Weinberger.  He chronicles a 19th century journey down the Colo...

Pauls Toutonghi : Dog Gone from 2016-10-27T07:00

“You can’t write about dogs without writing about people. They chose long ago to be our good company in the adventure of being alive, and ever since they’ve served as our mirrors, our teachers, ...

Monica Drake : The Folly of Loving Life from 2016-09-28T07:00

Following her acclaimed novels Clown Girl and The Stud Book, Monica Drake presents her long-awaited first collection of stories. “What can I say about Monica Drake’s stories? They are brilliant,...

Alexis Smith : Marrow Island from 2016-09-14T07:00

“A faltering journalist returns to an island abandoned after an earthquake released a toxic spill. That’s the beautifully wrought setting of this novel, which reunites two childhood friends, one...

Jesse Ball : How to Set a Fire and Why from 2016-08-17T07:00

Jesse Ball’s blistering novel tells the story of a teenage girl who has lost everything—and will burn anything. Lucia’s father is dead, her mother in a mental hospital, and now she’s been kicked...

Rikki Ducornet : Brightfellow from 2016-07-20T07:00

A feral boy comes of age on a campus decadent with starched sheets, sweating cocktails,&homemade jams. Stub is the cause of that missing sweater, the pie that disappeared off the cooling rack. T...

Lina Meruane : Seeing Red from 2016-06-30T07:00

This powerful autobiographical novel describes a young Chilean writer recently relocated to New York for doctoral work who suffers a stroke, leaving her blind&increasingly dependent on those clo...

Rob Spillman : All Tomorrow’s Parties from 2016-06-15T07:00

“Truly exceptional memoirs have to do something more than recount a good origin story: they have to test the author’s youthful understanding of the world, and break down that world, even as it’s...

Brian Blanchfield : Proxies from 2016-05-18T07:00

“Into what some are calling a new golden age of creative nonfiction lands Brian Blanchfield’s Proxies, which singlehandedly raises the bar for what’s possible in the field. This is a momentous w...

Idra Novey : Ways to Disappear from 2016-05-04T07:00

“Idra Novey, an acclaimed poet&translator of Spanish&Portuguese literature, has written a debut novel that’s a fast-paced, beguilingly playful, noirish literary mystery with a translator at its ...

Ursula K. Le Guin : Late in the Day from 2016-04-20T07:00

Late in the Day, Ursula K. Le Guin’s new collection of poems (2010–2014) seeks meaning in an ever-connected world, giving voice to objects that may not speak a human language but communicate wit...

Brian Evenson : A Collapse of Horses from 2016-03-30T07:00

A stuffed bear’s heart beats with the rhythm of a dead baby; Reno keeps receding to the east no matter how far you drive; and in a mine on another planet, the dust won’t stop seeping in. In thes...

Laila Lalami : The Moor’s Account from 2016-03-16T07:00

In this stunning work of historical fiction, Laila Lalami brings us the imagined memoirs of the 1st black explorer of America, a Moroccan slave whose testimony was left out of the official recor...

Lacy M. Johnson : The Other Side from 2016-02-17T08:00

“[Lacy M. Johnson’s] powerfully moving and brilliantly structured memoir, The Other Side, asks, ‘How is it possible to reclaim the body after devastating violence?’ Her intense desire and demand...

Keith Lee Morris : Travelers Rest from 2016-01-20T08:00

“It won’t take long—a page, maybe two—before you feel wondrously disquieted by Keith Lee Morris’s Travelers Rest. The novel traps its characters in the town of Good Night, Idaho, and the reader ...

Mary Gaitskill : The Mare from 2015-12-16T08:00

From the author of the National Book Award-nominated Veronica: Mary Gaitskill’s The Mare—the story of a Dominican girl, the white woman who introduces her to riding, and the horse who changes ev...

Valeria Luiselli : The Story of My Teeth from 2015-11-19T08:00

Written in collaboration with the workers at a Jumex juice factory, The Story of My Teeth is a witty, exhilarating romp through the industrial suburbs of Mexico City and Luiselli’s own literary ...

Amelia Gray : Gutshot from 2015-10-28T07:00

NPR calls Gutshot “a book brimming with blood, sexual deviance, mucus and madness.” The New York Times says “reading Gutshot is a little like being blindfolded and pelted from all sides with fir...

Ursula K. Le Guin : Steering The Craft from 2015-10-01T07:00

Ursula K. Le Guin believes we cannot restructure society without restructuring the English language, and thus her book on the craft of writing inevitably engages class, gender, race, capitalism,...

Liz Prato : Baby’s On Fire from 2015-09-23T07:00

“Liz Prato’s stories are filled with the lost, the lonely, and the damned, and she makes all of them sing with a haunting grandeur. Baby’s on Fire is a lamentation brimming with wit, candor, and...

David Biespiel : A Long High Whistle from 2015-08-19T07:00

Library Journal calls David Biespiel’s A Long High Whistle one of the best books about reading poetry you will ever find. Biespiel is a poet, editor, essayist, critic, and teacher, and also the ...

Rebecca Makkai : Music For Wartime from 2015-08-05T07:00

Rebecca Makkai, whose stories have appeared in four consecutive editions of The Best American Short Stories, discusses her much-anticipated story collection Music for Wartime. A reality show pro...

Maggie Nelson : The Argonauts from 2015-07-29T07:00

An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family. Maggie Nelson binds her personal experience, the story of her relationship with the fluidly-gende...

Lidia Yuknavitch : The Small Backs of Children from 2015-07-15T07:00

In a war-torn village in Eastern Europe, an American photographer captures a heart-stopping image: a young girl flying toward the lens, fleeing a fiery explosion that has engulfed her home and f...

Mary Ruefle : An Incarnation of the Now from 2015-06-03T07:00

Beloved and critically-acclaimed poet, essayist, and erasure artist, Mary Ruefle talks about her life as an artist, her approach to poetry, the questions she comes back to, and the artists that ...

Neal Stephenson : Seveneves from 2015-05-20T07:00

A catastrophic event renders the Earth a ticking time bomb. In a feverish race against the inevitable, nations around the globe band together to devise an ambitious plan to ensure the survival o...

Viet Thanh Nguyen : The Sympathizer from 2015-04-29T07:00

It is April 1975 and Saigon is in chaos. At his villa, a general of the South Vietnamese army is drinking whiskey and, with the help of his trusted captain, drawing up a list of those who will b...

Sarah Manguso : Ongoingness from 2015-04-02T07:00

In Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso confronts a meticulous diary that she has kept for 25 years. “I wanted to end each day with a record of everything that had ever happened,” she explains. But this s...

Kelly Link : Get in Trouble from 2015-03-04T08:00

Kelly Link has been hailed by Michael Chabon as “the most darkly playful voice in American fiction” and by Neil Gaiman as “a national treasure.” Link has won an ardent following for her ability,...

Sarah Gerard : Binary Star from 2015-02-25T08:00

The language of the stars is the language of the body. Like a star, the anorexic burns fuel that isn’t replenished; she is held together by her own gravity. With luminous, lyrical prose, Binary ...

Miranda July : The First Bad Man from 2015-01-28T08:00

Here is Cheryl, a tightly-wound, vulnerable woman who lives alone, with a perpetual lump in her throat. She is haunted by a baby boy she met when she was six, who sometimes recurs as other peopl...

Leslie Jamison : The Empathy Exams from 2014-12-18T08:00

Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison’s visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about o...

Claudia Rankine : Citizen from 2014-11-13T08:00

Claudia Rankine, chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, speaks about her much-awaited follow-up to her groundbreaking work Don’t Let Me Be Lonely. A provocative meditation on race (and sho...

William Gibson : The Peripheral from 2014-11-05T08:00

Where Flynne and her brother, Burton, live, jobs outside the drug business are rare. Fortunately, Burton has his veteran’s benefits, for the neural damage he suffered from implants during his ti...

David Mitchell : The Bone Clocks from 2014-10-01T07:00

“No one, clearly, has ever told Mitchell that the novel is dead. He writes with a furious intensity and slapped-awake vitality, with a delight in language and all the rabbit holes of experience ...

Ben Parzybok : Sherwood Nation from 2014-09-10T07:00

In drought-stricken Portland, Oregon, a Robin Hood-esque water thief is caught on camera redistributing an illegal truckload of water to those in need. Nicknamed Maid Marian—real name: Renee, a ...

Karen Russell : Sleep Donation from 2014-08-13T07:00

A crisis has swept America. Hundreds of thousands have lost the ability to sleep. Enter the Slumber Corps, an organization that urges healthy dreamers to donate sleep to an insomniac. Under the ...

Dinaw Mengestu : All Our Names from 2014-07-30T07:00

All Our Names is the story of two young men who come of age during an African revolution, drawn from the safe confines of the university campus into the intensifying clamor of the streets outsid...

Jo Walton : My Real Children from 2014-06-25T07:00

It’s 2015 and Patricia Cowan is very old. “Confused today,” read the notes clipped to the end of her bed. She forgets things she should know—what year it is, major events in the lives of her chi...

Roxane Gay : An Untamed State from 2014-06-11T07:00

An Untamed State is a novel of privilege in the face of crushing poverty, and of the lawless anger that corrupt governments produce. It is the story of a willful woman attempting to find her way...

Leni Zumas&Luca Dipierro : A Wooden Leg from 2014-05-28T07:00

There is a long, if lesser known, history of fictions (and fictive illustrations) that invite reader participation, where the reader co-creates the story with the authors. These stories often ut...

Lorrie Moore : Bark from 2014-04-23T07:00

Harper’s Magazine may have said it best when describing today’s guest, Lorrie Moore: “Fifty years from now, it may well turn out that the work of very few American writers has as much to say abo...

Kyle Minor : Praying Drunk from 2014-04-09T07:00

The characters in Praying Drunk speak in tongues, torture their classmates, fall in love, hunt for immortality, abandon their children, keep machetes beneath passenger seats, and collect porcela...

Helen Oyeyemi : Boy, Snow, Bird from 2014-03-27T07:00

In the winter of 1953, Boy Novak arrives by chance in a small town in Massachusetts, looking, she believes, for beauty—the opposite of the life she’s left behind in New York. She marries a local...

Gina Frangello: A Life In Men from 2014-03-12T07:00

The friendship between Mary and Nix has endured since childhood, a seemingly unbreakable bond, until the mid-1980s, when the two young women reunite for a summer vacation in Greece. It’s a trip ...

Chang-rae Lee : On Such A Full Sea from 2014-02-20T08:00

“The most striking dystopian novels sound an alarm, focus our attention and even change the language. The Handmaid’s Tale crystallized our fears about reproductive control; Fahrenheit 451 still ...

Gary Shteyngart : Little Failure from 2014-01-23T08:00

“Gary Shteyngart has written a memoir for the ages. I spat laughter on the first page and closed the last with wet eyes. Unputdownable in the day and a half I spent reading it, Little Failure is...

Veronica Gonzalez Peña : The Sad Passions from 2013-12-19T08:00

Told by six women in one family, Veronica Gonzalez Peña’s The Sad Passions captures the alertness, beauty, and terror of childhood lived in proximity to madness. Set against the backdrop of a co...

Kevin Sampsell : This Is Between Us from 2013-11-21T08:00

There may be no author more integral to the Portland literary scene than Kevin Sampsell. Kevin is not only the small press curator and events coordinator at Powell’s books, but he’s also the edi...

Lucy Corin : One Hundred Apocalypses from 2013-10-31T07:00

We seem to be in the midst of an upsurge in dystopian art and end times anxieties. If we as a culture don’t have a sense of impending doom, we do at least have trouble imagining the future being...

Jonathan Lethem : Dissident Gardens from 2013-10-02T07:00

Jonathan Lethem is a man of many lives. For one, because of his repeated return to New York as both setting and muse in novels such as Motherless Brooklyn, Fortress of Solitude, and Chronic City...

Robert Boswell : Tumbledown from 2013-09-19T07:00

“When most of us think of today’s great American novel, we think of Franzen’s Freedom or Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad—sprawling stories that comment on contemporary society as we live it. ...

Jami Attenberg : The Middlesteins from 2013-08-08T07:00

For more than thirty years, Edie and Richard Middlestein shared a solid family life together in the suburbs of Chicago. But now things are splintering apart for one reason: Edie’s enormous girth...

Matt Bell : In the House Upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods from 2013-07-10T07:00

Matt Bell’s novel is so unlike anything else you’ll read this year that people are struggling to describe just what it is. The Washington Post says it’s like a magical realist story chanted by d...

NoViolet Bulawayo : We Need New Names from 2013-06-27T07:00

Born and raised in Zimbabwe, NoViolet Bulawayo earned her MFA at Cornell University where she was the recipient of the Truman Capote fellowship. In 2011 she won the biggest literary prize in Afr...

Lenore Zion : Stupid Children from 2013-05-30T07:00

Host David Naimon talks with Lenore Zion about her debut novel Stupid Children, a book Thomas Michael Duncan of Necessary Fiction calls “a bildungsroman of twisted proportions told with startlin...

Benjamin Percy : Red Moon from 2013-05-15T07:00

They live among us.
 They are your neighbor, your mother, your lover.
 They change.  Every teenage girl thinks she’s different. When government agents kick down Claire Forrester’s front door and...

Karen Russell : Vampires in the Lemon Grove from 2013-04-24T07:00

Karen Russell is one of today’s most celebrated and vital writers—honored in the New Yorker’s list of the twenty best writers under the age of forty, Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, a...

Monica Drake : The Stud Book from 2013-04-18T07:00

In the hip haven of Portland, Oregon, a pack of unsteady but loyal friends asks what it means to bring babies into an already crowded world. A smart, edgy and poignantly funny exploration of the...

Sam Lipsyte : The Fun Parts from 2013-03-14T07:00

A hilarious collection of stories from the writer the New York Times called “the novelist of his generation.” Returning to the form in which he began, Sam Lipsyte, author of the New York Times b...

George Saunders : Tenth of December from 2013-02-14T08:00

“George Saunders Has Written the Best Book You’ll Read All Year,” declared the cover of the New York Times Magazine several weeks ago. Since then, the world has rushed to agree that Saunders’ ne...

Chris Kraus : Summer of Hate from 2012-11-30T08:00

Writer, filmmaker and art critic Chris Kraus talks with host David Naimon about her latest book, Summer of Hate. Her other books include the novels I Love Dick, hailed by Rick Moody as one of th...

Alexis Smith : Glaciers from 2012-11-15T08:00

Portland author Alexis Smith talks with host David Naimon about Glaciers, her debut novel from Tin House books. Glaciers follows Isabel through a day in her life, in which work with damaged book...

Jess Walter : Beautiful Ruins from 2012-10-25T07:00

Host David Naimon talks with Jess Walter about his sixth novel, Beautiful Ruins, a deeply human rollercoaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives. Walter is also the author...

Junot Diaz : This Is How You Lose Her from 2012-09-27T07:00

Host David Naimon speaks with Junot Diaz, who the New Yorker calls one of the top 20 writers for the 21st century. He’s the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of ...

Sheila Heti : How Should A Person Be? from 2012-08-31T07:00

Is How Should a Person Be? a novel, a memoir, a self-help manual, or a book of philosophy? It is all of these things and more.  Host David Naimon talks with Sheila Heti about her new book, which...

Karen Thompson Walker : The Age of Miracles from 2012-07-14T07:00

On a seemingly ordinary Saturday in a California suburb, Julia and her family awake to discover, along with the rest of the world, that the rotation of the earth has suddenly begun to slow. The ...

Vanessa Veselka : Zazen from 2012-06-22T07:00

A war has either started or is about to; bombs are going off in the city, but people seem strangely disengaged. Della’s activist friends seem more concerned about the next sex party or the finer...

Adam Levin : Hot Pink from 2012-06-14T07:00

Adam Levin’s debut novel, The Instructions, published by McSweeney’s in 2010, arrived with a lot of buzz. An inventive, experimental book of over 1000 pages, its protagonist was Gurion ben-Judah...

Jon Raymond : Rain Dragon from 2012-05-24T07:00

Host David Naimon talks with Portland author, Jon Raymond, about his new novel Rain Dragon.  Raymond is the author of the novel The Half-Life, and the short story collection Livability, which wo...

Nathan Englander : What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank from 2012-03-14T07:00

Englander burst on the literary scene in 1999 with For The Relief of Unbearable Urges, a story collection that earned him the PEN/Faulkner Malamud Award and the American Academy of Arts and Lett...

Ben Marcus : The Flame Alphabet from 2012-03-01T08:00

What if the words your children spoke to you actually made you sick? Physically sick. And what if the children themselves relished in this newfound power over their parents? This is the setting ...

Colson Whitehead : Zone One from 2011-12-29T08:00

Host David Naimon speaks with award-winning writer Colson Whitehead about his new novel Zone One, described as a “wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel.” The world has been devastated by...

Justin Torres : We The Animals from 2011-11-03T07:00

Host David Naimon interviews debut novelist Justin Torres. His book, We the Animals, has been heralded for its beautiful, concentrated prose. NPR likened it to a diamond, brilliant and brilliant...

China Miéville : Embassytown from 2011-07-21T07:00

Science fiction and fantasy writer China Miéville has won nearly every award in the genre and has caught the attention of mainstream publications from the New York Times to the Guardian with the...

Scott Sparling : Wire to Wire from 2011-06-30T07:00

Host David Naimon interviews Portland writer Scott Sparling about his debut novel, Wire to Wire, from Tin House Books.  A pick of the week by Publisher’s Weekly, they call Wire to Wire, “well-cr...

Anthony Doerr : Memory Wall from 2011-01-13T08:00

Host David Naimon speaks with writer Anthony Doerr about his latest book, Memory Wall. Doerr is the author of three other books: The Shell Collector, About Grace, and Four Seasons in Rome. Doerr...

Nicole Krauss : Great House from 2010-12-14T08:00

Host David Naimon speaks with Nicole Krauss about her newest novel Great House, which tells a story haunted by questions: What do we pass on to our children? How do they absorb our dreams and lo...