Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry
Between The Covers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with writers of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Hosted by David Naimon and produced by Milkweed Editions, the show explores the craft and process of writing, as well as the themes and ideas behind the authors' works. Each episode offers a thoughtful and engaging dialogue that delves into the literary world.
Episodes
From the Archives : Morgan Parker : Magical Negro
Today’s conversation with poet Morgan Parker was recorded in-person in 2019 and was Morgan’s second appearance on the show. Both conversations with Morgan are unforgettable, so don’t miss her first appearance in 2017 after you enjoy today’s episode about Magical Negro. Later that same year Magical Negro won the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. Danez Smith, anot
Claudia Rankine : Triage
Claudia Rankine first appeared on Between the Covers in 2014 to discuss Citizen: An American Lyric. Our first encounter back then was before January 6th or October 7th, before Trump 1.0 or Trump 2.0, before the public murder of George Floyd or the live-streamed genocide, before the fall of Roe v Wade or the massive worldwide fires felling our forests each summer. Not only do we account for the tim
Valeria Luiselli : Beginning Middle End
We welcome back Valeria Luiselli—who first appeared on the show eleven years ago—to discuss her new and truly marvelous novel Beginning Middle End. Much like the shapeshifting god Proteus, who figures prominently in this story, Beginning Middle End is many things at once: a road novel, a family drama, a work of climate fiction, a feminist retelling of classical mythology, a novel about writing, ab
From the Archives : Cristina Rivera Garza : The Taiga Syndrome & The Iliac Crest
Today’s archival conversation, recorded in 2019, is Cristina Rivera Garza’s first unforgettable appearance on the show. We discuss two works of fiction by her, The Taiga Syndrome and The Iliac Crest. Poet Daniel Borzutsky says of the first, “If The Taiga Syndrome is a book of illness, it’s also about exile, disappearance, borders, love, language and translation, desire, capitalism and
Eleni Sikelianos : Memory Rehearsal
Today’s guest is writer, poet and translator Eleni Sikelianos. We discuss her hybrid-genre, ancestral memoir Memory Rehearsal, a work that moves between poetry and prose, image and text, human and animal, history and mythology, and perhaps most of all tells the story of a poet’s self-discovery, finding her voice within a dual poetic lineage, within a chorus of remarkable voices, past a
Lisa Robertson : Riverwork
Lisa Robertson’s Riverwork twins the mysterious disappearance of the great aunt of our protagonist, Lucy Frost, and that same aunt’s interest in a long-disappeared river, buried under the streets of Paris. As Lucy searches for traces of her aunt, by attempting to inhabit and complete her work on this long-forgotten river, erased histories about both come to the surface. Today’s u
From the Archives : Richard Powers : The Overstory
Today’s archival episode with Richard Powers, about The Overstory, was recorded in 2019 in the studios of KBOO community radio in Portland, Oregon. Unusually, that same night I appeared with Richard at a live ticketed event at Revolution Hall to discuss the same book. Beyond the differences between an intimate one-on-one in-studio conversation (which today’s episode is), and a public-
Giada Scodellaro : Ruins, Child
Dionne Brand says of Giada Scodellaro debut novel, winner of the prestigious Novel Prize: “Ruins, Child takes us to the crumbling architecture of a future past; a future past that is possibly now. In this work of fractal seeing, we encounter women in lives that are simultaneously lived, reenacted, and observed. Ruins, Child is conceptually rich, prismatic, and choral, embodied, and surreal,
Saul Williams : Martyr Loser King
Martyr Loser King, the debut graphic novel of poet, musician, actor and director Saul Williams, with art by Morgan Sorne, not only exists in the same world as his feature film Neptune Frost, but also that of three of his albums, one of his poetry collections and a touring dance performance called The Motherboard Suite. All of these works, in their respective disciplines, explore the distribution o
From the Archives : Zadie Smith : Grand Union
Today’s classic episode from the archives with Zadie Smith was recorded in 2019 at the studios of KBOO community radio to discuss her story collection Grand Union. The conversation ranges wildly—from the politics of representation, of being “free to imagine,” to the freedoms we’ve surrendered to surveillance capitalism. It ranges widely because her collection is, in the wor
Molly Crabapple : Here Where We Live Is Our Country : The Story of the Jewish Bund
One of the elements that makes Molly Crabapple’s latest book so remarkable is, not only the remarkable stories it unearths and retells, but more specifically how she tells these stories, these erased stories, these stories meant to be forgotten. Not only does she tell them in a dynamic, often thrilling, way, she also does so in a way that somehow opens up the history and gifts it to contempo
Lily Brooks-Dalton : Ruins
Lily Brooks-Dalton’s Ruins is both a cleverly plotted page-turner, and an emotionally engaging, character-driven novel with an unforgettable protagonist; it’s both erudite and a wild ride, inviting and yet mysterious, only slowly revealing its cards. Through the lens of archaeology, Ruins explores how cultures construct history and shape memory, and through our prickly protagonist Embe
From the Archives : Ted Chiang : Exhalation
Excited to share this classic episode from the archives with one of the great short storytellers of our time, Ted Chiang. This conversation happened in 2019 at the studios of KBOO community radio in Portland, Oregon. Blake Crouch speaking of Exhalation, the book we discuss today, says “Ted Chiang has no contemporary peers when it comes to the short story form. His name deserves to be mentioned in
Jordy Rosenberg : Night Night Fawn
Today’s conversation with Jordy Rosenberg is many things but at its heart it explores the question of what it means to write revolutionary literature (or as Trotsky would call it “October literature”). Whether we are talking about trans horror or a Marxist surreal, the originating violence of early capitalism or writing toward utopian horizons; whether we are getting granular on
Joan Naviyuk Kane : with snow pouring southward past the window
When Cynthia Cruz describes Joan Naviyuk Kane’s latest collection as a series of poems that “both shows and enacts how a self is brought to being through the abyss,” I think of Kane’s own words about poetry: as “a place of refuge and possibility, a generative space. Not a space of loss, but contingence.” What is a home in the face of dispossession? Inheritance i
From the Archives : Brandon Shimoda : The Grave on the Wall
Today’s episode is a classic from the archives, a conversation from 2019 with Brandon Shimoda about his book The Grave on the Wall. While the book centers on an exploration of Shimoda’s grandfather’s internment at Fort Missoula during World War II, it is really an interrogation of America that extends both directions in time from that moment. Forts such as these, that imprisoned Japanese and
Báyò Akómoláfé : Selah
What if we were to take seriously that we, as humans, aren’t the sole authors of our world, that there are other intelligences at play, that we are only one of many agents of change and transformation, and that “we” aren’t even entirely ourselves given that “we” are composed of many “others,” many strangers that nevertheless make up what we call a &#
Milkweed Live : Canisia Lubrin : The World After Rain
Canisia Lubrin returns to Between the Covers for a live conversation in downtown Portland, at Powell’s Bookstore, about her latest poetry collection The World After Rain. A private book, that Canisia never intended to publish, we explore what it means to write elegy beyond personal biography, what it means that “metaphors unmake the too-made,” what it means to write against the l
From the Archives : Jake Skeets : Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers
Today’s episode is a classic from the archives, a conversation from 2019 with current Navajo Nation Poet Laureate Jake Skeets about his debut poetry collection Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers. Winner of the Whiting Award in poetry and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, there is no better time to revisit this remarkable collection, and this unforgettable conversation with Skeets, as
Sangamithra Iyer : Governing Bodies : A Memoir, A Confluence, A Watershed
“When I tell you a story about my body, I cannot separate it from a story about water. And a story about water is also a story about family. And a story about family is rooted in the earth…,” opens Sangamithra Iyer’s Governing Bodies. What does it mean for a memoir to assume the elusive, ever-changing shape of water, to be the story of family but where the notion of family
Lily Dunn : Into Being : The Radical Craft of Memoir and Its Power to Transform
In Into Being Lily Dunn explores the ways in which writing one’s life has the potential to transform it; how writing, if done well, can produce “symbolic repair.” We look at Virginia Woolf’s notion of “moments of being” as a means and method to find the form that best fits your specific story to tell. We look at different ways memoirists have used the imaginati
Randa Abdel-Fattah : Discipline
Randa Abdel-Fattah’s new novel Discipline is set in Sydney, Australia in 2021 during Ramadan. Discipline follows two Palestinians there, one in media and one in academia, where each has to confront questions of silence and complicity in their respective fields. As Israel intensifies its bombardment of Gaza, and as an eighteen-year-old student at a local Islamic school is arrested for protest
Jazmina Barrera : The Queen of Swords
Jorge Luis Borges called her the “Tolstoy of Mexico” and César Aira the “greatest novelist of the 20th century,” so why is it likely that you haven’t read or even heard of Elena Garro before now? And given that Garro was, like her fantastical stories, not beholden to the truth when accounting her own life, and given that her own life was, in its radical shifts and co
Tin House Live : Caren Beilin : Sea Poison
Caren Beilin’s first appearance on the show, in 2022 to discuss her book Revenge of the Scapegoat, was so unforgettable, and spurred so much enthusiasm and electrifying conversation in its wake, that I couldn’t say “no” to being in conversation with her again, this time live at Powell’s Bookstore, to discuss her latest book Sea, Poison out with New Directions. So get
Tin House Live: Stephen Hayes
Painter Stephen Hayes latest exhibition, “Elegy,” consists of twelve abstract paintings that engage with the genocide in Gaza. One of the twelve paintings was created while listening to the Between the Covers conversation with Omar El Akkad about his book One Day Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This. Because of this, instead of asking, as he usually does, an art curator or fello
Robin Coste Lewis : Archive of Desire
Archive of Desire: A Poem in Four Parts for C.P. Cavafy began as a collaborative multidisciplinary project between the poet Robin Coste Lewis, the composer Vijay Iyer, the cellist Jeffrey Zeigler and the visual artist Julie Mehretu. This multimedia quartet traveled to Athens together to engage with the Cavafy archives as part of the composition of their performance, a performance now rendered anew
Diana Arterian : Agrippina the Younger & Smoke Drifts
As an artist, how does one dive into the wreck of an archive, a canon, a shared collective memory, a history—one filled with silenced voices, distorted accounts, erasures and elisions—on behalf of those wronged by it? Poet Dionne Brand says “the salvage is the life which exceeds the wreck” and Diana Arterian’s work seems animated by this work of salvage and recovery. We look at h
Olga Ravn : The Wax Child
Set during the 17th century witch trials in Denmark, and relayed to us through the voice of a magically animated wax child of one of the accused, Olga Ravn’s new book, which creates something uncannily other from primary sources, has been heralded as a “devilishly subversive feminist anthem” and speaks as much to the present moment as it does to the time of the witches. We explor
Rickey Laurentiis : Death of the First Idea
Ten years in the making, poet Rickey Laurentiis joins us to talk about her much-anticipated remarkable new collection Death of the First Idea. “In the past decade, as Laurentiis has transitioned, her ideas of the lyric and poetry have transformed, as has the America in which she lives,” says the back copy on this book, whose poetry fittingly resists easy categorization. Oracular and ly
Laynie Browne : Apprentice to a Breathing Hand
What does it mean to write toward or under the aura of another poet one admires, to write in homage, as a celebration of another? What happens to language when it hovers between two writers, between how they each separately inhabit it? What does it say about the self, or is discovered about it—within the poem and in the world at large—when that self works through a devotional practice of homage? T
Martha Anne Toll : Duet for One
Today’s guest is writer and critic Martha Anne Toll. Through a discussion of her latest novel Duet for One we explore the perennial mystery of writing and art-making, namely how to render something that lives beyond representation, and how words can become a vehicle to evoke what words themselves cannot adequately describe. In this case, we look at how to bring music into language, the exper
Rob Macaisa Colgate : Hardly Creatures & My Love is Water
Today’s conversation with Rob Macaisa Colgate is about two books, his poetry collection Hardly Creatures and his verse drama My Love is Water. You could say these two books are approaching the same questions, but from opposite, if complementary vantage points. Questions of care and disability, of accessibility and community, of Filipino-American identity and the afterlives of colonialism, of
Robert Macfarlane : Is a River Alive?
Don’t miss today’s conversation with Robert Macfarlane. A polyvocal deep dive into the mysteries of words and rivers, of speech acts as spells, whorls as worlds, of grammars of animacy, of what it means to river, and to be rivered. From the Epic of Gilgamesh to Virginia Woolf’s wave in the mind to Ursula K. Le Guin’s fellow feeling to Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s not
adrienne maree brown : Ancestors
With the arrival of Ancestors, the third and final book in adrienne maree brown’s Grievers Trilogy, we take the iconic frames she has created in her nonfiction work—emergent strategy, pleasure activism, fractal responsibility, loving corrections and more—and look at how they are dramatized within this fictional near-future Detroit. Much as the three books do themselves, one to the next, we l
Madeleine Thien : The Book of Records
The Book of Records is many things: a book of historical fiction and speculative fiction, a meditation on time and on space-time, on storytelling and truth, on memory and the imagination, a book that impossibly conjures the lives and eras of the philosopher Baruch Spinoza, the Tang dynasty poet Du Fu and the political theorist Hannah Arendt not as mere ghostly presences but portrayed as vividly a
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson : Theory of Water
What would it mean for our writing, thinking, and living if we looked to land as pedagogy, or if we thought of theory as something embodied and kinetic? In Theory of Water Leanne Betasamosake Simpson takes us not only outside the academy, and away from our screens, but outside and into the world at large as part of a reconsideration of what and whom we consider teachers and mentors, of where and h
Keetje Kuipers : Lonely Women Make Good Lovers
From the craft of writing sex in poetry to the virtues of failing publicly, today’s conversation with poet Keetje Kuipers is not to be missed. We explore everything from storytelling within poems to the dialectic between control and wildness; everything from queerness and wilderness to fantasy as a portal to truth on the page.
Keetje’s contribution to the bonus audio archive is unusual
Patrycja Humienik : We Contain Landscapes
What does it mean to risk rupture for rapture, on the page, and in one’s life? Or for water to be one’s method, mode or muse? Are inherited forms (of womanhood, of sexuality, of national identity) a gift or are their borders meant to be crossed and breached? Together we look at forms and norms in Patrycja’s poetry, at bringing unruly forces into one’s work—eros, love, solid
Torrey Peters : Stag Dance
Four novellas, in four different genres—science fiction, horror, teen romance, and a western—Stag Dance not only interrogates genre, but gender through genre. Written over a ten year period, Torrey Peters’ new book spans a decade when her own views and insights about gender were themselves changing. Placing these four novellas in conversation with each other like this now, raises all sorts o
Michelle de Kretser : Theory & Practice
Today’s guest, one of Australia’s most celebrated and daring writers, Michelle de Kretser, discusses her latest uncategorizable book Theory & Practice (one she describes as 80% fiction, 15% essay and 5% memoir). Theory & Practice is a book that is wildly erudite and erotic at the same time, both an engrossing, immersive read and one that is constantly experimenting with and bre
Omar El Akkad : One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This
In late October 2023, weeks into Israel’s bombing of northern Gaza, the novelist Omar El Akkad retweeted a video taken by a Gazan man. This video showed a lifeless moonscape with endless empty streets of rubble, every building, one to the next, a hollow blown-out shell of itself. No people, no animals, the only sound the strained breath of this man stumbling through this indiscriminately obl
Hélène Cixous : Rêvoir
Feminist and literary theorist, playwright, philosopher, memoirist and novelist Hélène Cixous returns to the show to discuss her latest genre-defying hybrid work of prose. Written during the first year of the pandemic, Rêvoir explores the effect of pandemic confinement on time, the effect of pandemic time on writing, and what plagues and confinement show us about the nature of time, memory, dreams
Aria Aber : Good Girl
Poet Aria Aber’s debut novel Good Girl , set in the club scene of Berlin, is a book brimming over with sex and drugs and music, true. But really at its heart it is a book of self-making and unmaking, of self-destruction and self-discovery, where 19 year old Nila navigates the irresolvable dialectics of being a second generation Afghan-German immigrant, finding home neither in the world of he
Zahid Rafiq : The World With Its Mouth Open
Today’s guest Zahid Rafiq discusses his debut short story collection The World With Its Mouth Open, eleven remarkable stories set in modern-day Kashmir. Prior to writing fiction Rafiq was a journalist and we explore the ways the stories he tells now, and the stories he wrote then, differ and overlap, We look at how fiction can contain the unsaid, the unknown even; how it can create space for
Tin House Live : Denis Johnson : 2004
We started 2024 with an archival recording of Denis Johnson from the first ever Tin House Writers Workshop in 2003. That episode was a three-part episode: Denis Johnson reading from the manuscript of his novella Train Dreams, then being interviewed by Chris Offutt, and finally, Denis, Chris and Charles D’Ambrosio performing the first act of his play Psychos Never Dream. It turns out Denis re
Rodrigo Fresán : Melvill
How can a novel set during one brief moment near the end of Herman Melville’s father’s life, a moment lost to history and now fully overshadowed by his son’s enduring literary legacy, become a portal to discuss the world entire? Melvill is a novel about reading and writing, about parenthood and legacy, about madness and memory, about time and ghosts and the dead who never die. Jo
Dionne Brand : Salvage : Readings from the Wreck
What does it mean that a life can not only be animated by books but destroyed by them? That a self can be not only made by reading, but unmade by it? Dionne Brand’s latest book of nonfiction Salvage: Readings from the Wreck returns to formative texts from her own reading life in order to model a more aware and liberatory way of reading, of thinking, of being, in relation to them. We explore
Danez Smith : Bluff
Danez Smith’s poetry is so many things, a poetry of resistance, of elegy, of joy, of care, of repair. Their poetry is Afrofuturist and Afropessimist. It’s nature poetry, decolonial poetry, queer poetry, a poetry that is archival and documentary. And it is also a poetry that questions poetry itself and even more so, questions the poet, a poetry that is continually in the process of self
Kenzie Allen : Cloud Missives
Today’s conversation with Kenzie Allen, about her debut poetry collection Cloud Missives, is unusually wide-ranging. We look at the influence of archaeology, anthropology and cartography on her poetry, and on her notion of gaze within her work. We explore the fraught colonial history of these fields, and how, as an indigenous poet, she orients herself to her own work in this regard. We look
Tin House Live : Torrey Peters on Strategic Opacity
Today’s craft talk—by Torrey Peters on “Strategic Opacity”— was recorded at the 2024 Tin House summer writers workshop. Peters explores the elements in works of fiction that actually don’t make sense—from William Shakespeare to Elena Ferrante —and how, paradoxically, it is these very elements, the unexplainable ones, that can make a work of art great. Given that most actual
Jewish Currents Live : Dionne Brand & Adania Shibli in Conversation
As part of Jewish Currents Live: A Day of Politics & Culture, I moderated a conversation between Adania Shibli and Dionne Brand this September in New York City. Both Dionne and Adania have been on the show individually, and part of why I was hoping to bring them together this way was because of just how unforgettable my conversations with each of them respectively were. Together we look at que
Isabella Hammad : Recognizing the Stranger : On Palestine and Narrative
Today’s conversation with Isabella Hammad is truly like no other on the show in its fourteen year history. The main text of her book is the speech she delivered for the Edward Said Memorial Lecture in September of 2023. A remarkable speech called “Recognizing the Stranger” which looks at the middle of narratives, at turning points, recognition scenes and epiphanies; which explore
Tin House Live : Frank Bidart
Today’s episode is an archival recording of poet Frank Bidart from the 2008 Tin House Writers Workshop. It begins with an introduction by the poet Brenda Shaughnessy, followed by an extended poetry reading by Frank Bidart. After the reading is a not-to-be-missed substantive and remarkable craft interview of Frank by Brenda. They look at how he approaches revision, the ways teaching students
Nalo Hopkinson : Blackheart Man
Todays’ guest is Grand Master of science fiction and fantasy Nalo Hopkinson. Together we center her first novel in over a decade, the remarkable Blackheart Man, and look at what it means to not only write an alternate Caribbean history, but within that history conjure an entirely new culture, one with its own language, sexual norms, family and gender dynamics, and racial politics. And yet a
Vajra Chandrasekera : Rakesfall
Sri Lankan writer Vajra Chandrasekera’s first novel, The Saint of Bright Doors, was shortlisted for or won nearly every major SFF award there is. Much of the buzz around this book circled the question:”what exactly is this?” Saints not only didn’t fulfill the expected tropes of the genre, but seemed to be actively working against them, subverting them. Vajra’s new boo
Carl Phillips : Scattered Snows, to the North
Today’s guest is one of the most singular and celebrated Anglophone poets writing today, Carl Phillips. We center his latest collection, Scattered Snows, to the North, his first since winning the 2023 Pulitzer prize in poetry. But we also use his three craft books written over the decades (in 2004, 2014 and 2023 respectively) to look at his body of work across time. We spend time attending t
Shze-Hui Tjoa : The Story Game
Today’s guest, Shze-Hui Tjoa, has written a book that is remarkably unique. Is it an essay collection or a memoir? A detective story or a fantasy? A journey of self-individuation or an examination of power and control? Improbably it is all of these things, and perhaps more than any of them, it is the record of a writer finding her form by breaking form, but doing so in a way that invites us
Cecilia Vicuña : Deer Book
Today’s guest Chilean poet, performance artist, visual artist, activist, and filmmaker Cecilia Vicuña, joins us to discuss her latest work, Deer Book, or Libro Venado. A bilingual collection, with translations by the acclaimed poet and translator Daniel Borzutsky, Deer Book brings together nearly forty years of Vicuña’s poetry and drawings surrounding the cosmologies and mythologies of
Lance Olsen : Absolute Away & Shrapnel
Lance Olsen returns to Between the Covers to discuss his two new books, his uncategorizable multiverse fiction Absolute Away, and his new collection of philosophical essays and interviews on writing Shrapnel:Contemplations. Lance’s latest novel engages with the life of Edith Metzger, an improbable footnote in two momentous events in history: 1)as the woman in the backseat of Jackson Pollock
Amitav Ghosh : Smoke and Ashes
For nearly twenty years Amitav Ghosh has been writing about opium and the opium trade, first in his fictional Ibis trilogy, and now in nonfiction with Smoke & Ashes. This is a story that brings together many of the preoccupying themes from Ghosh’s career: the legacies of colonialism and extractive colonial economies, the intelligence of plants and the ways plants are actors and agents wi
Joyelle McSweeney : Death Styles
Today’s guest, poet, playwright, novelist, translator, publisher, editor and critic, Joyelle McSweeney discusses her latest poetry collection Death Styles. She talks about the juxtaposing of “death” and “style” and the seam to the underworld that opens when you do, about style as survival, about writing after and into death, about eyes that spill Art, and ears that ma
Danielle Dutton : Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other
One might ask, just what is Danielle Dutton’s latest book, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other? A collection of stories, a philosophical essay, a sequence of nested dreams and memories, an act of loving citation, a one-act play of silent animals, a meditation on the human in the more-than-human world, on the end of the world, on writing, on reading, on visual art, on black holes, on subterranean fo
Alexis Wright : Praiseworthy
Today’s guest is one of the most important and celebrated writers in Australia today, Alexis Wright. We look together at the ways Wright reshapes the novel form to honor Aboriginal notions of story, of time, and of scale. To find a different sound and voice for the novel, one that is multiple and collective. both ancestral and visionary, one that invites us to walk back into relationship wit
Nam Le : 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem
Over the past fifteen years, Nam Le has published a book in each genre. Best known for his phenomenal 2009 debut story collection The Boat, he followed it with his 2019 debut nonfiction On David Malouf, and now, this year, his debut poetry collection 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem. What is remarkable about these three books, is how, in a way, they are three different strategies aimed at the
Anne de Marcken : It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over
Writer, interdisciplinary artist, editor and publisher Anne de Marcken discusses her new book It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over. Winner of the Novel Prize, and thus published simultaneously in the U.S., U.K., and Australia, by New Directions, Fitzcarraldo Editions and Giramondo respectively, de Marcken’s new book is a deeply philosophical and metaphysical, heartbreakingly funny book
Canisia Lubrin : Code Noir
Award-winning poet Canisia Lubrin talks about her debut fiction, Code Noir. The fifty-nine stories in this collection are each prefaced by one of Louis XIV’s fifty-nine “Black codes,” the rules of conduct in France and its colonies regarding slaves and slavery. And each of these codes, each of these edicts, is also engaged with, manipulated and remade by the abstract artist Torkw
Diana Khoi Nguyen : Root Fractures
Today’s conversation, with poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen, is not to be missed. Both of her books, Ghost Of and Root Fractures, engage with and are shaped by her brother’s absence and the family silence surrounding it. Two years before his suicide, her brother quietly removed the family photos from their frames on the walls, carefully cut himself out of each photo, and re
Álvaro Enrigue : You Dreamed of Empires
Today’s conversation with Álvaro Enrigue about his latest novel, You Dreamed of Empires, translated by Natasha Wimmer, is set during the relatively undocumented first encounter between Moctezuma and Hernán Cortés. The novel dilates the knife’s edge moment when the Aztec emperor invites the conquistador, with his small band of Spanish soldiers, into the palaces of Tenochtitlan as guests
Mathias Énard : The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild
Is Mathias Énard’s latest book formally influenced by the Buddhist Wheel of Time, by Jewish undertaker guilds, by François Rabelais’s scatological and philosophical prose and linguistic wordplay, by Catholic altarpiece polyptych panel paintings, and by the scandalous diaries of a Polish anthropologist? The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is dedicated to les pensées sau
Tin House Live : Denis Johnson : 2003
We are kicking off the new year with a serious blast from the past. A recording from the very first Tin House writers workshop in the summer of 2003 with novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, and screenwriter Denis Johnson. This three-part episode includes a remarkable reading from Johnson’s novella Train Dreams, an interview of Johnson by writer Chris Offutt that is an unforgettab
Elle Nash : Deliver Me
Perhaps it is fitting that today’s episode, with writer and founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine, Elle Nash, is launched on the shortest day of the year, the longest night of darkness. Nash’s new novel Deliver Me explores the ways society tries to keep the light and the dark separate, to hide our unasked questions and forbidden desires in the shadows. Nash’s writing insists on
Naomi Klein : Doppelganger : Part Two
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 Zionism, Marxism, and the Jewish Labor Bund’s notion of “hereness.” We look at the battles over the definition of antisemitism and the ways accusations of antisemitism have been weaponized
Kate Zambreno & Sofia Samatar : Tone
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 from Nella Larsen to Clarice Lispector, W. G. Sebald to Franz Kafka, Renee Gladman to Bhanu Kapil. But in chasing the ever-elusive notion of tone, discovering its relational and atmosph
Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore : Touching the Art
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 is above all a complicated love letter to Mattilda’s grandmother, abstract artist Gladys Goldstein. Through an exploration of Mattilda’s love for Gladys’ art, Touching the Art becomes a b
Bhanu Kapil : Incubation : A Space for Monsters
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 follows Laloo, a British woman of Indian descent, who arrives in the US to give birth to a monster. This fictional story parallels Bhanu’s own arrival in the United States, a move that was meant
Colleen Burner : Sister Golden Calf
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 Road Narratives and Why it Matters,” Sister Golden Calf by its very existence interrogates the road novel tradition it now becomes a part of. As Leni Zumas says: “In shiveringly
Kate Briggs : The Long Form
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-centric, not a novel about babies, but where the baby is a main character, a vital actor that shapes the story that unfolds, that shapes the experience of time and duration, what does that do to the n
Lydia Davis : Our Strangers
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 quite long, often eschew backstory, exposition, context, or psychological interiority. Sometimes they even comment on other stories within the collection, or revise themselves, becoming something else
Naomi Klein : Doppelganger : Part One
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 framing, through the coining of new language, of our current political moment. And yet Doppelganger is decidedly more personal, more vulnerable, more inward-looking than her previous books. And
Tin House Live : Matthew Zapruder on Story of a Poem
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 mesmerizing way, behind the curtain of the creative process of composition. And you wouldn’t be wrong. But really it is also the story of the revision of the poet as well, a revision of the sto
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