interview - David Naimon

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore : Sketchtasy

Tue, 12 Feb 2023 23:31:07 +0000

“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 of the best books of the year, it’s an instant classic of queer literature.”—Michael Schaub, NPR Books

Alicia Jo Rabins : Fruit Geode

Fri, 01 Feb 2023 14:30:23 +0000

“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 concerns of Alicia Rabins’ Fruit Geode, a book that I could not stop reading once I started, a book that drew me in with intimacy and force and then grabbed my heart hard, which is to say, if you have a body, this book is a must read.”—Lynn Melnick

Genevieve Hudson: Pretend We Live Here

Sun, 13 Jan 2023 20:15:57 +0000

“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 the clinching detail is unnerving and her sympathies are fascinatingly conflicted. I hope, and suspect, this book will be the start of a long and inspiring career.” —Tom Bissell; “Full of blood and dust and stars and light, Hudson captures the beauty and horror of the everyday and makes it all seem like magic.” —Leah Dieterich

Jeffrey Yang : Hey Marfa

Wed, 02 Jan 2023 00:53:32 +0000

“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 poetic accounting of the ways imagination is currently working with & against the histories & myths of the US/Mexico borderlands & the American West.”-Tim Johnson; “Hey, Marfa a commonplace book, memoir, & hybrid obituary for things: following a trail of ‘last words’ & communal losses, here is a History learning to listen with eyes & Mourning recovering the dead travelers on the road. Hey, Marfa transmits voltage or vitalized matter as words reach to words.”-Susan Howe

Chaya Bhuvaneswar : White Dancing Elephants

Mon, 17 Dec 2022 09:23:04 +0000

“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…White Dancing Elephants is a necessary book — & one that introduces a gifted voice to contemporary literature.” -NPR; “White Dancing Elephants is a searing & complex collection, wholly realized, each piece curled around its own beating heart. Tender & incisive, Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a surgeon on the page, unflinching in her aim, unwavering in her gaze, & absolutely devastating in her prose. This is an astonishing debut.”-Amelia Gray

Layli Long Soldier : Whereas

Sun, 02 Dec 2023 01:06:18 +0000

“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 The New York Times Book Review; “Layli Long Soldier’s movement between collective and personal makes this book intimate and urgent. She has charted new ways to write in what’s left out—and not merely in the margins either. WHEREAS offers a powerful reckoning.”—National Book Critics Circle Award judges’ citation

Diane Williams: The Collected Stories of Diane Williams

Wed, 14 Nov 2023 01:12:29 +0000

“Williams’s short precise, & emphatic sentences build a strange society whose denizens are not quite familiar to us & not quite comfortable with their own quietly disturbing evolutions. Not a single moment of the prose here is what you expect, & even the ordinary is, in the context created by Diane Williams, no longer ordinary. It is fresh, happy & peculiar - or is it we who are refreshed, happy, & more peculiar than before after reading her?”—Lydia Davis;”Let’s hear it for the magnificent Diane Williams, one of the wittiest & most exacting writers of our time. Her fictions are fervid endorsements of terrible, joyous life. But that’s not quite right, because like all great literature, they are life.”—Sam Lipsyte

R.O. Kwon : The Incendiaries

Thu, 01 Nov 2023 15:05:15 +0000

“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—the characters, the crime, the story, &, ultimately, the reader.”—Viet Thanh Nguyen; “Kwon’s multi-faceted narrative portrays America’s dark, radical strain, exploring the lure of fundamentalism, our ability to be manipulated, and what can happen when we’re willing to do anything for a cause.” —Atlantic.com; “A God-haunted, willful, strange book written with a kind of savage elegance. I’ve said it before, but now I’ll shout it from the rooftops: R. O. Kwon is the real deal.”—Lauren Groff

Tommy Pico : Junk

Sun, 14 Oct 2023 21:51:34 +0000

“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, or returning the sheer absurdity of being to everything, from grief to intimacy to dating apps to donuts. Junk insists on the urgency of the quotidian, of, to borrow a phrase from Pico, ‘vibrant inconsequence.’ It’s rare to read a book that makes living feel so alive.”-Kaveh Akbar; “A visceral exorcism of personal & collective demons…Pico demonstrates that a person’s many selves, traumas, anxieties, hookups, & breakups can become a marker of courage and survival.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Dubravka Ugrešić : Fox & American Fictionary

Mon, 01 Oct 2023 06:58:05 +0000

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 literary luminaries from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Elizabeth Bishop to Octavio Paz. In 1991 when war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, Ugrešić took a firm antiwar stance, critically dissecting retrograde Croatian and Serbian nationalism, the stupidity and criminality of war, and becoming a target for nationalist journalists, politicians, and fellow writers in the process. Subjected to prolonged public ostracism and persistent media harassment, she has lived in exile since 1993.

Anna Moschovakis : Eleanor or The Rejection of the Progress of Love

Mon, 24 Sep 2023 23:14:34 +0000

“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, wild-goose chasing one’s data. Yet, the deeper we look into Eleanor’s unsettledness, the more we see & the more hope we find in her rhizomic wandering. This is a beautiful slow burn of a novel.” —Renee Gladman;
“By turns funny, melancholic, & provocative, Anna’s novel undoes & remakes the conventions of realist fiction through repetition & compression of time . . . It is ‘luminously ordinary’ in its progression, where profound shifts are as small as a postcard written or a hand touched.” —BOMB

Dao Strom : You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else

Wed, 22 Aug 2023 13:23:32 +0000

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 filled- with text: English, Vietnamese, drifting, entwined, dense, vanishing- with space: empty, white, solid, black- with images: cropped, multiplied, sliced, erased- & with punctuation: plus, minus, inequality signs, slashes, brackets, & bullet points imbued with as much meaning as entire novels. “After you depart from the cinema of her sea, you may ask, what or who is she? …why is she able to dismantle my soul so easily? …how is she able to make desolation so compellingly hospitable? What is her secret?”-Vi Khi Nao

Catherine Lacey : Certain American States

Tue, 07 Aug 2023 16:06:43 +0000

“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 like walking through a dark apartment in someone’s mind, full of winding hallways and unmarked doors. You never know quite where you are or where you’ll end up. Like the work of Clarice Lispector or Rachel Cusk, Lacey seems to be on the verge of inventing a new genre somewhere between prose poem and fugue state.”-Los Angeles Times

Forrest Gander : Be With

Thu, 19 Jul 2023 14:00:51 +0000

“Forrest Gander’s life partner, the poet C.D. Wright, died suddently 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 utterly naked and bereft, elegies, apologies, could-have-beens, Gander grieves and wonders about what’s left in his life. There is so much pain in this book—perhaps too much, almost too much—but what is poetry for if not for this? And there’s more life in one of these dark words than in most entire books. Reading this book may hurt, but it will help people to keep living through what they thought they could never survive.”-Craig Morgan Teicher for NPR

Chelsea Hodson : Tonight I’m Someone Else

Fri, 06 Jul 2023 13:46:13 +0000

“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. I had a real romance with this book.” —Miranda July; “Chelsea Hodson tests herself against her desires, grapples with their consequences, and presents a surgically precise account of what they were to her. These essays are bewitching—despite their discipline and rigor, you can smell the blood.” —Sarah Manguso; “A unique collection about being an artist and a woman in a world that doesn’t always value either.” —Booklist

Molly Crabapple : Brothers of the Gun - A Memoir of the Syrian War

Tue, 12 Jun 2023 16:57:32 +0000

“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 the war’s exhaustive devastation of bodies and souls, and the defiant resistance of many trapped men and women, but the Mahabharata of the Levant has already found its wisest chroniclers.”—Pankaj Mishra; “A revelatory and necessary read on one of the most destructive wars of our time . . . In great personal detail, Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple poignantly capture the tumultuous life in Syria before, after, and during the war—from inside one young man’s consciousness.”—Angela Davis

Sheila Heti : Motherhood

Fri, 01 Jun 2023 11:02:00 +0000

“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 don’t — either way your life will be changed by this thinker. I’m being serious here.”-Miranda July; “This inquiry into the modern woman’s moral, social and psychological relationship to procreation is an illumination, a provocation, and a response—finally—to the new norms of femininity, formulated from the deepest reaches of female intellectual authority. It is unlike anything else I’ve read. Sheila Heti has broken new ground, both in her maturity as an artist and in the possibilities of the female discourse itself.”-Rachel Cusk

Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi : Call Me Zebra

Tue, 15 May 2023 15:05:58 +0000

“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.”-Nylon Magazine; “Van der Vliet Oloomi captures the shattered identity of the refugee and the immigrant, the way that literature becomes a lifeline in exile: a movable home, a network of dissent, a genealogy beyond national borders.”-Los Angeles Review of Books; “Hearken ye fellow misfits, migrants, outcasts, squint-eyed bibliophiles, library-haunters and book stall-stalkers: Here is a novel for you.”-The Wall Street Journal

Jen Bervin : Silk Poems

Tue, 01 May 2023 14:52:32 +0000

“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 the unexpected wonder of pattern is everywhere and that the smallest detail contains enough energy to spawn a universe. I think they should send her into space, if it were not for the fact her work has already sent us there. Her poems in themselves, those exhilirated fragments, are the purest form of the art itself—they contain the innate inner gradients of whatever takes our breath away.”-Mary Ruefle

Cheston Knapp : Up Up Down Down

Tue, 10 Apr 2023 12:52:13 +0000

“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 open to analysis. He has the eye & ear of an anthropologist, a joyously expansive vocabulary, a prose style that feels both extravagant & exact, & a big, booming heart.”-Maggie Nelson; “This book made me laugh out loud in embarrassing places—a quiet Swedish train, a darkened redeye flight—& its insights will keep echoing in me for a long time.”-Leslie Jamison

John Keene : Counternarratives, Playland, and Grind

Sun, 01 Apr 2023 14:06:39 +0000

“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 is at turns playful and erudite, lyric and coldly diagnostic, but always completely absorbing. Counternarratives could easily be compared to Borges or Bolaño, Calvino or Kiš.”-Jess Row; “Keene’s story collection is truly radical—in its politics, in its stylistic restlessness, in its rethinking of the myths we tell ourselves about race and sexuality in the history of the Americas”-Anthony Domestico

Vi Khi Nao : Umbilical Hospital & A Brief Alphabet of Torture

Sun, 11 Mar 2023 16:16:40 +0000

“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 which way but…No, in every way they make way.”—Michael Martone; “Imagine an entity composed of sheep, wheat, assholes, clitorises, stars. Why not? That would be this poem, this world — a perfectly recognizable post-human world which is also post surreal. Vi Khi Nao is making it new, no, she is doing the old job of making us see what’s already here in a new way.”.– Rae Armantrout

Micheline Aharonian Marcom : The Brick House

Thu, 01 Mar 2023 16:07:50 +0000

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 in the strange, elemental language which dreams allow for, a strangeness mirrored in the accompanying illustrations by Fowzia Karimi. Inspired by Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Kawabata’s House of Sleeping Beauties, and following in the tradition of Armenian illuminated manuscripts, The Brick House is in Rikki Ducornet’s words “Fierce, fearlessly erotic and always unforeseeable.”

Terese Marie Mailhot : Heart Berries

Tue, 13 Feb 2023 18:27:09 +0000

“Heart Berries is an epic take—an Iliad for the indigenous. It’s the story of one First Nation woman & her geographic, emotional, & theological search for meaning in a colonial world. It’s disturbing & hilarious. It contains sentences of such poetry & power that you will be compelled to set the book down & walk away to recover from the tremors. Terese is a world-changing talent & I recommend this book with 100% of my soul.” —Sherman Alexie; “If Heart Berries is any indication, the work to come will not just surface suppressed stories; it might give birth to new forms.” —The New York Times

Carmen Maria Machado : Her Body and Other Parties

Thu, 01 Feb 2023 00:00:41 +0000

“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, Maggie Nelson, & Grace Paley; which is a way of saying, Machado sounds like nobody but herself.”—John Powers, NPR “Fresh Air”; “The book abounds with fantastical premises that ring true because the intensity of sexual desire, the mutability of the body, & the realities of gender inequality make them so. These stories stand as exquisitely rendered, poignant hauntings.”—San Francisco Chronicle

Eunsong Kim : Gospel of Regicide

Sun, 14 Jan 2023 16:04:25 +0000

“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-racist yet critical of non-intersectional understandings of identity & selfhood, she is unafraid of drawing the sacred from the pedestrian, & unbeholden to whiteness as foundation. These poems, mutable in form & style, yet cohesive in their vision, suggest a complex & different order allowing us to “complete the story.” Kim kills the king, & blesses us with a superlative collection as a result.”-John Keene

Leni Zumas : Red Clocks

Fri, 05 Jan 2023 12:19:37 +0000

“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, mordant, political, poetic, alarming, and inspiring—not to mention a way forward for fiction now.” -Maggie Nelson; “Move over Atwood, Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks is a gender roaring tour de force. The bodies of women in Red Clocks are each the site of resistance and revolution. I screamed out loud. I pumped my fist in the air. And I remembered how hope is forged from the ground up, through the bodies of women who won’t be buried.”―Lidia Yuknavitch

David Biespiel : The Education of a Young Poet

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 16:22:00 +0000

“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.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Whether he is writing about poetry, politics, competitive diving, or the glories of great conversation, Biespiel’s recurring subject is the tension between freedom & discipline―between the sublime release of our own wildness & the precision that comes only from exquisite self-control. Part memoir, part ars poetica, The Education of a Young Poet is a feast: of language, of memory, & of insights into how one young writer came into his own.” ―Patrick Phillips

Rae Armantrout : Partly -New & Selected Poems

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 20:13:41 +0000

“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 granted.”—Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune; “Hoopskirts, star jasmine, synchronized swimming, Russian icons, a ceramic fish face, electrons & photons: in these poems, everything is interconnected, thought through, deeply felt & expressed in the most precise and necessary words. Armantrout is one of our most inventive & magnetic poets, & she never disappoints: with inspired patience, she embraces the strangeness of our familiar world & refashions it into something new & utterly transporting.” -Lydia Davis

Eileen Myles : Afterglow

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 23:03:29 +0000

“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—among other things—geometry, gender, mortality, evil, aging, and plaids. Myles makes new rules for what prose writing can be. Afterglow is Myles’s funniest, profoundest work yet.” —Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick and After Kathy Acker; “Only Eileen Myles could reinvent the memoir again so stunningly; Afterglow is the sort of multidimensional love story you could only expect from one of our greatest experimental writers living today!” —Porochista Khakpour, author of The Last Illusion and Sick: A Memoir

Celeste Ng : Little Fires Everywhere

Thu, 05 Oct 2023 20:07:46 +0000

“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 microscope: how do questions of race stack up against the comfort of privilege, and what role does that play in parenting? Is motherhood a bond forged by blood, or by love? And perhaps most importantly: do the faults of our past determine what we deserve in the future? Be ready to be wowed by Ng’s writing — and unsettled by the mirror held up to one’s own beliefs.” – Jodi Picoult, New York Times bestselling author of Small Great Things and Leaving Time

Peter Rock : Spells

Thu, 21 Sep 2023 15:35:30 +0000

“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 is a novel unlike any I’ve read before, that weaves elements of realism, fable, prose poetry, and essay through the supporting structure of images to create something beautiful and unsettling.”-Oregon Book Award-winner Cari Luna; “Rock’s prose calls to mind Kazuo Ishiguro, not just for its spareness but also for its mix of wonder and creepiness.” —New York Times

Safiya Sinclair : Cannibal

Sun, 10 Sep 2023 23:19:45 +0000

“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 this dehumanizing judgment born from white entitlement & denouncing the idea that blackness is synonymous with savagery, Sinclair ponders such questions as, How does a poet get inside the head of Shakespeare’s Caliban? How would Caliban define blackness without the filter of a white man’s bias?…Through her visceral language Sinclair paints the institution of white supremacy as not just an individualized phenomenon, but as a ruthless & menacing force.” (Publisher’s Weekly-starred review)

Matthew Zapruder : Why Poetry

Mon, 21 Aug 2023 05:06:15 +0000

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 in poetic analysis & steered by Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging & conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. He takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose.

Yanara Friedland : Uncountry

Mon, 07 Aug 2023 21:05:02 +0000

“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 an open door,” a door through which we hear the echo of Ana Mendieta telling us “There is no original past to redeem: there is the void.” Uncountry is an invitation to that void, and Friedland serves as dream guide through this blend of the personal, political, and stunningly poetic”-Lily Hoang; Uncountry: a Mythology is winner of the Noemi Press Fiction Prize

Mary Ruefle : My Private Property

Sat, 22 Jul 2023 17:06:43 +0000

“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 surrealism with narrative techniques to create surprising, high-velocity, and deeply affecting work.”-The Stranger; “Mary Ruefle is, in this humble bookseller’s opinion, the best prose-writing poet in America. (And one of our best poets, too.) My Private Property, her latest collection of stories, essays, and asides, is as joyous and singular a book as you’ll read…”-Stephen Sparks, Literary Hub

Yuri Herrera : Kingdom Cons

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 15:55:31 +0000

“A powerful & memorable meditation on the social & economic value of art in a world ruled by the pursuit of power.”-Publisher’s Weekly; 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 crime romance, this prize-winning novel from Yuri Herrera questions the price of keeping your integrity in a world ruled by patronage & power. “Yuri Herrera must be a 1000 years old. He must’ve traveled to hell, & heaven, & back again. He must’ve once been a girl, an animal, a rock, a boy, & a woman. Nothing else explains the vastness of his understanding”-Valeria Luiselli

Gregory Pardlo : Digest

Mon, 26 Jun 2023 20:11:07 +0000

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 landscape of verse both haunting, funny, & rigorously intellectual-Jerry Magazine; He “renders history just as clearly & palpably as he renders NYC or Copenhagen or his native New Jersey. But mostly what he renders is America with its intractable conundrums & clashing iconographies. With lines that balance poise & a jam-packed visceral music & images that glimmer & seethe together like a conflagration these poems are a showcase for Pardlo’s ample & agile mind, his courageous social conscience, & his mighty voice.” -Tracy K. Smith

Dani Shapiro : Hourglass

Wed, 07 Jun 2023 15:14:54 +0000

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 often in flux? What happens to love in the face of the unexpected, in the face of disappointment and compromise–how do we wrest beauty from imperfection, find grace in the ordinary, desire what we have rather than what we lack? Drawing on literature, poetry, philosophy, and theology, Shapiro writes gloriously of the joys and challenges of matrimonial life, in a luminous narrative that unfurls with urgent immediacy and sharp intelligence.

Jeff Vandermeer : Borne

Tue, 23 May 2023 16:08:53 +0000

“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 a rampage as our behavior dictates–for these are our children, born of us and now to be borne in whatever shape or mess we have created. This coming-of-age story signals that eco-fiction has come of age as well: wilder, more reckless and more breathtaking than previously thought, a wager and a promise that what emerges from the twenty-first century will be as good as any from the twentieth, or the nineteenth.” —Wai Chee Dimock, The New York Times Book Review

Thalia Field : Experimental Animals

Tue, 02 May 2023 23:16:33 +0000

“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 medicine, but an entire age that spirited experiments in literature, science, engineering, film, etc. It’s nothing less than a history-gorgeously fictional, purposefully essayistic-of how we got where we are.” -John D’Agata; “Stemming from a through-line of marital discord in the household of the great French vivisector Claude Bernard…this compelling tale is made up largely of excerpts and quotations…a beautiful and thought-provoking collage of…rescued history & a sobering tribute to some of its victims.” —Karen Joy Fowler

Sallie Tisdale : Violation

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 17:38:29 +0000

“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 life mapped by curiosity. Here we get elephants and houseflies, diets and fires, birth and the debris of death, all the mixed and messy vitality of family life. We travel far and we travel wide, but in the end we circle home to Tisdale herself, vulnerable and available, intimate and encouraging, our guide and our friend, her questioning presence lighting the way and celebrating it all, every little step in life’s saga, one lovely sentence at a time.”-Charles D’Ambrosio

Morgan Parker : There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé

Wed, 29 Mar 2023 04:59:21 +0000

Morgan Parker uses political & pop-cultural references as a framework to explore 21st cent. black American womanhood & its complexities: performance, depression, isolation, exoticism, racism, femininity & politics. Parker explores this in the contemporary American political climate, folding in references from jazz standards, visual art, personal family history, & Hip Hop. The voice of this book is a multifarious one: writing & rewriting bodies, stories, & histories of the past, as well as uttering & bearing witness to the truth of the present; actively probing toward a new self, an actualized self. This is a book at the intersections of mythology & sorrow, of vulnerability & posturing, of desire & disgust, of tragedy & excellence.

Melissa Febos : Abandon Me

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 13:34:34 +0000

“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 stories, communal stories, literary stories & love stories, revealing much of where she’s been & where we, her readers, might go if we dare. Do we dare? Are we all running away from abandonment? It makes sense that Abandon Me feels completely structurally innovative. Febos has created 21st century text that intimately explores addiction, pain, pleasure & the strangely joyful & terrifying nuances of abandonment. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt more thankful to read a book. Abandon Me found me when I most needed it.” – Kiese Laymon

Ursula K. Le Guin : Words Are My Matter

Tue, 14 Feb 2023 16:44:52 +0000

“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 ways of being, & even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom — poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality. . .” Words Are My Matter collects talks, essays, intros to beloved books, & book reviews by Ursula K. Le Guin, one of our foremost public literary intellectuals. It is essential reading, & through the lens of deep considerations of contemporary writing, a way of exploring the world we are all living in.

Susan DeFreitas : Hot Season

Wed, 18 Jan 2023 17:37:21 +0000

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 events in the Northwest & Southwest in the early 90s & mid-Aughts, Hot Season explores what Oregon Book Award Winner Cari Luna calls “the charged terrain where the youthful search for identity meets the romantic, illicit lure of direct action.” “Is it worse to destroy a dam or to destroy a river? Which is to say, how do we live our conscience on a crowded, corrupted planet? DeFreitas has captured what it means to be coming of age in a tangle of love, politics & environmental degradation.”-Monica Drake.

Solmaz Sharif : Look

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 17:39:50 +0000

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 killed in America’s invasions of Afghanistan & Iraq, the discriminations endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter. At the same time, these poems point to ways violence is conducted against language, employing words lifted from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military & Associated Terms. Sharif exposes euphemisms deployed to sterilize language, control its effects, & sway our collective resolve, but refuses to accept this terminology as given, instead turning it back on its perpetrators. “Let it matter what we call a thing,” she writes. “Let me look at you.”

Sofia Samatar : The Winged Histories

Tue, 13 Dec 2023 04:08:01 +0000

“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, Fantasy Literature; “Told by four different women, it is a story of war; not epic battles of good & evil, but the attempt to make things right & the realities of violence wielded by one human against another, by one group against another. It’s about the aftermath of war, in which some things are better but others are worse. Above all, it’s a story about love—the terrible love that tears lives apart. Doomed love; impossible love; love that requires a rewriting of the rules, be it for a country, a person, or a story.”— Jenn Northington, Tor.com

Tyehimba Jess : Olio

Wed, 16 Nov 2023 19:23:16 +0000

“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 into the historical clefs of blackface, black sound, human sensibility. After the last poem is read we have no idea how long we’ve been on our knees.”-poet Nikky Finney; “Olio is one of the most inventive, intensive poetic undertakings of the past decade…The result is a work both historical and musical, scholarly and sculptural.”-Boston Globe

Eliot Weinberger : The Ghosts of Birds

Wed, 02 Nov 2023 13:52:46 +0000

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 Colorado River, records the dreams of people named Chang, & shares other factually verifiable discoveries that seem too fabulous to possibly be true. These essays include his notorious review of George W. Bush’s memoir, Decision Points, writings about the I Ching, & the history of American Indophilia (“There is a line, however jagged, from pseudo-Hinduism to Malcolm X”). This collection proves once again that Weinberger is “one of the bravest and sharpest minds in the U.S.” (Javier Marías).

Pauls Toutonghi : Dog Gone

Thu, 27 Oct 2023 12:23:22 +0000

“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, and the most stubbornly loyal of friends. Pauls Toutonghi understands the richness of these bonds. In Dog Gone, this engaging storyteller lights up the ways the love between human and dog brings both species to hilarity, gratitude, deep sorrow and a tenderness so real you can’t help but touch it.” —Mark Doty

Monica Drake : The Folly of Loving Life

Wed, 28 Sep 2023 05:24:33 +0000

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, sure. They are hilarious, yes. Each one is a marvel. But more importantly–they are raw and awake and full of life. At the center of each one is the bright beating heart of what literature can be: Relevant, unusual, entertaining, fascinating, unique. These are not characters–and Drake’s is not a voice–that you can ignore or forget.” Pauls Toutonghi, author of Dog Gone

Alexis Smith : Marrow Island

Wed, 14 Sep 2023 14:08:13 +0000

“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 of whom has joined a sect claiming it can heal the land.”—O, The Oprah Magazine “Tucked into this suspenseful plot are stunning and important reflections on nature and the environment, its awe-inspiring power and the many ways humanity both detracts from that power and willfully ignores it—and how that shapes our lives.” —Shelf Awareness

Jesse Ball : How to Set a Fire and Why

Wed, 17 Aug 2023 02:40:25 +0000

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 out of school—again. She makes her way through the world with only a book, a zippo lighter, a pocketful of stolen licorice, a biting wit, and the striking intelligence that she tries to hide. “Lucia details a philosophy that smartly parallels the novel’s own–namely, that writing literature is, like arson, an act of creation and destruction…A song of teenage heartbreak sung with a movingly particular sadness, a mature meditation on how actually saying something, not just speaking, is what most makes a voice human.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Rikki Ducornet : Brightfellow

Wed, 20 Jul 2023 14:11:17 +0000

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. Then Stub meets Billy, who takes him in, & Asthma, who enchants him, & all is found, then lost. A fragrant, voluptuous novel of imposture, misplaced affection, & the many ways we are both visible & invisible to one another. The author of eight previous novels as well as collections of short stories, essays, & poems, Rikki Ducornet has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, is a two-time honoree of the Lannan Foundation, & is the recipient of an Academy Award in Literature.

Lina Meruane : Seeing Red

Thu, 30 Jun 2023 14:08:02 +0000

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 closest to her. Fiction & autobiography intertwine in an intense, visceral, & caustic novel about the relation between the body, illness, & gender. “Meruane writes further into, rather than through or around, blindness. Her language pulses with the psychological terror of the body’s betrayal; it pulls at the seams of the self, unleashing something deep within. This is not a fictionalized memoir of transformation & recovery, but a book that burns in your hands, something sharp & terrifying that bites back.” — Anna Zalokostas, Full Stop

Rob Spillman : All Tomorrow’s Parties

Wed, 15 Jun 2023 15:14:11 +0000

“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 being built upon the page. All Tomorrow’s Parties is such a memoir. Not only is it a super-fun, shatter-the-mirror joyride through Spillman’s eccentric upbringing, but it’s also replete with insightful double visions . . . [Spillman] manages to invoke both the dreamy, mythic version of life amid art and interesting scenery, and all the chaos and cracks and potential car crashes that threaten it . . . A thrill to read.”—Interview Magazine

Brian Blanchfield : Proxies

Wed, 18 May 2023 14:10:18 +0000

“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 work informed by a lifetime of thinking, reading, loving, and reckoning, utterly matchless in its erudition, its precision, its range, its daring, and its grace. I know of no book like it, nor any recent book as thoroughly good, in art or in heart.” -Maggie Nelson “Maybe short says it best. Sexy book.” —Eileen Myles

Idra Novey : Ways to Disappear

Wed, 04 May 2023 13:52:50 +0000

“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 center. Ways to Disappear explores the meaning behind a writer’s words-the way they can both hide & reveal deep truths….Yes, there’s carnage, but there’s also exuberant love, revelations of long-buried, unhappy secrets, ruminations about what makes a satisfying life, a publisher’s regrets about moral compromises in both his work & his use of his family wealth & connections, & an alternately heartfelt & wry portrait of the satisfactions & anxieties of the generally underappreciated art of translation.”-NPR review

Ursula K. Le Guin : Late in the Day

Wed, 20 Apr 2023 13:53:22 +0000

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 with us nevertheless through and about the seasonal rhythms of the earth, the minute and the vast, the ordinary and the mythological. As Le Guin herself states, “science explicates, poetry implicates.” Accordingly, this immersive, tender collection implicates us (in the best sense) in a subjectivity of everyday objects and occurrences. “There is no writer with an imagination as forceful and delicate as Ursula K. Le Guin’s.” —Grace Paley

Brian Evenson : A Collapse of Horses

Wed, 30 Mar 2023 13:53:24 +0000

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 these stories, Brian Evenson unsettles us with the everyday and the extraordinary—the terror of living with the knowledge of all we cannot know. “Brian Evenson is one of the treasures of American story writing, a true successor both to the generation of Coover, Barthelme, Hawkes & Co., but also to Edgar Allan Poe.”—Jonathan Lethem “There is not a more intense, prolific, or apocalyptic writer of fiction in America than Brian Evenson.”—George Saunders

Laila Lalami : The Moor’s Account

Wed, 16 Mar 2023 13:51:28 +0000

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 record. In 1527, the conquistador Narváez sailed with a crew of 600 men & nearly 100 horses. Within a year there were only 4 survivors, one of them our narrator/protagonist Estebanico. As this dramatic chronicle unfolds, we come to understand that, contrary to popular belief, black men played a significant part in New World exploration, & that Native American men & women were not merely silent witnesses to it. In Laila Lalami’s deft hands, Estebanico’s memoir illuminates the ways in which stories transmigrate into history, even as storytelling offers a chance at redemption & survival.

Lacy M. Johnson : The Other Side

Wed, 17 Feb 2023 20:20:43 +0000

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 for a life lived in the body is triumphant. Johnson’s strength to free not only her physical self, but also to move through years of incapacitating fear by writing this book, is breathtaking: ‘I lift the chain from my neck, over my head, let it rattle to the floor’.”-author Kelle Groom

Keith Lee Morris : Travelers Rest

Wed, 20 Jan 2023 20:04:44 +0000

“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 in its shaken snow globe of a world. The language dazzles and the circumstances chill and put this story in the good company of Stephen King’s The Shining, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House, and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. This is a breakout book that will earn Morris the wide readership he richly deserves.”―Benjamin Percy, author of The Dead Lands and Red Moon

Mary Gaitskill : The Mare

Wed, 16 Dec 2022 16:47:21 +0000

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 everything for her “Gaitskill takes a premise that could have been preachy, sentimental, or simplistic—juxtaposing urban and rural, rich and poor, young and old, brown and white—and makes it candid and emotionally complex, spare, real, and deeply affecting. Gaitskill explores the complexities of love (mares, meres…) to bring us a novel that gallops along like a bracing bareback ride on a powerful thoroughbred.”-Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Valeria Luiselli : The Story of My Teeth

Thu, 19 Nov 2023 17:01:10 +0000

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 influences. Protagonist Gustavo “Highway” Sanchez Sanchez is a late-in-life world traveler, yarn spinner, collector, and legendary auctioneer. His most precious possessions are the teeth of the “notorious infamous” like Plato, Petrarch, and Virginia Woolf. Highway adds value to these teeth that he auctions off through the stories he tells of them, while The Story of My Teeth examines the value of storytelling itself.

Amelia Gray : Gutshot

Wed, 28 Oct 2023 17:31:28 +0000

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 fire, Jell-O and the occasional live animal.” And Vice Magazine calls it a book full of bodily fluids and strange sights and smells. That said, Gray’s work is not disturbing for its own sake, but as the Chicago Tribune says “has an unflinching intimacy that is completely and absorbingly her own” and that “if there is one story Gray is telling over and over again, it’s about the embodiedness of language, the blood and guts of books themselves.”

Ursula K. Le Guin : Steering The Craft

Thu, 01 Oct 2023 15:34:31 +0000

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 and morality, all of which are not separate from grammar, punctuation, tense, and point of view for Le Guin. Ursula K. Le Guin is the author of more than sixty books of fiction, fantasy, children’s literature, poetry, drama, criticism and translation. She talks today about her writing guide, Steering The Craft, newly rewritten and revised for writers of fiction and memoir in the 21st century.

Liz Prato : Baby’s On Fire

Wed, 23 Sep 2023 22:37:38 +0000

“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 the eternal possibility of mercy,” says writer Steve Almond about Liz Prato’s debut collection of stories. “The stories are at once beautifully written and tremendously compelling—not to mention filled with characters so full of life that they feel as real as people we know. A knockout collection.”—Molly Antopol, The UnAmericans. Liz is a fiction writer and essayist, teacher and editor, in Portland, Oregon.

David Biespiel : A Long High Whistle

Wed, 19 Aug 2023 20:02:11 +0000

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 writer of the longest running newspaper column on poetry in the U.S. A Long High Whistle discusses the work of nearly a hundred poets from ancient times to the present, in English and in translation. This collection will provide anyone, from the beginning poet to the mature writer to the lover of literature, with insights into what inspires poets, how poems are written and read, and how poetry situates itself in American life.

Rebecca Makkai : Music For Wartime

Wed, 05 Aug 2023 20:20:08 +0000

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 producer manipulates two contestants into falling in love, even as her own relationship falls apart. A young boy has a revelation about his father’s past when a renowned Romanian violinist plays a concert in their home. A composer records the folk songs of two women from a village on the brink of destruction. These stories—some inspired by her own family history—demonstrate Makkai’s extraordinary range as a storyteller, and confirm her as a master of the short story form.

Maggie Nelson : The Argonauts

Wed, 29 Jul 2023 16:18:23 +0000

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-gendered artist Harry Dodge, to a rigorous exploration of what iconic theorists have said about sexuality, gender, and the vexed institutions of marriage and child-rearing. The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of love and language, offering a firsthand account of the complexities and joys of (queer) family-making.

Lidia Yuknavitch : The Small Backs of Children

Wed, 15 Jul 2023 21:21:02 +0000

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 family. The image wins acclaim and prizes, becoming an icon for millions—and a subject of obsession for one writer, the photographer’s best friend, who has suffered a devastating tragedy of her own. In The Small Backs of Children, Lidia Yuknavitch explores the treacherous, often violent borders between war and sex, love and art. “Yuknavitch moves through narratives and structures like a literary banshee seeking a body. Fast, visceral, The Small Backs of Children is a gunshot meditation on art and violence and I couldn’t put it down.” (Vanessa Veselka, author of Zazen)

Mary Ruefle : An Incarnation of the Now

Wed, 03 Jun 2023 01:41:30 +0000

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 influence her. Ruefle is the author of ten books of poetry, the collected lectures Madness, Rack & Honey, a book of prose, a comic book, and the erasure, A Little White Shadow.

Neal Stephenson : Seveneves

Wed, 20 May 2023 12:04:53 +0000

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 of humanity far beyond our atmosphere, in outer space. Only a handful of survivors remain . . .Five thousand years later, their progeny—seven distinct races now three billion strong—embark on yet another audacious journey into the unknown . . .to an alien world utterly transformed by cataclysm and time: Earth. Neal Stephenson combines science, philosophy, psychology, & literature in a magnificent work of speculative fiction that offers a portrait of a future that is both extraordinary & eerily recognizable.

Viet Thanh Nguyen : The Sympathizer

Wed, 29 Apr 2023 20:51:55 +0000

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 be given passage aboard the last flights out of the country. The general and his compatriots start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, the captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong. A gripping spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature, film, and the wars we fight today.

Sarah Manguso : Ongoingness

Thu, 02 Apr 2023 00:57:40 +0000

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 simple statement belies a terror that she might miss something important. Then Manguso became pregnant & had a child, & these Copernican events generated an amnesia that put her into a different relationship with the need to document herself amid ongoing time. Ongoingness is a spare, meditative work that stands in stark contrast to the volubility of the diary-a haunting account of mortality & impermanence, of how we struggle to find clarity in the chaos of time that rushes around & over & through us.

Kelly Link : Get in Trouble

Wed, 04 Mar 2023 17:21:05 +0000

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, with each new short story, to take readers deeply into an unforgettable, brilliantly constructed fictional universe. Hurricanes, astronauts, evil twins, bootleggers, Ouija boards, iguanas, The Wizard of Oz, superheroes, the Pyramids . . . These are just some of the talismans of an imagination as capacious and as full of wonder as that of any writer today.

Sarah Gerard : Binary Star

Wed, 25 Feb 2023 21:22:28 +0000

The language of 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 Star is an account of a young woman struggling with anorexia and her long-distance, alcoholic boyfriend. On a road trip circumnavigating the U.S., they stumble into a book on veganarchism, and believe they’ve found a direction. Binary Star is a fast-moving saga of two young lovers and the culture that keeps them sick (or at least inundated with quick-fix solutions).

Miranda July : The First Bad Man

Wed, 28 Jan 2023 20:23:13 +0000

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 people’s babies. Cheryl is also obsessed with Phillip, a philandering board member at the women’s self-defense nonprofit where she works. She believes they’ve been making love for many lifetimes, though they have yet to consummate in this one. When Cheryl’s bosses ask if their twenty-one-year-old daughter, Clee, can move into her house for a little while, Cheryl’s eccentrically ordered world explodes. And yet it is Clee—the selfish, cruel blond bombshell—who bullies Cheryl into reality and, unexpectedly, provides her the love of a lifetime.

Leslie Jamison : The Empathy Exams

Thu, 18 Dec 2022 01:47:47 +0000

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 our basic understanding of others: How should we care about each other? How can we feel another’s pain, especially when pain can be assumed, distorted, or performed? Is empathy a tool by which to test or even grade each other? By confronting pain—real and imagined, her own and others’—Jamison uncovers a personal and cultural urgency to feel. She draws from her own experiences of illness and bodily injury to engage in an exploration that extends far beyond her life, spanning wide-ranging territory—from poverty tourism to phantom diseases, street violence to reality television, illness to incarceration—in its search for a kind of sight shaped by humility and grace.

Claudia Rankine : Citizen

Thu, 13 Nov 2023 04:07:30 +0000

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 short-listed for the National Book Award), Citizen: An American Lyric recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV—everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come to bear on a person’s ability to speak, perform, and stay alive.

William Gibson : The Peripheral

Wed, 05 Nov 2023 21:49:39 +0000

Where Flynne and her brother, Burton, live, jobs outside the drug business are rare. Fortunately, Burton has his veteran’s benefits, for neural damage he suffered from implants during his time in the USMC’s elite Haptic Recon force. Then one night Burton has to go out, but there’s a job he’s supposed to do—a job Flynne didn’t know he had. Beta-testing part of a new game, he tells her. The job seems to be simple: work a perimeter around the image of a tower building. Little buglike things turn up. He’s supposed to get in their way, edge them back. That’s all there is to it. He’s offering Flynne a good price to take over for him. What she sees, though, isn’t what Burton told her to expect. It might be a game, but it might also be murder. William Gibson joins Between The Covers host, David Naimon, to discuss his latest novel, The Peripheral.

David Mitchell : The Bone Clocks

Wed, 01 Oct 2023 20:27:47 +0000

“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…In his sixth novel, he’s brought together the time-capsule density of his eyes-wide-open adventure in traditional realism with the death-defying ambitions of Cloud Atlas until all borders between pubby England and the machinations of the undead begin to blur…Not many novelists could take on plausible Aboriginal speech, imagine a world after climate change has ravaged it and wonder whether whales suffer from unrequited love…Very few [writers] excite the reader about both the visceral world and the visionary one as Mitchell does.”—The New York Times Book Review

Ben Parzybok : Sherwood Nation

Wed, 10 Sep 2023 21:31:45 +0000

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 twenty-something barista and eternal part-time college student—she is an instant folk hero. Renee rides her swelling popularity and the public’s disgust at how the city has abandoned its people, raises an army . . . and secedes a quarter of the city. Sherwood Nation is the story of the rise and fall of a micronation within a city. It is a love story, a war story, a grand social experiment, a treatise on hacking and remaking government, on freedom and necessity, on individualism and community.

Karen Russell : Sleep Donation

Wed, 13 Aug 2023 10:22:49 +0000

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 wealthy and enigmatic Storch brothers the Corps’ reach has grown, with outposts in every major US city. Trish Edgewater, whose sister Dori was one of the first victims of the lethal insomnia, has spent the past seven years recruiting for the Corps. But Trish’s faith in the organization and in her own motives begins to falter when she is confronted by Baby A, the first universal sleep donor, and the mysterious Donor Y. Sleep Donation explores a world facing the end of sleep as we know it, where “Night Worlds” offer black market remedies to the desperate and sleep deprived, and where even the act of making a gift is not as simple as it appears.

Dinaw Mengestu : All Our Names

Wed, 30 Jul 2023 10:18:08 +0000

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 outside. But as the line between idealism and violence becomes increasingly blurred, the friends are driven apart—one into the deepest peril, as the movement gathers inexorable force, and the other into the safety of exile in the American Midwest. There, pretending to be an exchange student, he falls in love with a social worker and settles into small-town life. Yet this idyll is inescapably darkened by the secrets of his past: the acts he committed and the work he left unfinished. Most of all, he is haunted by the beloved friend he left behind, the charismatic leader who first guided him to revolution and then sacrificed everything to ensure his freedom. Writing within the grand tradition of Naipul, Greene, and Achebe, Mengestu gives us a political novel that is also a transfixing portrait of love and grace, of self-determination and the names we are given and the names we earn.

Jo Walton : My Real Children

Wed, 25 Jun 2023 17:28:33 +0000

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 children. But she remembers things that don’t seem possible. She remembers marrying Mark and having four children. And she remembers not marrying Mark and raising three children with Bee instead. She remembers the bomb that killed President Kennedy in 1963, and she remembers Kennedy in 1964, declining to run again after the nuclear exchange that took out Miami and Kiev. Two lives, two worlds, two versions of modern history. Each with their loves and losses, their sorrows and triumphs. Jo Walton’s My Real Children is the tale of both of Patricia Cowan’s lives…and of how every life means the entire world. “It explores issues of choice and chance and destiny and responsibility with the narrative tools that only science fiction affords, but it’s also a deeply poignant, richly imagined book about women’s lives in 20th- and 21st-century England, and, in a broader sense, about the lives of all those who are pushed to the margins of history: the disabled, the disenfranchised, the queer, the lower middle class.”—Publisher’s Weekly signature review

Roxane Gay : An Untamed State

Wed, 11 Jun 2023 20:56:45 +0000

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 back to the person she once was, and of how redemption is found in the most unexpected of places. An Untamed State establishes Roxane Gay as a writer of prodigious, arresting talent.

“Once you start this book, you will not be able to put it down. An Untamed State is a novel of hope intermingled with fear, a book about possibilities mixed with horror and despair. It is written at a pace that will match your racing heart, and while you find yourself shocked, amazed, devastated, you also dare to hope for the best, for all involved.”—Edwidge Danticat

Leni Zumas & Luca DiPierro : A Wooden Leg

Wed, 28 May 2023 17:46:51 +0000

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 utilize an element of chance and/or suggest multiple possible ways a text can be read. Leni Zumas and Luca DiPierro, the co-creators of A Wooden Leg: A Novel in 64 Cards, discuss A Wooden Leg in light of these traditions. Leni Zumas is a professor of creative writing in the MFA program at Portland State University and the author of the short story collection Farewell Navigator as well as the novel The Listeners, a finalist for the 2013 Oregon Book Award. Luca Di Pierro is an animator and illustrator whose work appears regularly on record and book covers and in animated films. Di Pierro is also the author of the art zine Das Ding and the book of fictions Biscotti Neri.

Lorrie Moore : Bark

Wed, 23 Apr 2023 18:00:16 +0000

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 about what it means to be alive in our time as that of Lorrie Moore.” Over the course of the past thirty years Lorrie Moore, has earned a place among the best and most beloved of American writers. The author of 4 collections of short stories, and 3 novels, Moore’s work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories of the Century, has won the O Henry Prize, and been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Orange Prize. A longstanding faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Lorrie Moore has recently become the Gertrude Conway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee. In addition to her fiction, she is a frequent essayist on popular culture for the New York Review of Books. And she is here today on Between The Covers to talk about her latest story collection “Bark” a collection the New York Times declares “will stand by itself as one of our funniest, most telling anatomies of human love and vulnerability.”

Kyle Minor : Praying Drunk

Wed, 09 Apr 2023 17:00:01 +0000

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 porcelain figurines. From Kentucky to Florida to Haiti, these seemingly disparate lives are woven together within a series of nested repetitions, enacting the struggle to remain physically and spiritually alive throughout the untamable turbulence of their worlds. In a masterful blend of fiction, autobiography, and surrealism, Kyle Minor shows us that the space between fearlessness and terror is often very small. Long before Praying Drunk reaches its plaintive, pitch-perfect end, Minor establishes himself again and again as one of the most talented younger writers in America. “I finished this book with my heart pounding and grateful, my coffee cold and my smile wide and crying like a baby.”—Daniel Handler

Helen Oyeyemi : Boy, Snow, Bird

Thu, 27 Mar 2023 04:05:16 +0000

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 widower and becomes stepmother to his winsome daughter, Snow Whitman. A wicked stepmother is a creature Boy never imagined she’d become, but elements of the familiar tale of aesthetic obsession begin to play themselves out when the birth of Boy’s daughter, Bird, who is dark-skinned, exposes the Whitmans as light-skinned African Americans passing for white. Among them, Boy, Snow, and Bird confront the tyranny of the mirror to ask how much power surfaces really hold. Dazzlingly inventive and powerfully moving, Boy, Snow, Bird is an astonishing and enchanting novel. With breathtaking feats of imagination, Helen Oyeyemi confirms her place as one of the most original and dynamic literary voices of our time.

Gina Frangello: A Life In Men

Wed, 12 Mar 2023 17:04:20 +0000

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 instigated by Nix, who has just learned that Mary has been diagnosed with a disease that will inevitably cut her life short. Nix, a free spirit by nature, is determined that Mary have the vacation of a lifetime, but by the time their visit to Greece is over, the ties between them have unraveled, and when they said goodbye, it’s for the last time.

Gina Frangello is the author of three books of fiction: A Life in Men (Algonquin 2014), which was a book club selection for NYLON magazine, The Rumpus and The Nervous Breakdown; Slut Lullabies (Emergency Press 2010), which was a Foreword Magazine Best Book of the Year finalist, and My Sister’s Continent (Chiasmus 2006).

Chang-rae Lee : On Such A Full Sea

Thu, 20 Feb 2023 01:35:22 +0000

“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 flames discussions of censorship; and 1984 is the lens through which we watch the Obama administration watching us. Chang-rae Lee’s unsettling new novel, On Such a Full Sea, arrives from that same frightening realm of total oversight and pinched individuality. . . . A brilliant, deeply unnerving portrait.”—The Washington Post

Selected by the The New Yorker as one of the twenty best writers under forty, Chang-rae Lee is also the author of Native Speaker, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award for first fiction, A Gesture Life, Aloft, and The Surrendered, and teaches fiction at Princeton University.

Gary Shteyngart : Little Failure

Thu, 23 Jan 2023 00:59:41 +0000

“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 a window into immigrant agony and ambition, Jewish angst, and anybody’s desperate need for a tribe. Readers who’ve fallen for Shteyngart’s antics on the page will relish the trademark humor. But here it’s laden and leavened with a deep, consequential psychological journey. Brave and unflinching, Little Failure is his best book to date.”—Mary Karr, bestselling author of Lit and The Liars’ Club

Veronica Gonzalez Peña : The Sad Passions

Thu, 19 Dec 2022 17:56:54 +0000

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 colonial past, spanning three generations, and shuttling from Mexico City to Oaxaca to the North Fork of Long Island to Veracruz, The Sad Passions is the lyrical story of a middle-class Mexican family torn apart by the undiagnosed mental illness of Claudia, a lost child of the 1960s and the mother of four little girls.

“The Sad Passions explodes the tired assumption that women’s interiority is intrinsically domestic, fanning out women’s inner lives like the vibrant sections of a peacock’s tail. It upends our expectations of a novel about women’s family life. The cumulative effect of Gonzalez Peña’s novel is that of a hall of mirrors: an intimate, personal hall of mirrors, a psychic hall of mirrors. This, she tells us, is where women live, how women live, in the company of past selves, future selves, in the anguished haunting of possible selves. This is where women’s lives happen, in the space in between memory and present, in the split-second recognition of one’s reflection, before turning from the glass and going out into the world.”-L.A. Review of Books

Kevin Sampsell : This Is Between Us

Thu, 21 Nov 2023 06:25:05 +0000

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, he’s also the editor of the Portland Noir fiction anthology, curated this year’s Wordstock literary festival, was in charge of LitHopPDX, Portland’s inaugural literary bar crawl, and is the publisher of the micro-press Future Tense Books. His own books include the collections Beautiful Blemish and Creamy Bullets, and his memoir A Common Pornography. His work has appeared in Tin House, Salon, McSweeney’s, Best Sex Writing 2012 and Best American Essays 2013, and he is here today on Between The Covers to talk about his novel, This is Between Us.

Lucy Corin : One Hundred Apocalypses

Thu, 31 Oct 2023 03:02:35 +0000

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 bright and promising. Today’s guest Lucy Corin is here on Between The Covers to talk about her new book from McSweeney’s, A Hundred Apocalypses and Other Apocalypses, a book playful both in form and content, that looks at this cultural moment from every perspective imaginable. Lucy Corin is the author of the novel Everyday Psychokillers: A History of Girls and the short story collection The Entire Predicament from Tin House Books. She is the program director of the creative writing program at UC Davis and the winner of the 2012 American Academy of Arts and Letters Rome Prize who described her writing as follows: “Lucy Corin sounds like no one; prickly, shrewd, faintly paranoid or furtive, witty and also savage, she has something of Paley’s gift for soliloquy combined with Dickinson’s passionate need to hold the world at bay, that sense of a voice emanating from a Skinner box. Her achievement is already dazzling, he promise immense.”

Jonathan Lethem : Dissident Gardens

Wed, 02 Oct 2023 18:41:08 +0000

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, he may be New York’s closest thing to having a bard. But Lethem is known as well for his genre fiction, his hard-boiled detective and science fiction books, his revival of the Marvel comic Omega the Unknown, and for editing the Library of America’s four-volume edition of Philip K. Dick’s novels. Yet another side of Jonathan Lethem is that of essayist on music and culture with books about John Carpenter, the New York Mets and the Talking Heads, with his remarkable Rolling Stone interview of Bob Dylan, and a profile of James Brown that the New York Times says “stands as the best writing ever about the greatest musician of the post-World War II era.” Given all of these accomplishments, it is no small thing that many call Lethem’s latest novel, Dissident Gardens, his best. Spanning three generations and eighty years, from the Jewish communists of Queens in the 1930s, to the folk revivalists of Greenwich Village in the 60s to the modern day Occupy movement, Dissident Gardens is both an intimate and epic portrayal of the American Left, of American Jews in the twentieth century, and of one family’s quest for transformation and self-reinvention one generation to the next.

Robert Boswell : Tumbledown

Thu, 19 Sep 2023 13:49:02 +0000

“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. Tumbledown, Robert Boswell’s latest, is just such a book—and one you’ll stay up until 3 a.m. reading. Over the course of a few weeks, James Candler, a 30-something therapist is about to lose everything including his job at the treatment center, his fiancée and his underwater house in the suburbs. Whether he actually loses it all becomes less important as the lives of his teenage patients intertwine with his…This look at life inside a for-profit mental health facility will make you laugh out loud, then sucker-punch you straight to sorrow…Boswell is a writer who can see the humanity, and yes, even beauty in just about anything, including a lone man sitting at a late-night diner, holding “a frosted doughnut to his nose as if it were a flower.” — Leigh Newman, ‘Oprah Book of the Week’ review

Jami Attenberg : The Middlesteins

Thu, 08 Aug 2023 03:44:02 +0000

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, it seems: Edie’s enormous girth. She’s obsessed with food-thinking about it, eating it-and if she doesn’t stop, she won’t have much longer to live. With pitch-perfect prose, huge compassion, and sly humor, Jami Attenberg has given us an epic story of marriage, family, and obsession. The Middlesteins explores the hopes and heartbreaks of new and old love, the yearnings of Midwestern America, and our devastating, fascinating preoccupation with food. David Naimon hosts.

Matt Bell : In the House Upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods

Wed, 10 Jul 2023 23:15:25 +0000

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 druids on mushrooms, The Stranger says it feels like a Tolkein epic set inside Plato’s cave and told by Carl Jung, others mention Calvino, Borges, Kafka, and the Bible. Earlier this year Flavorwire called Matt Bell one of the 10 best millennial writers you haven’t read (yet) and NPR called Bell’s book, In the House Upon the Dirt Between the Lake and the Woods, one of the smartest meditations on love, family and marriage in recent years.

NoViolet Bulawayo : We Need New Names

Thu, 27 Jun 2023 20:14:32 +0000

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 Africa, the Caine Prize for African Writing for her short story “Hitting Budapest,” first published by Junot Diaz in the Boston Review. Bulawayo talks with Between The Covers host, David Naimon, about her debut novel, We Need New Names, a powerful story of emigration and immigration during Zimbabwe’s Lost Decade.

Lenore Zion : Stupid Children

Thu, 30 May 2023 00:15:04 +0000

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 startling clarity through the filter of a smart, psychoanalytic perspective. No character is safe from Zion’s unapologetic examinations. She bestows her protagonist with an open mind, a sharp intellect, and a sweltering imagination—all of the requisite ingredients for a disturbing, fascinating novel.”

Benjamin Percy : Red Moon

Wed, 15 May 2023 18:36:07 +0000

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 murder her parents, Claire realizes just how different she is.

Patrick Gamble was nothing special until the day he got on a plane and hours later stepped off it, the only passenger left alive, a hero.

President Chase Williams has sworn to protect the people of the United States from the menace in their midst, but is becoming the very thing he has promised to destroy. So far the threat has been controlled by laws and violence and drugs. But the night of the red moon is coming, when an unrecognizable world will emerge, and the battle for humanity will begin. Host David Naimon talks with author Benjamin Percy about his new novel, Red Moon.

Karen Russell : Vampires in the Lemon Grove

Wed, 24 Apr 2023 16:36:53 +0000

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, and the National Book Foundation’s five best writers under the age of thirty-five. Last year, Karen Russell was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (alongwith David Foster Wallace and Denis Johnson) for her debut novel, Swamplandia! Now Russell is back with a magical new collection of stories, Vampires in the Lemon Grove, that showcases her gifts at their inimitable best.

Monica Drake : The Stud Book

Thu, 18 Apr 2023 15:52:07 +0000

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 complexities of what parenthood means today, Monica Drake’s second novel, The Stud Book, demonstrates that when it comes to babies, we can learn a lot by considering our place in the animal kingdom. Cheryl Strayed calls The Stud Book a “take your breath away good, blow your mind wise, crack your heart open beauty of a novel. A smart sexy, comic compassionate, absorbing and necessary story of our times.”

Sam Lipsyte : The Fun Parts

Thu, 14 Mar 2023 01:57:29 +0000

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 bestseller The Ask, offers up The Fun Parts, a book of bold, hilarious, and deeply felt fiction. Combining both the tragicomic dazzle of his beloved novels and the compressed vitality of his classic debut collection, The Fun Parts is Lipsyte at his best—an exploration of new voices and vistas from a writer Time magazine has said “everyone should read.”

George Saunders : Tenth of December

Thu, 14 Feb 2023 15:14:44 +0000

“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’ new story collection, Tenth of December, is a remarkable literary achievement. George Saunders joins host David Naimon to discuss his work.

“George Saunders is a complete original, unlike anyone else, thank god—and yet still he manages to be the rightful heir to three other complete American originals—Barthelme (the lyricism, the playfulness), Vonnegut (the outrage, the wit, the scope), and Twain (the common sense, the exasperation). There is no author I recommend to people more often—for ten years I’ve urged George Saunders onto everyone and everyone. You want funny? Saunders is your man. You want emotional heft? Saunders again. You want stories that are actually about something—stories that again and again get to the meat of matters of life and death and justice and country? Saunders. There is no one better, no one more essential to our national sense of self and sanity.”—Dave Eggers

Chris Kraus : Summer of Hate

Fri, 30 Nov 2023 19:46:57 +0000

Writer, filmmaker and art critic, Chris Kraus, talks with host David Naimon about her latest book, Summer of Hate. “Chris Kraus cuts a new and insatiably clever line in this explosive new work, breaking down big themes like art writing, romance, and capitalism,
within a wildly expansive take on the thriller.”-Janine Armin, Joyland.

Her other books include the novels I Love Dick, hailed by Rick Moody as one of the literary highpoints of the past two decades, Aliens & Anorexia, and Torpor. She is also the author of the essay collections Video Green and Where Art Belongs, and is a frequent contributor toArtforum, Bookforum, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Alexis Smith : Glaciers

Thu, 15 Nov 2023 20:19:05 +0000

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 books in the basement of a library, unrequited love for the former soldier who fixes her computer, and dreams of the perfect vintage dress move over a backdrop of deteriorating urban architecture and the imminent loss of the glaciers she knew as a young girl in Alaska. Glaciers was a Publishers Weekly pick of the week, received its coveted starred review, and was selected by Indie Booksellers for the January 2012 Indie Next List.

“An Alaska childhood and dreams of faraway cities such as Amsterdam inform Alexis M. Smith’s Glaciers, a delicate debut novel set in Portland, Oregon—“a slick fog of a city…drenched in itself”—that reveals in short, memory-soaked postcards of prose a day in the life of twentysomething library worker Isabel.”—Lisa Shea, ELLE Magazine

Jess Walter : Beautiful Ruins

Thu, 25 Oct 2023 05:46:41 +0000

Host David Naimon talks with Jess Walter about his sixth novel, Beautiful Ruins, a deeply human, roller coaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives. “…a blockbuster, with romance, majesty, comedy, smarts, and a cast of thousands. There’s lights, there’s camera, there’s action. If you want anything more from a novel than Jess Walter gives you in Beautiful Ruins, you’re getting thrown out of the theater.” (Daniel Handler, author of Why We Broke Up and creator of Lemony Snicket )

Walter is also the author of the national bestseller The Financial Lives of the Poets, the National Book Award finalist The Zero, the Edgar Award-winning Citizen Vince, Land of the Blind, and the New York Times Notable Book Over Tumbled Graves. He lives in Spokane, Washington, with his family.

Junot Diaz : This Is How You Lose Her

Thu, 27 Sep 2023 20:06:55 +0000

Host David Naimon speaks with Junot Diaz, a writer 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 Oscar Wao, a creative writing professor at MIT, the fiction editor at The Boston Review, and a founding member of Voices of Our Nations Arts Writing Workshop, which focuses on writers of color. In 2010 he was the first Latino to be appointed to the board of jurors for the Pulitzer Prize. Junot Diaz is here today to talk about his new short story collection This is How you Lose her, a much-anticipated work, sixteen years in the making.

Sheila Heti : How Should A Person Be?

Fri, 31 Aug 2023 20:14:13 +0000

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, “a raw, startling, genre-defying novel of friends, sex, and love in the new millennium-a compulsive read that’s like ‘spending a day with your new best friend.’ (Bookforum).

Canadian writer, Sheila Heti is the author of five books, all very different in form and style. She has written a collection of modern fables entitled The Middle Stories, a historical novella calledTicknor and an illustrated book for children, We Need a Horse. Recently she ventured into nonfiction with her book of “conversational philosophy,” The Chairs Are Where the People Go, written with Misha Glouberman, which the New Yorker chose as one of the best books of 2011. Sheila Heti also works as Interviews Editor at The Believer magazine.

Karen Thompson Walker : The Age of Miracles

Sat, 14 Jul 2023 20:09:57 +0000

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 days and nights grow longer and longer, gravity is affected, the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she struggles to navigate an ever-shifting landscape, Julia is also coping with the normal disasters of everyday life—the fissures in her parents’ marriage, the loss of old friends, the hopeful anguish of first love, the bizarre behavior of her grandfather who, convinced of a government conspiracy, spends his days obsessively cataloging his possessions. As Julia adjusts to the new normal, the slowing inexorably continues. This is the world of The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker. Host David Naimon talks with Karen about her debut novel which has taken the literary world by storm.

Vanessa Veselka : Zazen

Fri, 22 Jun 2023 20:21:07 +0000

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 points of vegan ideology, and customers at the vegan café where she works, talk of leaving the country for a life of escape and eco-tourism. But Della feels compelled to stay as the bombs inch closer. Even though she isn’t quite sure how to engage, and what exactly to fight for. This is the world of Zazen.

Today’s guest is Portland writer and debut novelist Vanessa Veselka. Vanessa’s work has appeared in Tin House, The Atlantic, BUST, Bitch Magazine, and Maximum Rock ‘n’ Roll, among others. She’s also a musician and a writing instructor at The Attic. She talks today with host David Naimon about her first book, Zazen, a finalist for the Oregon Book Awards, published by Red Lemonade Press.

Adam Levin : Hot Pink

Thu, 14 Jun 2023 04:12:12 +0000

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 one thousand pages, its protagonist was Gurion ben-Judah Maccabee, a 10 year old genius from Chicago, who may or may not be the Jewish Messiah. Levin’s short stories have appeared in Tin House, McSweeney’s and Esquire. He was the winner of the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award and the 2004 Joyce Carol Oates Fiction Prize among others. He lives in Chicago where he teaches Creative Writing at the School of the Art Institute and talks today, with host David Naimon, about his much anticipated follow-up to The Instructions, his short story collection, Hot Pink. “From walls that ooze unnameable, unidentifiable gel, through makers of children’s dolls designed to mimic the stages of digestive health, to old widowers in retirement looking back over their marriages, Levin manages to find the pathos and humor in living an ‘ordinary’ existence. Enter his world if you dare!”—The Jewish Times

Jon Raymond : Rain Dragon

Thu, 24 May 2023 05:50:11 +0000

Host David Naimon talks with Portland author, Jon Raymond, about his new novel Rain Dragon. Raymond is the author of the novel Half-life, and the short story collection, Livability, which won the Oregon Book Award and contained two stories that became the critically acclaimed movies Old Joy andWendy & Lucy.Jon Raymond was also the screenwriter for the film Meek’s Cutoff, and for the HBO miniseries Mildred Pierce starring Kate Winslet.

Rain Dragon follows a couple who leave the rat race in L.A. to work on an organic farm in Oregon. “Raymond expertly captures the emotions of personal growth and inner turmoil while bringing the Oregon setting to life with descriptive language reminiscent of that in his first novel, The Half Life (2004). Deep characters offset by a light tone make this work about dreams and realities an enjoyable read.”—Booklist

Nathan Englander : What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

Wed, 14 Mar 2023 20:12:39 +0000

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 Letters Sue Kauffman Prize. His first novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, set during Argentina’s Dirty War, came out in 2007. And this year finds Englander particularly busy, with a play, The Twenty-Seventh Man, premiering at The Public Theater in New York, the release of his original translation of the Haggadah, the prayerbook used during the Passover seder, edited by Jonathan Safran Foer, and his much anticipated story collection that we will talk about today, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. “It takes an exceptional combination of moral humility and moral assurance to integrate fine-grained comedy and large-scale tragedy as daringly as Nathan Englander does.”—Jonathan Franzen

“What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank vividly displays the humor, complexity, and edge that we’ve come to expect from Nathan Englander’s fiction-always animated by a deep, vibrant core of historical resonance.”
—Jennifer Egan

interview - David Naimon

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Diane Williams: The Collected Stories of Diane Williams

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