Winamp Logo
Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry Cover
Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry Profile

Between The Covers : Conversations with Writers in Fiction, Nonfiction & Poetry

English, Arts, 1 season, 284 episodes, 3 days, 13 hours, 48 minutes
About
Author interviews with today's best writers — established & up-and-coming — in fiction, nonfiction and poetry. Hosted by David Naimon & Tin House in Portland, Oregon. --The Guardian's 10 Best Book Podcasts --Book Riot's 15 Outstanding Podcasts for Book Lovers --the most intense and awesome podcast I've ever been a part of–Gary Shteyngart
Episode Artwork

Diana Khoi Nguyen : Root Fractures

Today’s conversation, with poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen, is not to be missed. Both of her books, Ghost Of and Root Fractures engage with and are shaped by her brother’s absence and the family silence surrounding it. Two years before his suicide, her brother quietly removed the family photos from their frames on […] The post Diana Khoi Nguyen : Root Fractures appeared first on Tin House.
2/5/20242 hours, 39 minutes, 49 seconds
Episode Artwork

Álvaro Enrigue : You Dreamed of Empires

Today’s conversation with Álvaro Enrigue about his latest novel, You Dreamed of Empires, translated by Natasha Wimmer, is set during the relatively undocumented first encounter between Moctezuma and Hernan Cortés. The novel dilates the knife’s edge moment when the Aztec emperor invites the conquistador, with his small band of Spanish soldiers, into the palaces of […] The post Álvaro Enrigue : You Dreamed of Empires appeared first on Tin House.
1/21/20240
Episode Artwork

Mathias Énard : The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild

Is Mathias Énard’s latest book formally influenced by the Buddhist Wheel of Time, by Jewish undertaker guilds, by François Rabelais’s scatological and philosophical prose & linguistic wordplay, by Catholic altarpiece polyptych panel paintings, and by the scandalous diaries of a Polish anthropologist?  The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is dedicated to les pensées sauvages, […] The post Mathias Énard : The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild appeared first on Tin House.
1/10/20241 hour, 49 minutes, 5 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : Denis Johnson : 2003

We are kicking off the new year with a serious blast from the past. A recording from the very first Tin House writers workshop in the summer of 2003 with novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright and screenwriter, Denis Johnson. This three part episode includes a remarkable reading from Johnson’s novella Train Dreams, an interview of […] The post Tin House Live : Denis Johnson : 2003 appeared first on Tin House.
1/5/20241 hour, 30 minutes, 33 seconds
Episode Artwork

Elle Nash : Deliver Me

Perhaps it is fitting that today’s episode, with writer and founding editor of Witchcraft Magazine, Elle Nash, is launched on the shortest day of the year, the longest night of darkness. Nash’s new novel Deliver Me explores the ways society tries to keep the light and the dark separate, to hide our unasked questions and […] The post Elle Nash : Deliver Me appeared first on Tin House.
12/21/20231 hour, 47 minutes, 7 seconds
Episode Artwork

Naomi Klein : Doppelganger : Part Two

Today’s part two of the conversation with Naomi Klein about Doppelganger highlights the Jewish elements in the book, and looks at them through the lens of Palestine & Israel. We discuss Zionism, Marxism and the Jewish Labor Bund’s notion of ‘hereness.” We look at the battles over the definition of  antisemitism and the ways accusations […] The post Naomi Klein : Doppelganger : Part Two appeared first on Tin House.
12/8/20232 hours, 28 minutes, 12 seconds
Episode Artwork

Kate Zambreno & Sofia Samatar : Tone

In Kate Zambreno & Sofia Samatar’s Tone they construct a shared voice, that of the “Committee to Investigate the Atmosphere.” Yes, they do this to investigate tone, in the writings of everyone from Nella Larsen to Clarice Lispector, W.G. Sebald to Franz Kafka, Renee Gladman to Bhanu Kapil. But in chasing the ever-elusive notion of tone, […] The post Kate Zambreno & Sofia Samatar : Tone appeared first on Tin House.
12/1/20232 hours, 30 minutes, 10 seconds
Episode Artwork

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore : Touching the Art

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore returns to Between the Covers to talk about her remarkable new book, Touching the Art. A mixture of memoir, biography, criticism and social history, Touching the Art is above all a complicated love letter to Mattilda’s grandmother, abstract artist Gladys Goldstein. Through an exploration of Mattilda’s love for Gladys’ art, Touching the Art becomes […] The post Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore : Touching the Art appeared first on Tin House.
11/9/20232 hours, 34 minutes, 18 seconds
Episode Artwork

Bhanu Kapil : Incubation : A Space for Monsters

Bhanu Kapil’s postcolonial feminist road novel Incubation: A Space for Monsters has long been out of print. The book of hers that most engages with the mythos and reality of America, Incubation follows Laloo, a British woman of Indian descent, who arrives in the US to give birth to a monster. This fictional story parallels […] The post Bhanu Kapil : Incubation : A Space for Monsters appeared first on Tin House.
11/1/20232 hours, 34 minutes, 20 seconds
Episode Artwork

Colleen Burner : Sister Golden Calf

Colleen Burner’s novella Sister Golden Calf is the story of two sisters on the road set in a world without men. Inspired, in part, by Vanessa Veselka’s essay “Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters,” Sister Golden Calf by its very existence interrogates the road novel tradition it now becomes a part […] The post Colleen Burner : Sister Golden Calf appeared first on Tin House.
10/23/202357 minutes, 35 seconds
Episode Artwork

Kate Briggs : The Long Form

Essayist and translator Kate Briggs’ first novel The Long Form is a book about, and happening within, the relationship between Helen and her infant daughter Rose. What does making a novel baby-centric, not a novel about babies, but where the baby is a main character, a vital actor that shapes the story that unfolds, that […] The post Kate Briggs : The Long Form appeared first on Tin House.
10/14/20232 hours, 21 minutes, 51 seconds
Episode Artwork

Lydia Davis : Our Strangers

Today’s conversation with Lydia Davis about her latest story collection, Our Strangers, a collection of 143 stories, is a deep dive into storytelling. These stories, whether incredibly short or quite long, often eschew backstory, exposition, context, or psychological interiority. Sometimes they even comment on other stories within the collection, or revise themselves, becoming something else entirely. […] The post Lydia Davis : Our Strangers appeared first on Tin House.
10/2/20231 hour, 58 minutes, 6 seconds
Episode Artwork

Naomi Klein : Doppelganger

Naomi Klein’s new book Doppelganger is a departure for her. One some of her closest friends even cautioned her against. On the one hand, it is what we come to expect from Klein, a brilliant framing, through the coining of new language, of our current political moment. And yet Doppelganger is decidedly more personal, more vulnerable, […] The post Naomi Klein : Doppelganger appeared first on Tin House.
9/20/20232 hours, 18 minutes, 24 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : Matthew Zapruder on Story of a Poem

You could say that Matthew Zapruder’s Story of a Poem is about the revision of a poem, that it follows the life of one poem, from its first phrase to its final draft, and invites us, in the most mesmerizing way, behind the curtain of the creative process of composition. And you wouldn’t be wrong. […] The post Tin House Live : Matthew Zapruder on Story of a Poem appeared first on Tin House.
9/12/20231 hour, 7 minutes, 50 seconds
Episode Artwork

Major Jackson : Razzle Dazzle

Poet and host of the The Slowdown podcast Major Jackson joins us to talk about Razzle Dazzle, his collection of new and selected poems that captures two decades in the life of a poet. Last year Major also released a book his selected prose, A Beat Beyond, his meditations on poetry and its relation to […] The post Major Jackson : Razzle Dazzle appeared first on Tin House.
9/4/20232 hours, 33 minutes, 52 seconds
Episode Artwork

JoAnna Novak : Contradiction Days

Five months pregnant, fearful of the future, and creatively blocked, JoAnna Novak becomes obsessed with the life, writings, and paintings of Agnes Martin. She fashions a three-week intensive writing regimen in northern New Mexico, where Martin lived and painted (and where Novak writes this book we discuss today). The structure of this retreat is inspired […] The post JoAnna Novak : Contradiction Days appeared first on Tin House.
8/21/20231 hour, 56 minutes, 58 seconds
Episode Artwork

Jorie Graham : To 2040

Jorie Graham’s first appearance on the show in 2021, to discuss her collection Runaway, is one of the most relistened to episodes in the show’s history, a conversation that, with each revisitation, seems to reveal something new about how to will oneself into presence as an artist and as a human. And it is a […] The post Jorie Graham : To 2040 appeared first on Tin House.
8/9/20233 hours, 28 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah on Surrealism

Today’s craft talk, “Why So Surrealism” by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, was recorded at the 2022 Tin House Summer Workshop. Prompted by a journalist who asked him to talk about how surrealistic and speculative conceits operated in and informed Black fiction, in this craft talk Adjei-Brenyah looks at the tropes of surrealist and speculative fiction within […] The post Tin House Live : Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah on Surrealism appeared first on Tin House.
8/4/202341 minutes, 2 seconds
Episode Artwork

Roger Reeves : Dark Days

Poet Roger Reeves calls the essays in his debut book of prose “fugitive essays.” And we explore what it means to write fugitively, to write into and from and toward fugitivity. If, as Fred Moten says, fugitivity is “a desire for and a spirit of escape and transgression of the proper and the proposed. . […] The post Roger Reeves : Dark Days appeared first on Tin House.
7/26/20232 hours, 16 minutes, 44 seconds
Episode Artwork

Isabella Hammad : Enter Ghost

Isabella Hammad’s latest book Enter Ghost is about a Palestinian theater group attempting to put on a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. The actors come from many different Palestinian experiences, one to the next. Some have Israeli citizenship. Others live in refugee camps or Ramallah or in the diaspora in Europe. But why […] The post Isabella Hammad : Enter Ghost appeared first on Tin House.
7/8/20231 hour, 45 minutes, 25 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : Max Porter on Shy

Even though each of Max Porter’s books is a stand-alone book, some have called Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, Lanny, and his latest, Shy, a “trilogy of boyhood,” a framing Max himself embraces. After a truly electrifying short reading from Shy, Max and I explore his impulse to examine and evoke boyhood across these three […] The post Tin House Live : Max Porter on Shy appeared first on Tin House.
7/1/20231 hour, 14 minutes
Episode Artwork

Megan Fernandes : I Do Everything I’m Told

Spareness, economy, and distillation are often put forth as obvious virtues in poetry. But what if there were a politics undergirding this aesthetic preference? In today’s conversation with poet Megan Fernandes we look at questions of poetics and aesthetics in relation to capitalism and colonialism and how a messier, more unruly poetics can trouble borders […] The post Megan Fernandes : I Do Everything I’m Told appeared first on Tin House.
6/20/20231 hour, 59 minutes, 45 seconds
Episode Artwork

Johanna Hedva : Your Love Is Not Good

What if you gave your fictional main character all of your own biographical details and family history but had them, at every point, choose “wrong”? At every point do the thing you yourself would be against? Johanna Hedva does just that, and their novel Your Love Is Not Good is not just full of sex […] The post Johanna Hedva : Your Love Is Not Good appeared first on Tin House.
6/10/20232 hours, 46 minutes, 58 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : Katie Holten on The Language of Trees

In Early Medieval Ireland there was a language called Ogham that was sometimes referred to as the “Celtic Tree Alphabet'” because its letters each corresponded to and depicted a different tree. At one point Ireland, now one of the most deforested countries in Europe, was largely covered in forest, its culture deeply entwined with the […] The post Tin House Live : Katie Holten on The Language of Trees appeared first on Tin House.
6/1/202352 minutes, 2 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live: Richard Powers on The Overstory

Back in 2019, when Richard Powers was a guest on Between the Covers for The Overstory, we also appeared together that very same night, in conversation again. This time, an onstage ticketed event at Revolution Hall before a live audience. I’ve wanted to share this second conversation ever since. Not only because I prepared two […] The post Tin House Live: Richard Powers on The Overstory appeared first on Tin House.
5/19/20231 hour, 34 minutes, 23 seconds
Episode Artwork

Melanie Rae Thon : As If Fire Could Hide Us

Melanie Rae Thon’s latest book, As If Fire Could Hide Us, is described not as a novel with three chapters, nor as a collection of three stories, but as “a love song in three movements.” What does it mean to see a story as song, to sing from or toward love, to experience a book’s […] The post Melanie Rae Thon : As If Fire Could Hide Us appeared first on Tin House.
5/10/20232 hours, 7 minutes, 10 seconds
Episode Artwork

Christina Sharpe : Ordinary Notes

There may be no writer, no thinker, who has shaped my conversations on the show more than Christina Sharpe. Whether her work is explicitly part of a conversation (in episodes with Ross Gay, Solmaz Sharif, Natalie Diaz, and Dionne Brand, to name a few) or whether her thought and vision provide a foundation and subtext […] The post Christina Sharpe : Ordinary Notes appeared first on Tin House.
5/1/20232 hours, 18 minutes, 13 seconds
Episode Artwork

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o : The Language of Languages

Today’s guest, novelist, storyteller, essayist, playwright, scholar, translator, and perennial front-runner for the Nobel Prize in Literature Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, is an iconic figure in postcolonial thought. His latest book, The Language of Languages, is the first book dedicated to his writings on translation and the status of African languages, globally and in Africa today, […] The post Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o : The Language of Languages appeared first on Tin House.
4/11/20231 hour, 52 minutes, 53 seconds
Episode Artwork

Charif Shanahan : Trace Evidence

Early in poet Charif Shanahan’s latest collection, Trace Evidence, we encounter the lines: “I want to ​tell you what for me it has been like. // To speak at all / I must occupy a position // In a system whose positions / I appear not to occupy.” How does one connect to others, be […] The post Charif Shanahan : Trace Evidence appeared first on Tin House.
4/1/20232 hours, 40 minutes, 15 seconds
Episode Artwork

Sabrina Orah Mark : Happily

Today’s guest is poet, storyteller, and now essayist Sabrina Orah Mark. Her latest book, Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales, is an intriguing blend of two radically different forms, memoir and fairy tale. Much as fairy tales are feral, forever escaping a simple, reductive meaning, forever changing shape and being retold, forever out of fashion […] The post Sabrina Orah Mark : Happily appeared first on Tin House.
3/14/20232 hours, 10 minutes, 14 seconds
Episode Artwork

Monica Youn : From From

In today’s conversation with poet Monica Youn we explore what it means to write from a poetics of difference rather than of authenticity, a poetics of deracination rather than identity. Youn’s latest poetry collection From From engages with the history of anti-Asian violence in the United States but is always conscious of the ways this […] The post Monica Youn : From From appeared first on Tin House.
3/3/20232 hours, 14 minutes, 18 seconds
Episode Artwork

Jai Chakrabarti : A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness

Today’s conversation with novelist and story writer Jai Chakrabarti is unusually wide-ranging, touching on everything from classical Indian aesthetics to Jewish ritual, from poetry to cognitive science, from Tagore’s plays to Buber’s philosophy, from sublimating the self to writing the other. Chakrabarti’s new story collection, A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness, engages with complex […] The post Jai Chakrabarti : A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness appeared first on Tin House.
2/20/20231 hour, 41 minutes, 50 seconds
Episode Artwork

Mariana Enriquez : Our Share of Night

Today’s guest, Argentinian novelist, short story writer, and journalist Mariana Enriquez has been called the queen of Latin American gothic horror. She is in the vanguard of a generation of Latin American women writers breaking new ground in the horror genre. We look at the ways her work extends Argentina’s long and storied tradition of […] The post Mariana Enriquez : Our Share of Night appeared first on Tin House.
2/1/20232 hours, 15 minutes, 4 seconds
Episode Artwork

Gabrielle Bates : Judas Goat

Today’s conversation is with poet, visual artist, editor, and podcast host Gabrielle Bates. The poems in Bates’ debut poetry collection Judas Goat feel both personal and mythic, violent and tender, human and much more than human, with an effect that haunts the reader long after closing the book. They also have a fascinating relationship to […] The post Gabrielle Bates : Judas Goat appeared first on Tin House.
1/20/20232 hours, 57 seconds
Episode Artwork

Georgi Gospodinov : Time Shelter

Today’s guest, Bulgarian novelist, storyteller, poet, essayist, and more, Georgi Gospodinov, is the perfect writer to bring in the new year. Gospodinov is a writer obsessed with beginnings and endings, with time, history, imagination, and memory. A writer raised on the stories of his grandmother, on the fantastical tales of Márquez and Borges, on the […] The post Georgi Gospodinov : Time Shelter appeared first on Tin House.
1/1/20231 hour, 53 minutes, 55 seconds
Episode Artwork

Lucy Ives : Life Is Everywhere

Novelist, short story writer, poet, and critic Lucy Ives’ new novel Life Is Everywhere has been heralded by some of our most formally inventive and playful writers today, from Jesse Ball to Alejandro Zambra to Percival Everett. No wonder as Life Is Everywhere, a book that contains other books, is hard to categorize. Some have […] The post Lucy Ives : Life Is Everywhere appeared first on Tin House.
12/22/20222 hours, 26 minutes, 43 seconds
Episode Artwork

Crafting with Ursula: Neil Gaiman on Word Magic & The Power of Telling Stories

Who better to talk about the unique power of telling stories than one of our great contemporary storytellers, Neil Gaiman? One deep way Neil Gaiman and Ursula K. Le Guin are kindred spirits is how they both share an abiding interest in the strange, uncanny relationship between truth and fiction, truth and myth, the imagination […] The post Crafting with Ursula: Neil Gaiman on Word Magic & The Power of Telling Stories appeared first on Tin House.
12/10/20221 hour, 39 minutes, 45 seconds
Episode Artwork

Sawako Nakayasu : Pink Waves

Of Sawako Nakayasu’s many literary endeavors—poetry, translation, performance art—it is hard to know where one begins and another ends. They each seem to not only be talking to each other but Sawako’s work also blurs the boundaries between them, nesting each within the next in a way that illuminates something about all three. Her latest […] The post Sawako Nakayasu : Pink Waves appeared first on Tin House.
12/1/20222 hours, 47 minutes, 18 seconds
Episode Artwork

Ama Codjoe : Bluest Nude

“On Seeing and Being Seen” is the title of an Ama Codjoe poem but it could just as easily be a description of her debut collection Bluest Nude as a whole. Bluest Nude is a book that engages with ways of seeing, and its poems often engage with visual art—poems that look at art forms made […] The post Ama Codjoe : Bluest Nude appeared first on Tin House.
11/20/20222 hours, 12 minutes, 55 seconds
Episode Artwork

Crafting with Ursula : Gabrielle Bellot on The Power of Names & Naming

Writer and editor Gabrielle Bellot joins Crafting with Ursula to discuss the power of names and naming across Le Guin’s work. From the very beginning, with Ged in Earthsea, a boy-wizard who is named in three very different ways, names have contained both power and an elusive mysterious quality for Le Guin. The ways names […] The post Crafting with Ursula : Gabrielle Bellot on The Power of Names & Naming appeared first on Tin House.
11/10/20222 hours, 35 minutes, 25 seconds
Episode Artwork

Hélène Cixous : Well-Kept Ruins

Today’s guest is poet, novelist, playwright, feminist theorist, literary critic, and philosopher Hélène Cixous. Perhaps best known for her iconic 1976 essay “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Cixous thought for much of her writing life that she would never write about her birthplace and childhood in Algeria, that she would never write about her mother, […] The post Hélène Cixous : Well-Kept Ruins appeared first on Tin House.
11/1/20221 hour, 29 minutes, 37 seconds
Episode Artwork

Billy-Ray Belcourt : A Minor Chorus

Poet Billy-Ray Belcourt has already transformed the memoir form, remaking it—strange, fresh, and new, in A History of My Brief Body. He does something similarly unexpected with his first novel, A Minor Chorus. Deeply aware of the history of the novel, of the sociopolitical forces that shaped what we consider a novel today, a form whose […] The post Billy-Ray Belcourt : A Minor Chorus appeared first on Tin House.
10/19/20221 hour, 42 minutes, 54 seconds
Episode Artwork

Crafting with Ursula : Maria Dahvana Headley on Feminist Translation & Classical Retellings

One of Le Guin’s lesser known but lifelong practices was that of a translator. Her translations of the first Latin American Nobel Prize Laureate in literature (and the only Latin American woman to receive the award), Gabriela Mistral, were the first truly substantive presentations of her work in both English and Spanish. She’s translated other […] The post Crafting with Ursula : Maria Dahvana Headley on Feminist Translation & Classical Retellings appeared first on Tin House.
10/10/20222 hours, 8 minutes, 49 seconds
Episode Artwork

Dionne Brand : Nomenclature — New and Collected Poems

Today’s guest Dionne Brand, to borrow the words of John Keene, “is without question one of the major living poets in the English language.” Kamau Brathwaite called Brand “our first major exile female poet.” Adrienne Rich described her as “a cultural critic of uncompromising courage, an artist in language and ideas, and an intellectual conscience […] The post Dionne Brand : Nomenclature — New and Collected Poems appeared first on Tin House.
10/1/20222 hours, 41 minutes, 8 seconds
Episode Artwork

Elaine Castillo : How to Read Now

“White supremacy makes for terrible readers” says today’s guest Elaine Castillo, arguing that we are all overeducated in a set of fundamentally terrible reading techniques, ones that impoverish us as readers and thinkers, ones that diminish the availability of meaning and meaningfulness in our lives. When Castillo says “read,” and suggests that how we read […] The post Elaine Castillo : How to Read Now appeared first on Tin House.
9/18/20222 hours, 48 minutes, 34 seconds
Episode Artwork

Crafting with Ursula : Lidia Yuknavitch on The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

Today’s conversation is about one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s most iconic and influential essays: The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, an essay that deserves an entire episode to itself. And who better to discuss it than Lidia Yuknavitch, whose latest novel Thrust follows a character who herself is a “carrier.” Because this essay has influenced […] The post Crafting with Ursula : Lidia Yuknavitch on The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction appeared first on Tin House.
9/8/20221 hour, 41 minutes, 2 seconds
Episode Artwork

Claire Schwartz : Civil Service

Claire Schwartz’ poetry collection Civil Service looks at the ways ordinary, everyday actions uphold and sustain state violence, the ways civility can and does serve extraordinary atrocities. The world of this collection, populated by civil positions—The Accountant, The Archivist, The Curator, The Intern—also has within it a fugitive voice, a disruptive voice, the voice of Amira. […] The post Claire Schwartz : Civil Service appeared first on Tin House.
9/1/20222 hours, 6 minutes, 11 seconds
Episode Artwork

Morgan Talty : Night of the Living Rez

Morgan Talty’s collection of linked short stories is set on the Penobscot Reservation on Indian Island in Maine. But Morgan is quick to point out that these stories are not Penobscot stories in so far as they do not ‘represent’ the Penobscot people, that even people who are praising the book are often falling into […] The post Morgan Talty : Night of the Living Rez appeared first on Tin House.
8/20/20222 hours, 8 minutes, 13 seconds
Episode Artwork

Crafting with Ursula : Julie Phillips on the Writing Mother

Ursula K. Le Guin’s biographer, Julie Phillips, joins “Crafting with Ursula” to talk about the writing mother, how Le Guin’s embrace of both writing and motherhood influenced her engagement with feminism, as well as with story form, and ultimately how it prompted her to develop a philosophical framework from which to re-vision her own work […] The post Crafting with Ursula : Julie Phillips on the Writing Mother appeared first on Tin House.
8/10/20221 hour, 56 minutes, 12 seconds
Episode Artwork

Daniel Mendelsohn : Three Rings — A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate

Daniel Mendelsohn’s latest book you could say is about digression and about ring composition, a form of storytelling with digression at its heart. And yet this book, about digression, is not only his shortest and most concise, a mere 112 pages, but also somehow contains all the concerns of his previous books and much more, […] The post Daniel Mendelsohn : Three Rings — A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate appeared first on Tin House.
8/1/20222 hours, 24 minutes, 6 seconds
Episode Artwork

Vauhini Vara : The Immortal King Rao

The Immortal King Rao is somehow three narratives in one, a historical novel set within a Dalit community in 1950s India, a near-future tech dystopia on the islands of the Puget Sound near Seattle, and an immigration story from the former to the latter. As a technology reporter herself, Vauhini Vara is interested in artificial […] The post Vauhini Vara : The Immortal King Rao appeared first on Tin House.
7/20/20221 hour, 59 minutes, 45 seconds
Episode Artwork

Crafting with Ursula : William Alexander on Writing for Children

“People who deny the existence of dragons are often eaten by them,” says Ursula K. Le Guin. “From within.” This is just one of many quotes that arise from Le Guin’s high regard for the child reader and for the unique intelligence of children. Her philosophy around the importance of the imagination and of imaginative […] The post Crafting with Ursula : William Alexander on Writing for Children appeared first on Tin House.
7/10/20222 hours, 12 minutes, 23 seconds
Episode Artwork

Hernan Diaz : Trust

Hernan Diaz’s debut novel In the Distance went on to become not only one of the great debuts of the year, but a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction and the PEN/Faulkner award. His follow-up Trust is also a book that engages with and interrogates the stories that the United States tells about itself and […] The post Hernan Diaz : Trust appeared first on Tin House.
7/1/20222 hours, 24 minutes, 56 seconds
Episode Artwork

Rae Armantrout : Finalists

The first time Rae Armantrout came on the show, in 2017, we looked at her poetry through the lens of her interest in quantum physics. Now, five years later, with the release of this double collection of poems, we look at her career-long desire to cultivate a poetics that encourages life to interrupt and interject […] The post Rae Armantrout : Finalists appeared first on Tin House.
6/19/20221 hour, 53 minutes, 43 seconds
Episode Artwork

Crafting with Ursula : Kim Stanley Robinson on Ambiguous Utopias

Today’s guest, Kim Stanley Robinson, is perhaps the living writer most associated with utopian literature today. And as a student of the philosopher, political theorist, and literary critic Fredric Jameson, Robinson has thought deeply about the history of utopias, the history of the novel, and the strange hybrid form that became the utopian novel. In […] The post Crafting with Ursula : Kim Stanley Robinson on Ambiguous Utopias appeared first on Tin House.
6/10/20221 hour, 59 minutes, 49 seconds
Episode Artwork

Courtney Maum — The Year of the Horses

Courtney Maum’s latest book, her memoir The Year of the Horses, is about a writer at a rough point in her writing career, in her marriage, as a mother, as a woman, finding a way back to herself in all of these spheres by learning to listen and communicate, outside of language, to another species. […] The post Courtney Maum — The Year of the Horses appeared first on Tin House.
6/1/20222 hours, 21 minutes, 32 seconds
Episode Artwork

Ada Limón : The Hurting Kind

Today’s guest Ada Limón discusses her latest collection of poetry, The Hurting Kind, whose poems ask and explore what it means to be a human animal among animals, and how language can be a means or an obstacle to this desire. We talk about the relationship of joy to death, poetry to praise, and the […] The post Ada Limón : The Hurting Kind appeared first on Tin House.
5/20/20222 hours, 23 minutes, 34 seconds
Episode Artwork

Crafting with Ursula : adrienne maree brown on Social Justice & Science Fiction

Today’s conversation with adrienne maree brown begins with the notion that all organizing is science fiction, and thus that social justice and science fiction are intricately linked imaginative acts, acts that have real effects in the world at large. brown looks at works by Le Guin that she considers foundational texts for activists and organizers, […] The post Crafting with Ursula : adrienne maree brown on Social Justice & Science Fiction appeared first on Tin House.
5/10/20222 hours, 38 minutes, 39 seconds
Episode Artwork

Cristina Rivera Garza : New and Selected Stories

Cristina Rivera Garza returns to the show to discuss her New and Selected Stories, which gathers together fiction across thirty years of her writing life. Some are stories translated into English for the first time. Others are stories in English that haven’t yet appeared in Spanish. Still others are new versions, rewritten, retranslated or both. We […] The post Cristina Rivera Garza : New and Selected Stories appeared first on Tin House.
5/1/20222 hours, 12 minutes, 28 seconds
Episode Artwork

Caren Beilin : Revenge of the Scapegoat

Today’s guest, Caren Beilin, talks about her latest novel Revenge of the Scapegoat. All four of her books—two nonfiction, two fiction—each stand alone but they each also share recognizable people/characters that travel across books and across genre. How do the fictional versions of the real people in her life—her partner, her parents, her siblings, her […] The post Caren Beilin : Revenge of the Scapegoat appeared first on Tin House.
4/20/20222 hours, 50 minutes, 45 seconds
Episode Artwork

Crafting with Ursula : Karen Joy Fowler on Experimental Women, Animals, Science & Story

Today’s guest on Crafting with Ursula, the award-winning writer of science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction Karen Joy Fowler, was a longstanding friend of Ursula K. Le Guin. And they both shared a deep interest not only in science, but also in raising questions about the biases deeply embedded in the way we conduct it […] The post Crafting with Ursula : Karen Joy Fowler on Experimental Women, Animals, Science & Story appeared first on Tin House.
4/10/20221 hour, 55 minutes, 5 seconds
Episode Artwork

Sheila Heti : Pure Colour

Sheila Heti returns to Between the Covers to discuss her latest unclassifiable novel Pure Colour. When something happens in your life that upends everything you thought you knew, that changes what you notice and value, something that is hard, if not impossible, to put into language, that mystifies you even now, how do you find […] The post Sheila Heti : Pure Colour appeared first on Tin House.
4/1/20221 hour, 31 minutes, 50 seconds
Episode Artwork

Alejandro Zambra : Chilean Poet

Today’s guest is Chilean novelist, essayist, literary critic, and poet Alejandro Zambra, talking about his latest novel Chilean Poet, a novel brimming over with, yes, Chilean poets and poems, but also with love and laughter, artistic dreams and failures, and the desire to find language for things deeply felt that have no name. This conversation, […] The post Alejandro Zambra : Chilean Poet appeared first on Tin House.
3/20/20222 hours, 33 minutes, 38 seconds
Episode Artwork

Crafting with Ursula : Isaac Yuen on Writing Nature & Nature Writing

Today’s “Crafting with Ursula,” a conversation with nature writer Isaac Yuen, explores Le Guin’s writing of the nonhuman other in her fiction. Why might we consider decentering the human within our stories and how do we do so? How does one evoke a truly alien intelligence (i.e. that of a plant or an insect) but […] The post Crafting with Ursula : Isaac Yuen on Writing Nature & Nature Writing appeared first on Tin House.
3/10/20221 hour, 37 minutes, 33 seconds
Episode Artwork

Solmaz Sharif : Customs

It’s been five years since Solmaz Sharif’s first appearance on Between the Covers, for her National Book Award–finalist debut collection Look. Since then, many listeners have pointed to this conversation as one of the most memorable episodes to date. Solmaz returns today to discuss her much-anticipated follow-up, Customs. We talk about belonging, exile and language, about what […] The post Solmaz Sharif : Customs appeared first on Tin House.
3/1/20222 hours, 25 minutes, 47 seconds
Episode Artwork

Gabrielle Civil : the déjà vu

Writer and performance artist Gabrielle Civil talks about her latest book the déjà vu: black dreams & black time, as well as her chapbook ( ghost gestures ), chosen by Bhanu Kapil for the Gold Line Press Nonfiction prize. What does Civil mean by “Black time” and how does she enact this in the déjà […] The post Gabrielle Civil : the déjà vu appeared first on Tin House.
2/22/20222 hours, 23 minutes, 15 seconds
Episode Artwork

Crafting with Ursula : Molly Gloss on Writing the Clear, Clean Line

Today’s guest on the second episode of Crafting with Ursula, Molly Gloss, the acclaimed writer of both award-winning science fiction and fantasy as well as feminist Westerns, has a particular insight into the work and writing life of Le Guin. Gloss’ writing career began as a student of Le Guin’s in a workshop in the […] The post Crafting with Ursula : Molly Gloss on Writing the Clear, Clean Line appeared first on Tin House.
2/10/20221 hour, 7 minutes, 40 seconds
Episode Artwork

James Hannaham : Pilot Impostor

Writer, critic, performer, & visual artist James Hannaham talks about his latest and most uncategorizable book Pilot Impostor. This book slips between the borders of prose and poetry, fiction and nonfiction, image and text, facts and fake news, selfhood and persona, pretending and privilege. And Pilot Impostor comes into being piece by piece through an engagement […] The post James Hannaham : Pilot Impostor appeared first on Tin House.
2/1/20221 hour, 51 minutes, 55 seconds
Episode Artwork

Rabih Alameddine : The Wrong End of the Telescope

Rabih Alameddine talks about his new novel The Wrong End of the Telescope, which is set on the island of Lesbos amidst the medical personnel and tourist-volunteers involved with helping the arriving Syrian refugees. Interestingly, the writer, one suspiciously similar to Rabih himself, is a secondary character in this novel, a character who asks Mina, […] The post Rabih Alameddine : The Wrong End of the Telescope appeared first on Tin House.
1/20/20222 hours, 4 minutes, 19 seconds
Episode Artwork

Crafting with Ursula : Becky Chambers on Creating Aliens & Alien Cultures

Today’s guest, Becky Chambers, discusses her own work, and her own considerations when imagining alien cultures and the beings that inhabit them. She does this in light of Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness and Le Guin’s short story, “Coming of Age in Karhide,” written by Le Guin 25 years later, but within […] The post Crafting with Ursula : Becky Chambers on Creating Aliens & Alien Cultures appeared first on Tin House.
1/10/20221 hour, 16 minutes, 30 seconds
Episode Artwork

Victoria Chang : Dear Memory

Poet Victoria Chang talks about her latest and most uncategorizable book Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief. A book composed largely of essay-like letters, Dear Memory also contains collages by Victoria, created from the artifacts (mementos, documents, photographs) found in her family’s storage locker, and short poems which she places among the images. […] The post Victoria Chang : Dear Memory appeared first on Tin House.
1/1/20222 hours, 15 minutes, 10 seconds
Episode Artwork

Valerie Mejer Caso : Edinburgh Notebook

Today’s guest, Mexican poet, painter, and translator Valerie Mejer Caso talks about her latest book, the bilingual publication of poetry, collage, and photography Edinburgh Notebook, translated by Michelle Gil-Montero for Action Books. What does it mean to write something both autobiographical and surreal, both dream-like and real? How can questions of selfhood and identity (the […] The post Valerie Mejer Caso : Edinburgh Notebook appeared first on Tin House.
12/13/20211 hour, 53 minutes, 42 seconds
Episode Artwork

Raymond Antrobus : All The Names Given & The Perseverance

British poet, educator, and writer Raymond Antrobus has two poetry collections out this year. The US release of his award-winning debut The Perseverance and his follow-up, just out now, All The Names Given. We discuss both books in relation to Antrobus’ own particular deaf poetics. What questions do his poems raise about audience and accessibility, […] The post Raymond Antrobus : All The Names Given & The Perseverance appeared first on Tin House.
12/1/20212 hours, 28 minutes, 55 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tice Cin : Keeping the House

Tice Cin’s debut novel Keeping the House is set within the Turkish Cypriot community of North London. But while it is also set within the heroin trade there, this book is not a crime novel, or if it is, it is like no crime novel you’ve read before. Keeping the House is a book, by Cin’s […] The post Tice Cin : Keeping the House appeared first on Tin House.
11/11/20211 hour, 51 minutes, 53 seconds
Episode Artwork

Rosmarie Waldrop : The Nick of Time

Today’s guest, poet and translator Rosmarie Waldrop, is best known for her prose poetry and for good reason. Waldrop is one of the great prose poetry practitioners and innovators over the course of the last half century. We speak about her latest collection, The Nick of Time, through the lens of the themes, questions, and […] The post Rosmarie Waldrop : The Nick of Time appeared first on Tin House.
11/1/20211 hour, 52 minutes, 56 seconds
Episode Artwork

Percival Everett : The Trees

Today’s guest, Percival Everett, author of twenty-one novels, four short story collections, six collections of poetry and a children’s book, has also been a horse and mule trainer, a jazz guitarist, a fly fisherman, a rehabilitator of mandolins, and an abstract painter. He is, however, best known for his “gleefully unhinged” (New York Times) hard-to-categorize […] The post Percival Everett : The Trees appeared first on Tin House.
10/18/20211 hour, 16 minutes, 31 seconds
Episode Artwork

Myriam J. A. Chancy : What Storm, What Thunder

Haitian-Canadian-American writer Myriam Chancy is an acclaimed novelist but she is also a literary scholar who studies, among other things, storytelling. As a scholar instrumental in inaugurating Haitian women’s studies as a contemporary field of specialization, and one who has argued that much of Haitian women’s literature should be viewed through the lens of the […] The post Myriam J. A. Chancy : What Storm, What Thunder appeared first on Tin House.
10/5/20212 hours, 45 minutes, 23 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : Negotiating the Love and Renouncing the Rest with Destiny O. Birdsong and Donika Kelly

“Negotiating the Love and Renouncing the Rest,” today’s Tin House Live conversation between poets Destiny O. Birdsong & Donika Kelly, was recorded at the 2021 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. Among many other things, they ask what it would mean to center yourself in your own work, in your own story. How would that look, […] The post Tin House Live : Negotiating the Love and Renouncing the Rest with Destiny O. Birdsong and Donika Kelly appeared first on Tin House.
9/20/20211 hour, 5 minutes, 12 seconds
Episode Artwork

Pádraig Ó Tuama : In the Shelter & Borders and Belonging

Irish theologian, storyteller, poet, conflict mediator, and host of the podcast Poetry Unbound Pádraig Ó Tuama joins David to discuss the role of both narrative storytelling and poetry in relationship to encountering ‘the other.’ How can the stories we tell about ourselves prevent us from seeing who we are, from being open to accountability and change, […] The post Pádraig Ó Tuama : In the Shelter & Borders and Belonging appeared first on Tin House.
9/10/20212 hours, 32 minutes, 55 seconds
Episode Artwork

Adania Shibli : Minor Detail

The latest book by Palestinian novelist Adania Shibli, Minor Detail, was a finalist for the National Book Award for Translated Literature, and longlisted for the International Booker Prize. Shibli talks about what it means that she doesn’t write about Palestine but rather from Palestine. And why for her, as a writer, so many of the […] The post Adania Shibli : Minor Detail appeared first on Tin House.
9/1/20211 hour, 59 minutes, 39 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : Writing On Your Own Terms with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Originally delivered at the 2021 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore’s electrifying talk “Writing On Your Own Terms” explores what it means to write against the canonical imperative, to write against the world as it is, to instead write on your own terms, toward community, and specifically toward the community of people who […] The post Tin House Live : Writing On Your Own Terms with Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore appeared first on Tin House.
8/19/202142 minutes, 7 seconds
Episode Artwork

Kaveh Akbar : Pilgrim Bell

Today’s guest, poet Kaveh Akbar, discusses his latest poetry collection Pilgrim Bell. Given that Akbar once suggested that syntax was identity, how do the changes in Akbar’s own poetry, from his first collection to now, reflect changes in himself as a person? Akbar talks about the ways in which poetry can be a spiritual technology, […] The post Kaveh Akbar : Pilgrim Bell appeared first on Tin House.
8/10/20212 hours, 11 minutes, 20 seconds
Episode Artwork

Callum Angus : A Natural History of Transition

Callum Angus’s A Natural History of Transition is described as a collection of short stories “that disrupts the notion that trans people can only have one transformation.” Angus talks about trans narratives, both the ones most commonly seen in the culture at large, and his notion of transness, not as a journey between two static […] The post Callum Angus : A Natural History of Transition appeared first on Tin House.
8/1/20212 hours, 25 minutes, 49 seconds
Episode Artwork

Douglas Kearney : Sho

Today’s episode with poet Douglas Kearney is about his latest book of poetry, Sho, and the poetry-performance album (with Haitian sound artist Val Jeanty) Fodder. Throughout Kearney’s career he has engaged with the tension between the stage and the page, the eye and the ear, the word and the body, all as a means to […] The post Douglas Kearney : Sho appeared first on Tin House.
7/12/20212 hours, 43 minutes, 14 seconds
Episode Artwork

Arthur Sze : The Glass Constellation : New & Collected Poems

Arthur Sze, winner of the 2019 National Book Award in Poetry for Sight Lines, joins David Naimon to discuss his latest book, The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems. Together they step back to take in a half century of Arthur’s work, not only how it has changed and why, tracking the growth of a […] The post Arthur Sze : The Glass Constellation : New & Collected Poems appeared first on Tin House.
7/1/20212 hours, 19 minutes, 18 seconds
Episode Artwork

Anakana Schofield : Bina

Today’s guest, Irish Canadian writer Anakana Schofield, joins us to talk about her latest novel, Bina, winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Bina was also shortlisted for the 2020 Goldsmith Prize, awarded to fiction that pushes the boundaries of form (in the spirit of  Walter Benjamin who said “All great works of […] The post Anakana Schofield : Bina appeared first on Tin House.
6/16/20212 hours, 30 minutes, 13 seconds
Episode Artwork

Doireann Ní Ghríofa : A Ghost in the Throat & To Star the Dark

Irish poet Doireann Ní Ghríofa joins us to talk about her latest poetry collection, To Star the Dark, and her prose debut, A Ghost in the Throat, a debut that has captured the imaginations (and all the awards) in Ireland and the UK and is just out now in North America. A Ghost in the […] The post Doireann Ní Ghríofa : A Ghost in the Throat & To Star the Dark appeared first on Tin House.
6/1/20212 hours, 15 minutes, 44 seconds
Episode Artwork

Abdellah Taïa : A Country For Dying

Today’s guest, Moroccan writer and filmmaker Abdellah Taïa discusses his most recent novel A Country For Dying translated by Emma Ramadan and winner of the 2021 PEN Translation Award. We talk about voice in relation to self, story in relation to truth, writing in one’s second language, particularly a language imposed by colonization, about making that […] The post Abdellah Taïa : A Country For Dying appeared first on Tin House.
5/10/20212 hours, 17 minutes, 52 seconds
Episode Artwork

Elissa Washuta : White Magic

Today’s episode of Between the Covers is with writer Elissa Washuta about White Magic, her new memoir in essays just out from Tin House. Elissa Washuta’s body of work, and White Magic is no exception, is deeply engaged with form, particularly in relationship to the telling of our own true stories. How do we find […] The post Elissa Washuta : White Magic appeared first on Tin House.
5/1/20212 hours, 20 minutes, 14 seconds
Episode Artwork

Rikki Ducornet : Trafik

Writer, poet, and painter Rikki Ducornet returns to Between the Covers to discuss her latest novel Trafik which is her first foray into science fiction. Ducornet’s body of work—surrealist, alchemical, gnostic, metamorphic—is sparked by the wonder and mystery of dreams, as well as by the shared company of the non-human other, the eels and butterflies […] The post Rikki Ducornet : Trafik appeared first on Tin House.
4/18/20211 hour, 46 minutes, 50 seconds
Episode Artwork

Jorie Graham : Runaway

Today’s guest is poet Jorie Graham. We speak about her fifteenth book of poetry, Runaway. This latest book, along with the three that precede it—Sea Change, Place, and Fast—confronts our accelerating trajectory toward climate disaster. But as Lidija Haas says for Harper’s Magazine, Graham “in her poems remakes a world you can inhabit, one in […] The post Jorie Graham : Runaway appeared first on Tin House.
4/1/20212 hours, 45 minutes, 46 seconds
Episode Artwork

Brandon Hobson : The Removed

Today’s Between the Covers conversation with Brandon Hobson is about his novel The Removed, his first book since his National Book Award finalist, Where the Dead Sit Talking. The Removed places us with the Echota family fifteen years after the death of their son Ray-Ray at the hands of the police, and in the long shadow […] The post Brandon Hobson : The Removed appeared first on Tin House.
3/16/20211 hour, 54 minutes, 39 seconds
Episode Artwork

Viet Thanh Nguyen : The Committed

Today’s guest, Viet Thanh Nguyen, returns to Between the Covers after six years to discuss The Committed, his much-anticipated follow-up to the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel The Sympathizer. The second book in this trilogy finds our protagonist in the French Vietnamese community of Paris in the 1980s. We talk about the differences between France and the […] The post Viet Thanh Nguyen : The Committed appeared first on Tin House.
3/2/20212 hours, 1 second
Episode Artwork

Ross Gay : Be Holding

Today’s Between the Covers conversation is with the poet Ross Gay about Be Holding, his book-length poem that emerges from a sustained meditation on a mere few seconds of the basketball career of Julius Erving (aka Dr. J). Be Holding is a finalist for this year’s PEN/Jean Stein Book Award, given to a work “which […] The post Ross Gay : Be Holding appeared first on Tin House.
2/16/20212 hours, 1 minute, 10 seconds
Episode Artwork

Teju Cole : Fernweh

Today’s guest is writer, photographer, critic, and curator Teju Cole. In this extended conversation, we use Cole’s latest photo book Fernweh as a lens through which to look at his entire career, from his novels to his essay collection, from his collaborative work of image-text to the curation of his Spotify playlists. “Who is a stranger? Who […] The post Teju Cole : Fernweh appeared first on Tin House.
2/1/20212 hours, 52 minutes, 22 seconds
Episode Artwork

Nnedi Okorafor : Remote Control

Today’s episode is with one of today’s great writers of science fiction and fantasy, Nnedi Okorafor. Using her new novella Remote Control (Tor Books) as a lens and a frame, we discuss the difference between Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, questions of hybrid identity and home within her stories, her use of Nigerian, Namibian, and Ghanian cosmologies […] The post Nnedi Okorafor : Remote Control appeared first on Tin House.
1/19/20211 hour, 49 minutes, 16 seconds
Episode Artwork

Vanessa Veselka : The Great Offshore Grounds

Vanessa Veselka returns to Between the Covers, eight years after her first appearance, to discuss her new novel The Great Offshore Grounds. Longlisted for this year’s National Book Award in Fiction, Roxane Gay calls The Great Offshore Grounds epic, original, and “utterly engrossing.” Lidia Yuknavitch adds: “This novel is thrilling in its content, daring in […] The post Vanessa Veselka : The Great Offshore Grounds appeared first on Tin House.
1/1/20212 hours, 23 minutes, 51 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : Publishing, Power Structures & Creative Practice with Leni Zumas & Janice Lee

This Tin House Live conversation between Leni Zumas and Janice Lee, “Publishing, Power Structures, and Creative Practice,” was recorded at the summer 2020 Tin House Writers Workshop. Leni Zumas is the author most recently of the novel Red Clocks, a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice and winner of the Oregon Book Award for […] The post Tin House Live : Publishing, Power Structures & Creative Practice with Leni Zumas & Janice Lee appeared first on Tin House.
12/23/20201 hour, 12 minutes, 7 seconds
Episode Artwork

Natalie Diaz : Postcolonial Love Poem : Part Two

Today’s episode of Between the Covers is a first for the show, a return to and extension of a recent episode with Natalie Diaz.  Today’s ‘part two’ does not entirely depend upon part one, but it does refer back to it with frequency.  So if you would like to get the fullest experience begin here. […] The post Natalie Diaz : Postcolonial Love Poem : Part Two appeared first on Tin House.
12/10/20201 hour, 58 minutes, 34 seconds
Episode Artwork

Alice Oswald : Nobody

Today’s episode of Between the Covers is a conversation with poet and classicist Alice Oswald. Widely considered one of our great living poets, Oswald is the 46th professor of poetry at the University of Oxford, and the first woman to hold the poetry chair in its over three centuries of existence. Perhaps best known for Memorial, […] The post Alice Oswald : Nobody appeared first on Tin House.
12/1/20201 hour, 37 minutes, 53 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : Writing Pop Culture with Shayla Lawson & Hanif Abdurraqib

Join poet-essayists Hanif Abdurraqib & Shayla Lawson for an extended conversation on writing pop culture (and so much more).  This conversation was recorded at the 2020 Tin House Writers Workshop.  Shayla’s most recent book is This is Major: Notes on Diana Ross, Dark Girls and Being Dope & Hanif’s next book is A Little Devil in […] The post Tin House Live : Writing Pop Culture with Shayla Lawson & Hanif Abdurraqib appeared first on Tin House.
11/25/20201 hour, 13 minutes, 12 seconds
Episode Artwork

Elisa Gabbert : The Unreality of Memory

“Amid impending disasters too vast even to be perceived, what can we do―cognitively, morally, and practically? Gabbert, a tenacious researcher and a ruthless self-examiner, probes this ultimate abstraction in her essays, goes past wordless dread and comes up with enough reasoned consideration to lead us through. Do you feel―and how can you not―as if your […] The post Elisa Gabbert : The Unreality of Memory appeared first on Tin House.
11/14/20202 hours, 18 minutes, 51 seconds
Episode Artwork

Ayad Akhtar : Homeland Elegies

“An urgent, intimate hybrid of memoir and fiction, Homeland Elegies lays bare the broken heart of our American dream turned reality TV nightmare. The book . . . brilliantly captures how we got to this exact moment in time and at what cost. Stunning.” —A. M. Homes “An unflinchingly honest self-portrait by a brilliant Muslim-American […] The post Ayad Akhtar : Homeland Elegies appeared first on Tin House.
11/1/20201 hour, 59 minutes, 26 seconds
Episode Artwork

Natalie Diaz : Postcolonial Love Poem : Part One

Today’s conversation is with poet Natalie Diaz, author of the National Book Award shortlisted collection Postcolonial Love Poem.  We talk today about questions of postcoloniality, about love and postcolonial love, about writing poetry under occupation, the fine line between participation and complicity, about empathy and what cannot be translated and about the sensuality that arises from […] The post Natalie Diaz : Postcolonial Love Poem : Part One appeared first on Tin House.
10/23/20202 hours, 39 minutes, 31 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : Getting Past the Gatekeepers with Mira Jacob & Kaitlyn Greenidge

In “Getting Past the Gatekeepers: How to Keep Writing in an Industry that Excludes Us,” Kaitlyn Greenidge and Mira Jacob discuss their combined 30+ years of experience navigating literary publishing. From the first feedback to the final copyedits, they discuss strategies to stay sane and keep writing when your story doesn’t fit the industry’s narrow […] The post Tin House Live : Getting Past the Gatekeepers with Mira Jacob & Kaitlyn Greenidge appeared first on Tin House.
10/14/20201 hour, 2 minutes, 9 seconds
Episode Artwork

Jenny Erpenbeck : Not a Novel : A Memoir in Pieces

“This collection of essays, memoirs and critical pieces forms an intellectual biography of Europe’s most history-obsessed writer. Beginning with her childhood in East Berlin in the early ’60s and ’70s, the book moves in concentric circles, from the intimate and understatedly moving to the moment History collides with her life. A powerful voice singing the […] The post Jenny Erpenbeck : Not a Novel : A Memoir in Pieces appeared first on Tin House.
10/2/20202 hours, 10 minutes, 31 seconds
Episode Artwork

Mary-Kim Arnold : The Fish & The Dove

“In The Fish & The Dove, Mary-Kim Arnold’s lyrical scope sweeps across intersecting terrains, moving through time to capture the history of occupation and legacy war in Korea, through the delicate tethers between biological mother, adoptive mother, motherland and daughter, and through the permeable membranes which exist between person and place. . . . With […] The post Mary-Kim Arnold : The Fish & The Dove appeared first on Tin House.
9/23/20202 hours, 11 minutes, 11 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : Queer Beatitudes with Brandon Taylor & Garth Greenwell

A conversation between Brandon Taylor & Garth Greenwell about queer aesthetics, “problematic art,” representation, and much more. The post Tin House Live : Queer Beatitudes with Brandon Taylor & Garth Greenwell appeared first on Tin House.
9/12/20201 hour, 1 minute, 55 seconds
Episode Artwork

Jeannie Vanasco : Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl

“It’s hard to overstate the importance of this gorgeous, harrowing, heartbreaking book, which tackles sexual violence and its aftermath while also articulating the singular pain of knowing—or loving, or caring for, or having a history with—one’s rapist. Vanasco is whip-smart and tender, open and ruthless; she is the perfect guide through the minefield of her […] The post Jeannie Vanasco : Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl appeared first on Tin House.
9/3/20202 hours, 16 minutes, 13 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : Bassey Ikpi & Melissa Febos on the Anatomy of Melancholy

“Anatomy of Melancholy” is a conversation between Melissa Febos & Bassey Ikpi at the 2020 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop.  Febos & Ikpi talk about making narrative (and aesthetic) sense out of the darkest parts of one’s past. Bassey Ikpi is the New York Times bestselling author of I’m Telling the Truth But I’m Lying […] The post Tin House Live : Bassey Ikpi & Melissa Febos on the Anatomy of Melancholy appeared first on Tin House.
8/27/20201 hour, 8 minutes, 40 seconds
Episode Artwork

Lauren Camp : Took House

“In Lauren Camp’s Took House we are enveloped in a poetry both precise and mysterious, intimate and sublime. Reading through these poems, I was reminded of the tenet that poetry is not like the interior life, but is the interior life, the thing itself made flesh via language. . . . Here is a poet […] The post Lauren Camp : Took House appeared first on Tin House.
8/20/20201 hour, 32 minutes, 4 seconds
Episode Artwork

Joe Sacco : Paying the Land

“Sacco is a talent entirely unto himself, applying an exquisitely fine eye for detail to the urgent histories that define the world around us. . . . Now, Sacco brings that eye to the lives of the Dene people in the Canadian subarctic, getting the full picture as only he can.” —Jonny Diamond, Literary Hub […] The post Joe Sacco : Paying the Land appeared first on Tin House.
8/1/20201 hour, 38 minutes, 57 seconds
Episode Artwork

Lidia Yuknavitch : Verge

“Verge is a bouquet of dynamite: explosive, deadly, and spectacularly beautiful. These stories captivated me like modern fairy tales, and like those dark lessons they showed me how resilience is forged through survival, beauty through brokenness, joy by fire. The women who occupy them are my favorite kinds of heroines: as flawed as they are […] The post Lidia Yuknavitch : Verge appeared first on Tin House.
7/20/20201 hour, 34 minutes, 37 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : Lacy M. Johnson On Likability

Today’s talk, “On Likability” by Lacy M. Johnson, was given at the 2018 Tin House Writers Workshop. It later became an essay, one selected by Rebecca Solnit for The Best American Essays 2019. The post Tin House Live : Lacy M. Johnson On Likability appeared first on Tin House.
7/8/202033 minutes, 14 seconds
Episode Artwork

Philip Metres : Shrapnel Maps

“Shrapnel Maps is so beautiful. Half dream, half nightmare, all real. Filled with the remnants of what people hope for and what they are willing to do, and everything that remains afterwards. It’s a confrontation to identity and it dares to conjugate love as a defiance to the capacity of violence. Extraordinary. . . . […] The post Philip Metres : Shrapnel Maps appeared first on Tin House.
7/1/20202 hours, 4 minutes, 21 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : Lidia Yuknavitch on “Writing from the Deep Cut”

Lidia Yuknavitch gave this craft talk, “Writing from the Deep Cut,” at the 2018 Tin House Writers Workshop. As Lidia says: “We are (always) living in tumultuous times. The despair and trauma fracture our life narratives daily, culturally and personally. And yet we endure, make love, make art, we keep creating. There is so much […] The post Tin House Live : Lidia Yuknavitch on “Writing from the Deep Cut” appeared first on Tin House.
6/17/202035 minutes, 50 seconds
Episode Artwork

N.K. Jemisin : The City We Became

“The City We Became is a wonderfully inventive love letter to New York City that spans the multiverse. A big middle finger to Lovecraft with a lot of heart, creativity, smarts and humor. A timely and audacious allegorical tale for our times. This book is all these things and more.” —Rebecca Roanhorse “The most important […] The post N.K. Jemisin : The City We Became appeared first on Tin House.
6/11/20201 hour, 37 minutes, 39 seconds
Episode Artwork

Nikky Finney : Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry

“Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry is a 21st-century paean to the sterling love songs humming throughout four hundred years of black American life.” —Lit Hub “Her poems elide the generational and the personal with ample music. They are, therefore, more than taut with vital details; they are alive with nuance and contrast, where doom […] The post Nikky Finney : Love Child’s Hotbed of Occasional Poetry appeared first on Tin House.
6/1/20202 hours, 20 minutes, 4 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : Rebecca Makkai on The Ear of the Story

Given at the 2019 Tin House Summer Workshop, Rebecca Makkai’s craft talk “You Talkin’ to Me?: The ‘Ear’ of the Story” looks at an important but underappreciated aspect of story craft, the flip side of point of view, the point of telling.  In her words, “Who is the story’s implied listener? Are you casting your […] The post Tin House Live : Rebecca Makkai on The Ear of the Story appeared first on Tin House.
5/25/202054 minutes, 20 seconds
Episode Artwork

Fernanda Melchor : Hurricane Season

“Fernanda Melchor is part of a wave of real writing, a multi-tongue, variform, generationless, decadeless, ageless wave, that American contemporary literature must ignore if it is to hold on to its infantile worldview.” —Jesse Ball Shortlisted for the 2020 Booker Prize, Hurricane Season is the English-language debut of one of the most thrilling and accomplished […] The post Fernanda Melchor : Hurricane Season appeared first on Tin House.
5/18/20202 hours, 5 minutes, 13 seconds
Episode Artwork

Hanif Abdurraqib : A Fortune For Your Disaster

“A Fortune for Your Disaster proves that, if you pay attention, Black people have defined and still define themselves for themselves amid roses and dandelions, cardinals and violets, the blues of music and police uniforms, prayer and swagger. . . . The disaster is not us or ours but what we endure, forced and as […] The post Hanif Abdurraqib : A Fortune For Your Disaster appeared first on Tin House.
5/8/20201 hour, 29 minutes, 42 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : How to Write a Hoax Poem with Kevin Young

The New Yorker poetry editor and host of The New Yorker poetry podcast, Kevin Young, delivered this talk, “How to Write a Hoax Poem,” at the 2014 Tin House Writers Workshop. He discusses some of the more notable modern poetry hoaxes, glimpsing into the secret history of the poem as something conceived to tempt or […] The post Tin House Live : How to Write a Hoax Poem with Kevin Young appeared first on Tin House.
5/1/202051 minutes, 43 seconds
Episode Artwork

Rachel Zucker : SoundMachine

“Whether speaking about motherhood, grief, or poetry, Zucker’s unrelenting eye and wittily critical voice peel back these experiences to reveal insights that are both deeply human and uncompromisingly analytic. . . . Above all, this book is open—open about difficult subjects, open in the way its language operates, open in its willingness to create a […] The post Rachel Zucker : SoundMachine appeared first on Tin House.
4/24/20203 hours, 5 minutes, 28 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : Power & Audience, On Not Writing for White People with Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Ingrid Rojas Contreras’ talk “Power & Audience: On Not Writing for White People” was given at the 2019 Tin House Summer Workshop in Portland, Oregon. In this talk she references a 2019 Publishing Industry Survey and a series of pie charts showing the racial, gender, sexual orientation, and ability breakdown of various subsets of the […] The post Tin House Live : Power & Audience, On Not Writing for White People with Ingrid Rojas Contreras appeared first on Tin House.
4/15/202037 minutes, 14 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : On Dialogue with Dorothy Allison

Dorothy Allison treated the participants of the 2011 Summer Workshop to a spirited discussion of how characters should speak on the page. Not only “he said, she said, none of them said a thing,” but a whole range of language issues—what is said and not said, dialect and rhythm, pacing, patterns in speech, and most […] The post Tin House Live : On Dialogue with Dorothy Allison appeared first on Tin House.
4/8/202052 minutes, 44 seconds
Episode Artwork

Mark Haber : Reinhardt’s Garden

“Reinhardt’s Garden is one of those perfect books that looks small and exotic and melancholic from the outside but, once in, is immense and exultant in the best possible way. Think Amulet by Roberto Bolaño, think Nightwood by Djuna Barnes, think Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, think Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, think Zama by Antonio Di Benedetto, think The Loser by Thomas Bernhard. Think.” —Rodrigo […] The post Mark Haber : Reinhardt’s Garden appeared first on Tin House.
4/1/20201 hour, 26 minutes, 10 seconds
Episode Artwork

Jenny Offill : Weather

“Novelists don’t need to dream the end of the world anymore—they need to wake up to it. Jenny Offill is one of today’s few essential voices, because she writes about essential things, in sentences so clipped and glittering it’s as if they are all cut from one diamond.” –Jonathan Dee The post Jenny Offill : Weather appeared first on Tin House.
3/11/20201 hour, 46 minutes, 11 seconds
Episode Artwork

Lance Olsen : My Red Heaven

“Lance Olsen locates his porous, alluring, heartbreaking, and haunted narrative in Berlin on a day in 1927. Poised at a moment of such hope and doom, it is a ravishing meditation on history, on time, and on what it is to be alive.” —Carole Maso The post Lance Olsen : My Red Heaven appeared first on Tin House.
3/2/20202 hours, 8 minutes, 38 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : “From First Draft to Plot” with Alexander Chee

Alexander Chee delivered this craft lecture, from “First Draft to Plot,” at the 2016 Tin House Summer Workshop. Chee is the author most recently of the essay collection How to Write an Autobiographical Novel. The post Tin House Live : “From First Draft to Plot” with Alexander Chee appeared first on Tin House.
2/21/202036 minutes, 45 seconds
Episode Artwork

Garth Greenwell : Cleanness

“Garth Greenwell, whose first book is a masterpiece, amazingly has written a second book that is also a masterpiece. The great enterprise that Joyce and Lawrence began—to write with utter literal candor about sex, grounding one’s moral life and philosophical insight in what that candor reveals about us—finds fulfillment, a late apotheosis, in Greenwell’s work. […] The post Garth Greenwell : Cleanness appeared first on Tin House.
2/14/20201 hour, 49 minutes, 33 seconds
Episode Artwork

Carmen Maria Machado : In the Dream House

“In the Dream House . . . confronts the issues of credibility, self-doubt, and disbelief that all too frequently arise when survivors of domestic abuse speak out. But the work also stands as an intervention explicitly aimed at the silences, erasures, and lacunae of the culture at large . . . Machado’s In the Dream […] The post Carmen Maria Machado : In the Dream House appeared first on Tin House.
2/3/20201 hour, 39 minutes, 26 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : Jericho Brown on Suicide & Joy

Jericho Brown gave these two talks, on suicide, and on joy, at the 2016 Tin House Summer Workshop in Portland, Oregon.  His latest poetry collection The Tradition (Copper Canyon Press) was a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award. The post Tin House Live : Jericho Brown on Suicide & Joy appeared first on Tin House.
1/24/202025 minutes, 42 seconds
Episode Artwork

E. J. Koh : The Magical Language of Others

“In The Magical Language of Others, E. J. Koh writes of the boundary between anonymity and naming, between absence and abandonment, between cruelty and safety for four generations of mothers and daughters, each speaking with an occupied heart and crossing narrative borders between Korea, Japan, and America. As a reader, you give yourself over to her […] The post E. J. Koh : The Magical Language of Others appeared first on Tin House.
1/13/20201 hour, 38 minutes, 44 seconds
Episode Artwork

Karthika Naïr : Until the Lions : Echoes from the Mahabharata

“In this retelling of the Mahabharata from the point of view of its hitherto minor female characters, Karthika Naïr uncovers a seminal feminist text. Until the Lions makes dazzling use of concrete verse and surreptitious rhyme to tell a story you think you know. By poem’s end you understand, with gratitude, that you know nothing […] The post Karthika Naïr : Until the Lions : Echoes from the Mahabharata appeared first on Tin House.
1/6/20201 hour, 52 minutes, 32 seconds
Episode Artwork

CAConrad : Resurrect Extinct Vibration

“CAConrad always argues (from the inside of their poems) for a poetry of radical inclusivity while keeping a very queer shoulder to the wheel. Their kind of queerness strikes me as nonpolarizing, not intentionally but because of the fullness of their exposition, a kind of gigantism that seems to me to be most deeply informed […] The post CAConrad : Resurrect Extinct Vibration appeared first on Tin House.
12/16/20191 hour, 59 minutes, 30 seconds
Episode Artwork

Daniel José Older : The Book of Lost Saints

“Older’s spellbinding novel is a fever dream full of magic and loss, wickedness and grace, faith and love, spirit and power.” —Marlon James;  “A lyrical, beautiful, devastating, literally haunting journey of assimilation, resistance, and family. Older just gets better and better.” —N.K. Jemisin The post Daniel José Older : The Book of Lost Saints appeared first on Tin House.
12/1/20191 hour, 42 minutes, 50 seconds
Episode Artwork

Jake Skeets : Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers

“Jake Skeets takes us to ‘The Indian Capital of the World,’ a landscape of erosion and erasure, where ‘boys only hold boys / like bottles’ and eros is a dangerous thing. In the brush and horseweed, ghosts and trains and abandoned trailers, a young Diné attempts to answer all the question marks of adolescence and […] The post Jake Skeets : Eyes Bottle Dark with a Mouthful of Flowers appeared first on Tin House.
11/20/20191 hour, 50 minutes, 57 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : ‘Writing Towards Joy’ Panel with Kelly Link, Garth Greenwell, Justin Torres

Recorded on the final day of the 2019 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop, the panel “On Writing Towards Joy” ended the week on a high note.  Moderated by Tin House Assistant Books Editor Elizabeth DeMeo, panelists Kelly Link, Garth Greenwell, and Justin Torres unpack a rarely discussed topic. How does one create joy on the […] The post Tin House Live : ‘Writing Towards Joy’ Panel with Kelly Link, Garth Greenwell, Justin Torres appeared first on Tin House.
11/12/201936 minutes, 32 seconds
Episode Artwork

Richard Powers : The Overstory

“This book is beyond special. Richard Powers manages to turn trees into vivid and engaging characters, something that indigenous people have done for eons but that modern literature has rarely if ever even attempted. It’s not just a completely absorbing, even overwhelming book; it’s a kind of breakthrough in the ways we think about and […] The post Richard Powers : The Overstory appeared first on Tin House.
11/1/20191 hour, 30 minutes, 10 seconds
Episode Artwork

Zadie Smith : Grand Union

“Grand Union is an unusual creature, combining all the experimental exuberance of a writer discovering a form with the technical prowess of one at the height of her abilities. The result is exhilarating. Between the covers of one book, readers will find such disparate forms as allegory, parable, speculative thriller and satire, as well as […] The post Zadie Smith : Grand Union appeared first on Tin House.
10/21/201954 minutes, 5 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : Readings by Garth Greenwell, Michelle Tea, Kaveh Akbar

Recorded at the 2019 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, today’s episode is a medley of readings from three different nights. Garth Greenwell reads from his upcoming novel Cleanness (FSG January 2020), Michelle Tea  from her novel-in-progress, Little Faggot, and Kaveh Akbar the short and long poems “Vines” and “The Palace” respectively. The post Tin House Live : Readings by Garth Greenwell, Michelle Tea, Kaveh Akbar appeared first on Tin House.
10/16/201959 minutes, 31 seconds
Episode Artwork

Rob Schlegel : In the Tree Where the Double Sex Sleeps

“Rob Schlegel has a voice you’d follow into the dark woods, knowing full well it’s hard, awful, daily, plain, living truth you’re running toward. The speaker in this book is a heartbreaker of a storyteller—a synesthesiac of mixed feelings, bad news, and wordsmithery. I feel known, caught out, believed in, vulnerable, when I read this […] The post Rob Schlegel : In the Tree Where the Double Sex Sleeps appeared first on Tin House.
10/2/20192 hours, 1 minute, 57 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tin House Live : Revision Panel with R.O. Kwon, Karen Shepard, Danielle Evans, Jamel Brinkley

“Finding the Life of the Story: Vision & Revision” was recorded at the 2019 Tin House Summer Writers Workshop. Panelists Karen Shepard, Danielle Evans, R.O. Kwon and Jamel Brinkley talk strategies to draft and revise. Moderated by David Naimon, host of Between the Covers. The post Tin House Live : Revision Panel with R.O. Kwon, Karen Shepard, Danielle Evans, Jamel Brinkley appeared first on Tin House.
9/25/201948 minutes, 10 seconds
Episode Artwork

Xuan Juliana Wang : Home Remedies

“Filled with characters who mirror the chaos and anxiety, exhilaration and despair, desire and fear of the world around them, Home Remedies offers searing portraits of millennial Chinese immigrants. . . . Wang’s shimmering words offer proof that even the most mundane of these lives have the potential to become something extraordinary. . . .  A great, […] The post Xuan Juliana Wang : Home Remedies appeared first on Tin House.
9/18/20191 hour, 31 minutes, 13 seconds
Episode Artwork

Ayşe Papatya Bucak : The Trojan War Museum

“These are stories that reflect the author’s Turkish heritage and a curiosity about our human search for meaning as profound as it is lyrical. The stories are music. They beguile and illuminate with narratives about yearning and desire, circumstance and courage, resilience and discovery.”—NPR The post Ayşe Papatya Bucak : The Trojan War Museum appeared first on Tin House.
9/4/20191 hour, 43 minutes, 22 seconds
Episode Artwork

Brandon Shimoda : The Grave on the Wall

“If someone asked me what a poet’s history might look and read like, I would say Brandon Shimoda’s The Grave on the Wall. It is part dream, part memory, part forgetting, part identity. It is a remarkable exploration of how citizenship is forged by the brutal US imperial forces—through slave labor, forced detention, indiscriminate bombing, historical […] The post Brandon Shimoda : The Grave on the Wall appeared first on Tin House.
8/15/20191 hour, 49 minutes, 39 seconds
Episode Artwork

Elvia Wilk : Oval

“J. G. Ballard meets William Gibson meets Jeff VanderMeer. Oval is an up-to-the-minute story about the twilight zones of corporate design, aesthetics, pharmacy, and bioengineering, where there’s nothing consultants won’t break in the quest for ‘innovation.’ What could possibly go wrong? Find out in Elvia Wilk’s crisp and stylish debut book.”—McKenzie Wark The post Elvia Wilk : Oval appeared first on Tin House.
8/1/20191 hour, 41 minutes, 42 seconds
Episode Artwork

Max Porter : Lanny

“In Lanny Max Porter has expanded on his innovative hybrid mode while remaining faithful to our species-wide tradition of storytelling through myth, magic, and parable, but also through the harrowing minutiae of being alive in the trying hours of a small town ruptured by loss. The result is a powerful yet tender reclamation of the imagination, love, […] The post Max Porter : Lanny appeared first on Tin House.
7/15/20191 hour, 50 minutes, 5 seconds
Episode Artwork

Ted Chiang : Exhalation

“Ted Chiang has no contemporary peers when it comes to the short story form. His name deserves to be mentioned in the same breath as Carver, Poe, Borges, and Kafka. Every story is a universe. Every story is a diamond. You will inhale Exhalation in a single, stunned sitting, because true genius doesn’t come along nearly […] The post Ted Chiang : Exhalation appeared first on Tin House.
7/1/20191 hour, 10 minutes, 4 seconds
Episode Artwork

Miriam Toews : Women Talking

“An astonishment, a volcano of a novel with slowly and furiously mounting pressures of anguish and love and rage. No other book I’ve read in the past year has spoken so lucidly about our current moment, and yet none has felt as timeless; the always-wondrous Miriam Toews has written a book as close to a […] The post Miriam Toews : Women Talking appeared first on Tin House.
6/12/20191 hour, 34 minutes, 47 seconds
Episode Artwork

Sophia Shalmiyev : Mother Winter

“Shalmiyev stubbornly, brilliantly pursues loss in this psycho-geography of immigration, grief displacement, and damage. A mother herself, Shalmiyev’s narrator channels the ghosts of Dorothy Richardson, Anaïs Nin, Frances Farmer and the sad, bad stories of Aileen Wuornos and Amy Fisher, who could never be the right kind of girls. Like the great modernist writers, Shalmiyev writes from, not […] The post Sophia Shalmiyev : Mother Winter appeared first on Tin House.
6/3/20191 hour, 49 minutes, 19 seconds
Episode Artwork

Morgan Parker : Magical Negro

“Morgan Parker’s latest collection, Magical Negro, is a riveting testimony to everyday blackness. . . . It is wry and atmospheric, an epic work of aural pleasures and personifications that demands to be read—both as an account of a private life and as searing political protest.”—Glory Edim, Time Magazine The post Morgan Parker : Magical Negro appeared first on Tin House.
5/14/20191 hour, 57 minutes, 32 seconds
Episode Artwork

Cristina Rivera Garza : The Taiga Syndrome

“If The Taiga Syndrome is a book of illness, it’s also about exile, disappearance, borders, love, language and translation, desire, capitalism and its discontents, fairy tales, and what it means to be possessed by the madness of others and the madness of ourselves. The murmurs that haunt the detective in The Taiga Syndrome evoke the history of Mexican fiction, most […] The post Cristina Rivera Garza : The Taiga Syndrome appeared first on Tin House.
4/30/20191 hour, 45 minutes, 49 seconds
Episode Artwork

Lacy M. Johnson : The Reckonings

“Through prose that is at once passionate and percussive, Lacy Johnson’s The Reckonings demands that we place justice and discovery at the center of our conversations, memories, imaginations, and art. I don’t know that I’ve ever been happier to be alive after reading any book. In this weird way that probably says way too much about the smallness of […] The post Lacy M. Johnson : The Reckonings appeared first on Tin House.
4/15/20191 hour, 50 minutes, 2 seconds
Episode Artwork

Christine Schutt : Pure Hollywood

“Nobody writes like Schutt . . . and her latest collection is the perfect entry point for readers new to her work . . . In each of the collection’s 11 stories, Schutt gives readers dissipated women staggering to the brink of sanity, desperate men with foggy intentions, and an eerie atmosphere that radiates menace, […] The post Christine Schutt : Pure Hollywood appeared first on Tin House.
4/1/20191 hour, 39 minutes, 8 seconds
Episode Artwork

Mitchell S. Jackson : Survival Math

“A vibrant memoir of race, violence, family, and manhood . . . Jackson recognizes there is too much for one conventional form, and his various storytelling methods imbue the book with an unpredictable dexterity. It is sharp and unshrinking in depictions of his life, his relatives (blood kin and otherwise), and his Pacific Northwest hometown, […] The post Mitchell S. Jackson : Survival Math appeared first on Tin House.
3/18/20191 hour, 42 minutes
Episode Artwork

Marlon James : Black Leopard, Red Wolf

“Black Leopard, Red Wolf is the kind of novel I never realized I was missing until I read it. A dangerous, hallucinatory, ancient Africa, which becomes a fantasy world as well-realized as anything Tolkien made, with language as powerful as Angela Carter’s. It’s as deep and crafty as Gene Wolfe, bloodier than Robert E. Howard, and […] The post Marlon James : Black Leopard, Red Wolf appeared first on Tin House.
3/4/20191 hour, 22 minutes, 17 seconds
Episode Artwork

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore : Sketchtasy

“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 The post Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore : Sketchtasy appeared first on Tin House.
2/12/20191 hour, 49 minutes, 11 seconds
Episode Artwork

Alicia Jo Rabins : Fruit Geode

“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 […] The post Alicia Jo Rabins : Fruit Geode appeared first on Tin House.
2/1/20191 hour, 39 minutes, 6 seconds
Episode Artwork

Genevieve Hudson : Pretend We Live Here

“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 […] The post Genevieve Hudson : Pretend We Live Here appeared first on Tin House.
1/13/20191 hour, 32 minutes, 25 seconds
Episode Artwork

Jeffrey Yang : Hey Marfa

“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 […] The post Jeffrey Yang : Hey Marfa appeared first on Tin House.
1/2/20191 hour, 38 minutes
Episode Artwork

Chaya Bhuvaneswar : White Dancing Elephants

“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 […] The post Chaya Bhuvaneswar : White Dancing Elephants appeared first on Tin House.
12/17/20181 hour, 50 minutes, 15 seconds
Episode Artwork

Layli Long Soldier : Whereas

“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 […] The post Layli Long Soldier : Whereas appeared first on Tin House.
12/2/20181 hour, 53 minutes, 22 seconds
Episode Artwork

Diane Williams: The Collected Stories of Diane Williams

“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. […] The post Diane Williams: The Collected Stories of Diane Williams appeared first on Tin House.
11/14/20181 hour, 14 minutes, 18 seconds
Episode Artwork

R.O. Kwon : The Incendiaries

“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 […] The post R.O. Kwon : The Incendiaries appeared first on Tin House.
11/1/20181 hour, 11 minutes, 18 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tommy Pico : Junk

“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 […] The post Tommy Pico : Junk appeared first on Tin House.
10/14/20181 hour, 19 minutes, 20 seconds
Episode Artwork

Dubravka Ugrešić : Fox & American Fictionary

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 […] The post Dubravka Ugrešić : Fox & American Fictionary appeared first on Tin House.
10/1/20181 hour, 45 minutes, 5 seconds
Episode Artwork

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

“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 […] The post Anna Moschovakis : Eleanor or The Rejection of the Progress of Love appeared first on Tin House.
9/24/20181 hour, 51 minutes, 34 seconds
Episode Artwork

Dao Strom : You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else

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, […] The post Dao Strom : You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else appeared first on Tin House.
8/22/20181 hour, 55 minutes, 13 seconds
Episode Artwork

Catherine Lacey : Certain American States

“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 […] The post Catherine Lacey : Certain American States appeared first on Tin House.
8/7/20181 hour, 29 minutes, 25 seconds
Episode Artwork

Forrest Gander : Be With

“Forrest Gander’s life partner, the poet C.D. Wright, died suddenly a little more than two years ago, and this book is one result or record of the aftermath of that loss. In poems that are utterly naked and bereft, elegies, apologies, could-have-beens, Gander grieves and wonders about what’s left in his life. There is so […] The post Forrest Gander : Be With appeared first on Tin House.
7/19/20181 hour, 25 minutes, 46 seconds
Episode Artwork

Chelsea Hodson : Tonight I’m Someone Else

“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 […] The post Chelsea Hodson : Tonight I’m Someone Else appeared first on Tin House.
7/6/20181 hour, 26 minutes, 41 seconds
Episode Artwork

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

“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 […] The post Molly Crabapple : Brothers of the Gun – A Memoir of the Syrian War appeared first on Tin House.
6/12/20181 hour, 37 minutes, 34 seconds
Episode Artwork

Sheila Heti : Motherhood

“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 post Sheila Heti : Motherhood appeared first on Tin House.
6/1/20181 hour, 28 minutes, 54 seconds
Episode Artwork

Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi : Call Me Zebra

“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 […] The post Azareen Van Der Vliet Oloomi : Call Me Zebra appeared first on Tin House.
5/15/20181 hour, 37 minutes, 53 seconds
Episode Artwork

Jen Bervin : Silk Poems

“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 […] The post Jen Bervin : Silk Poems appeared first on Tin House.
5/1/20181 hour, 33 minutes, 36 seconds
Episode Artwork

Cheston Knapp : Up Up Down Down

“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 […] The post Cheston Knapp : Up Up Down Down appeared first on Tin House.
4/10/20181 hour, 38 minutes, 55 seconds
Episode Artwork

John Keene : Counternarratives, Playland, and Grind

“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 […] The post John Keene : Counternarratives, Playland, and Grind appeared first on Tin House.
4/1/20181 hour, 37 minutes, 11 seconds
Episode Artwork

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

“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 […] The post Vi Khi Nao : Umbilical Hospital & A Brief Alphabet of Torture appeared first on Tin House.
3/11/20181 hour, 48 minutes, 9 seconds
Episode Artwork

Micheline Aharonian Marcom : The Brick House

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 […] The post Micheline Aharonian Marcom : The Brick House appeared first on Tin House.
3/1/20181 hour, 36 minutes, 14 seconds
Episode Artwork

Terese Marie Mailhot : Heart Berries

“Heart Berries by Terese Mailhot is an astounding memoir in essays. Here is a wound. Here is need, naked and unapologetic. Here is a mountain woman, towering in words great and small . . . What Mailhot has accomplished in this exquisite book is brilliance both raw and refined.” ―Roxane Gay “If Heart Berries is any […] The post Terese Marie Mailhot : Heart Berries appeared first on Tin House.
2/13/20181 hour, 21 minutes, 2 seconds
Episode Artwork

Carmen Maria Machado : Her Body and Other Parties

“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 […] The post Carmen Maria Machado : Her Body and Other Parties appeared first on Tin House.
2/1/20181 hour, 28 minutes, 38 seconds
Episode Artwork

Eunsong Kim : Gospel of Regicide

“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 […] The post Eunsong Kim : Gospel of Regicide appeared first on Tin House.
1/14/20181 hour, 43 minutes, 34 seconds
Episode Artwork

Leni Zumas : Red Clocks

“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 […] The post Leni Zumas : Red Clocks appeared first on Tin House.
1/5/20181 hour, 20 minutes, 3 seconds
Episode Artwork

David Biespiel : The Education of a Young Poet

“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 […] The post David Biespiel : The Education of a Young Poet appeared first on Tin House.
12/1/20171 hour, 38 minutes, 46 seconds
Episode Artwork

Rae Armantrout : Partly – New & Selected Poems

“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 […] The post Rae Armantrout : Partly – New & Selected Poems appeared first on Tin House.
11/1/20171 hour, 17 minutes, 37 seconds
Episode Artwork

Eileen Myles : Afterglow

“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 […] The post Eileen Myles : Afterglow appeared first on Tin House.
10/19/20171 hour, 27 minutes, 31 seconds
Episode Artwork

Celeste Ng : Little Fires Everywhere

“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 […] The post Celeste Ng : Little Fires Everywhere appeared first on Tin House.
10/5/20171 hour, 11 minutes, 11 seconds
Episode Artwork

Peter Rock : Spells

“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 […] The post Peter Rock : Spells appeared first on Tin House.
9/21/20171 hour, 24 minutes, 44 seconds
Episode Artwork

Safiya Sinclair : Cannibal

“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 […] The post Safiya Sinclair : Cannibal appeared first on Tin House.
9/10/20171 hour, 21 minutes, 33 seconds
Episode Artwork

Matthew Zapruder : Why Poetry

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 […] The post Matthew Zapruder : Why Poetry appeared first on Tin House.
8/21/20171 hour, 30 minutes, 56 seconds
Episode Artwork

Yanara Friedland : Uncountry

“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 […] The post Yanara Friedland : Uncountry appeared first on Tin House.
8/7/20171 hour, 25 minutes
Episode Artwork

Mary Ruefle : My Private Property

“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 […] The post Mary Ruefle : My Private Property appeared first on Tin House.
7/22/20171 hour, 13 minutes, 3 seconds
Episode Artwork

Yuri Herrera : Kingdom Cons

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 […] The post Yuri Herrera : Kingdom Cons appeared first on Tin House.
7/11/20171 hour, 17 minutes, 36 seconds
Episode Artwork

Gregory Pardlo : Digest

“[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 “[Pardlo] renders history just as clearly & palpably as he renders NYC or […] The post Gregory Pardlo : Digest appeared first on Tin House.
6/26/20171 hour, 31 minutes, 54 seconds
Episode Artwork

Dani Shapiro : Hourglass

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 […] The post Dani Shapiro : Hourglass appeared first on Tin House.
6/7/20171 hour, 31 minutes, 15 seconds
Episode Artwork

Jeff Vandermeer : Borne

“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 […] The post Jeff Vandermeer : Borne appeared first on Tin House.
5/23/20171 hour, 9 minutes, 52 seconds
Episode Artwork

Thalia Field : Experimental Animals

“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 […] The post Thalia Field : Experimental Animals appeared first on Tin House.
5/2/20171 hour, 18 minutes, 25 seconds
Episode Artwork

Sallie Tisdale : Violation

“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 […] The post Sallie Tisdale : Violation appeared first on Tin House.
4/19/20171 hour, 15 minutes, 29 seconds
Episode Artwork

Morgan Parker : There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé

Morgan Parker uses political & pop-cultural references as a framework to explore 21st century 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 […] The post Morgan Parker : There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyoncé appeared first on Tin House.
3/29/20171 hour, 10 minutes, 31 seconds
Episode Artwork

Melissa Febos : Abandon Me

“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 […] The post Melissa Febos : Abandon Me appeared first on Tin House.
3/15/20171 hour, 20 minutes, 32 seconds
Episode Artwork

Ursula K. Le Guin : Words Are My Matter

“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. […] The post Ursula K. Le Guin : Words Are My Matter appeared first on Tin House.
2/14/20171 hour, 13 minutes, 17 seconds
Episode Artwork

Susan DeFreitas : Hot Season

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 […] The post Susan DeFreitas : Hot Season appeared first on Tin House.
1/18/20171 hour, 26 minutes, 20 seconds
Episode Artwork

Solmaz Sharif : Look

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 […] The post Solmaz Sharif : Look appeared first on Tin House.
1/4/20171 hour, 1 minute, 13 seconds
Episode Artwork

Sofia Samatar : The Winged Histories

“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 […] The post Sofia Samatar : The Winged Histories appeared first on Tin House.
12/13/20161 hour, 2 minutes, 29 seconds
Episode Artwork

Tyehimba Jess : Olio

“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.”—Nikky Finney “Olio is […] The post Tyehimba Jess : Olio appeared first on Tin House.
11/16/20161 hour, 16 minutes, 1 second
Episode Artwork

Eliot Weinberger : The Ghosts of Birds

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 […] The post Eliot Weinberger : The Ghosts of Birds appeared first on Tin House.
11/2/20161 hour, 4 minutes, 42 seconds
Episode Artwork

Pauls Toutonghi : Dog Gone

“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 […] The post Pauls Toutonghi : Dog Gone appeared first on Tin House.
10/27/20161 hour, 58 seconds
Episode Artwork

Monica Drake : The Folly of Loving Life

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 […] The post Monica Drake : The Folly of Loving Life appeared first on Tin House.
9/28/201645 minutes, 5 seconds
Episode Artwork

Alexis Smith : Marrow Island

“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 […] The post Alexis Smith : Marrow Island appeared first on Tin House.
9/14/20161 hour, 2 minutes, 41 seconds
Episode Artwork

Jesse Ball : How to Set a Fire and Why

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, […] The post Jesse Ball : How to Set a Fire and Why appeared first on Tin House.
8/17/20161 hour, 7 minutes, 2 seconds
Episode Artwork

Rikki Ducornet : Brightfellow

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, […] The post Rikki Ducornet : Brightfellow appeared first on Tin House.
7/20/20161 hour, 4 minutes, 37 seconds
Episode Artwork

Lina Meruane : Seeing Red

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 […] The post Lina Meruane : Seeing Red appeared first on Tin House.
6/30/20161 hour, 7 minutes, 33 seconds
Episode Artwork

Rob Spillman : All Tomorrow’s Parties

“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 […] The post Rob Spillman : All Tomorrow’s Parties appeared first on Tin House.
6/15/201651 minutes, 53 seconds
Episode Artwork

Brian Blanchfield : Proxies

“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 […] The post Brian Blanchfield : Proxies appeared first on Tin House.
5/18/20161 hour, 14 minutes, 48 seconds
Episode Artwork

Idra Novey : Ways to Disappear

“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 […] The post Idra Novey : Ways to Disappear appeared first on Tin House.
5/4/201655 minutes, 35 seconds
Episode Artwork

Ursula K. Le Guin : Late in the Day

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 […] The post Ursula K. Le Guin : Late in the Day appeared first on Tin House.
4/20/201654 minutes, 13 seconds
Episode Artwork

Brian Evenson : A Collapse of Horses

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 […] The post Brian Evenson : A Collapse of Horses appeared first on Tin House.
3/30/201659 minutes, 3 seconds
Episode Artwork

Laila Lalami : The Moor’s Account

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 […] The post Laila Lalami : The Moor’s Account appeared first on Tin House.
3/16/201647 minutes, 26 seconds
Episode Artwork

Lacy M. Johnson : The Other Side

“[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 […] The post Lacy M. Johnson : The Other Side appeared first on Tin House.
2/17/201659 minutes, 40 seconds
Episode Artwork

Keith Lee Morris : Travelers Rest

“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 […] The post Keith Lee Morris : Travelers Rest appeared first on Tin House.
1/20/201642 minutes, 48 seconds
Episode Artwork

Mary Gaitskill : The Mare

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, […] The post Mary Gaitskill : The Mare appeared first on Tin House.
12/16/201544 minutes, 6 seconds
Episode Artwork

Valeria Luiselli : The Story of My Teeth

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” Sánchez Sánchez is a late-in-life world traveler, yarn spinner, collector, and legendary auctioneer. His most precious possessions are the […] The post Valeria Luiselli : The Story of My Teeth appeared first on Tin House.
11/19/20151 hour, 5 minutes, 39 seconds
Episode Artwork

Amelia Gray : Gutshot

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. […] The post Amelia Gray : Gutshot appeared first on Tin House.
10/28/201553 minutes, 29 seconds
Episode Artwork

Ursula K. Le Guin : Steering The Craft

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 […] The post Ursula K. Le Guin : Steering The Craft appeared first on Tin House.
10/1/201558 minutes, 23 seconds
Episode Artwork

Liz Prato : Baby’s On Fire

“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 […] The post Liz Prato : Baby’s On Fire appeared first on Tin House.
9/23/201535 minutes, 47 seconds
Episode Artwork

David Biespiel : A Long High Whistle

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 United States. A Long High Whistle discusses the work of nearly a hundred […] The post David Biespiel : A Long High Whistle appeared first on Tin House.
8/19/20151 hour, 18 minutes, 53 seconds
Episode Artwork

Rebecca Makkai : Music For Wartime

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 […] The post Rebecca Makkai : Music For Wartime appeared first on Tin House.
8/5/201540 minutes, 43 seconds
Episode Artwork

Maggie Nelson : The Argonauts

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 […] The post Maggie Nelson : The Argonauts appeared first on Tin House.
7/29/201554 minutes, 46 seconds
Episode Artwork

Lidia Yuknavitch : The Small Backs of Children

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 […] The post Lidia Yuknavitch : The Small Backs of Children appeared first on Tin House.
7/15/201549 minutes, 31 seconds
Episode Artwork

Mary Ruefle : An Incarnation of the Now

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 […] The post Mary Ruefle : An Incarnation of the Now appeared first on Tin House.
6/3/20151 hour, 1 minute, 47 seconds
Episode Artwork

Neal Stephenson : Seveneves

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 […] The post Neal Stephenson : Seveneves appeared first on Tin House.
5/20/201549 minutes, 4 seconds
Episode Artwork

Viet Thanh Nguyen : The Sympathizer

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 […] The post Viet Thanh Nguyen : The Sympathizer appeared first on Tin House.
4/29/201541 minutes, 55 seconds
Episode Artwork

Sarah Manguso : Ongoingness

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. When Manguso became pregnant and had a child, these Copernican […] The post Sarah Manguso : Ongoingness appeared first on Tin House.
4/2/201538 minutes, 54 seconds
Episode Artwork

Kelly Link : Get in Trouble

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, […] The post Kelly Link : Get in Trouble appeared first on Tin House.
3/4/201552 minutes, 28 seconds
Episode Artwork

Sarah Gerard : Binary Star

The language of the stars is the language of the body. Like a star, the anorexic burns fuel that isn’t replenished; she is held together by her own gravity. With luminous, lyrical prose, Binary 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., […] The post Sarah Gerard : Binary Star appeared first on Tin House.
2/25/201530 minutes, 29 seconds
Episode Artwork

Miranda July : The First Bad Man

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. […] The post Miranda July : The First Bad Man appeared first on Tin House.
1/28/201541 minutes, 47 seconds
Episode Artwork

Leslie Jamison : The Empathy Exams

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, […] The post Leslie Jamison : The Empathy Exams appeared first on Tin House.
12/18/201449 minutes, 28 seconds
Episode Artwork

Claudia Rankine : Citizen

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. […] The post Claudia Rankine : Citizen appeared first on Tin House.
11/13/20141 hour, 10 seconds
Episode Artwork

William Gibson : The Peripheral

Where Flynne and her brother, Burton, live, jobs outside the drug business are rare. Fortunately, Burton has his veteran’s benefits, for the neural damage he suffered from implants during his 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 […] The post William Gibson : The Peripheral appeared first on Tin House.
11/5/20141 hour, 2 minutes, 30 seconds
Episode Artwork

David Mitchell : The Bone Clocks

“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 […] The post David Mitchell : The Bone Clocks appeared first on Tin House.
10/1/201446 minutes, 3 seconds
Episode Artwork

Ben Parzybok : Sherwood Nation

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 […] The post Ben Parzybok : Sherwood Nation appeared first on Tin House.
9/10/201437 minutes, 25 seconds
Episode Artwork

Karen Russell : Sleep Donation

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 U.S. city. Trish Edgewater, whose sister Dori was […] The post Karen Russell : Sleep Donation appeared first on Tin House.
8/13/201453 minutes, 15 seconds
Episode Artwork

Dinaw Mengestu : All Our Names

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, […] The post Dinaw Mengestu : All Our Names appeared first on Tin House.
7/30/201429 minutes, 25 seconds
Episode Artwork

Jo Walton : My Real Children

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 […] The post Jo Walton : My Real Children appeared first on Tin House.
6/25/201451 minutes, 5 seconds
Episode Artwork

Roxane Gay : An Untamed State

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. […] The post Roxane Gay : An Untamed State appeared first on Tin House.
6/11/201436 minutes, 10 seconds
Episode Artwork

Leni Zumas & Luca Dipierro : A Wooden Leg

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: […] The post Leni Zumas & Luca Dipierro : A Wooden Leg appeared first on Tin House.
5/28/201457 minutes, 43 seconds
Episode Artwork

Lorrie Moore : Bark

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 […] The post Lorrie Moore : Bark appeared first on Tin House.
4/23/201439 minutes, 44 seconds
Episode Artwork

Kyle Minor : Praying Drunk

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 […] The post Kyle Minor : Praying Drunk appeared first on Tin House.
4/9/201452 minutes, 1 second
Episode Artwork

Helen Oyeyemi : Boy, Snow, Bird

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 […] The post Helen Oyeyemi : Boy, Snow, Bird appeared first on Tin House.
3/27/201430 minutes, 30 seconds
Episode Artwork

Gina Frangello: A Life In Men

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, […] The post Gina Frangello: A Life In Men appeared first on Tin House.
3/12/201428 minutes, 50 seconds
Episode Artwork

Chang-rae Lee : On Such A Full Sea

“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 […] The post Chang-rae Lee : On Such A Full Sea appeared first on Tin House.
2/20/201437 minutes, 21 seconds
Episode Artwork

Gary Shteyngart : Little Failure

“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 […] The post Gary Shteyngart : Little Failure appeared first on Tin House.
1/23/201446 minutes, 39 seconds
Episode Artwork

Veronica Gonzalez Peña : The Sad Passions

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 […] The post Veronica Gonzalez Peña : The Sad Passions appeared first on Tin House.
12/19/201355 minutes, 12 seconds
Episode Artwork

Kevin Sampsell : This Is Between Us

There may be no author more integral to the Portland literary scene than Kevin Sampsell. Kevin is not only the small press curator and events coordinator at Powell’s books, but he’s also the editor of the Portland Noir fiction anthology, curated this year’s Wordstock literary festival, was in charge of LitHopPDX, Portland’s inaugural literary bar […] The post Kevin Sampsell : This Is Between Us appeared first on Tin House.
11/21/201330 minutes, 4 seconds
Episode Artwork

Lucy Corin : One Hundred Apocalypses

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 […] The post Lucy Corin : One Hundred Apocalypses appeared first on Tin House.
10/31/201332 minutes, 51 seconds
Episode Artwork

Jonathan Lethem : Dissident Gardens

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 […] The post Jonathan Lethem : Dissident Gardens appeared first on Tin House.
10/2/201336 minutes, 47 seconds
Episode Artwork

Robert Boswell : Tumbledown

“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 AM reading. Over the course of a […] The post Robert Boswell : Tumbledown appeared first on Tin House.
9/19/201338 minutes
Episode Artwork

Jami Attenberg : The Middlesteins

For more than thirty years, Edie and Richard Middlestein shared a solid family life together in the suburbs of Chicago. But now things are splintering apart for one reason: Edie’s enormous girth. 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, […] The post Jami Attenberg : The Middlesteins appeared first on Tin House.
8/8/201334 minutes, 24 seconds
Episode Artwork

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

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, […] The post Matt Bell : In the House Upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods appeared first on Tin House.
7/10/201329 minutes, 3 seconds
Episode Artwork

NoViolet Bulawayo : We Need New Names

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 in the Boston Review. Bulawayo talks with Between […] The post NoViolet Bulawayo : We Need New Names appeared first on Tin House.
6/27/201328 minutes, 6 seconds
Episode Artwork

Lenore Zion : Stupid Children

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 […] The post Lenore Zion : Stupid Children appeared first on Tin House.
5/30/201326 minutes, 47 seconds
Episode Artwork

Benjamin Percy : Red Moon

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 […] The post Benjamin Percy : Red Moon appeared first on Tin House.
5/15/201328 minutes, 32 seconds
Episode Artwork

Karen Russell : Vampires in the Lemon Grove

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 […] The post Karen Russell : Vampires in the Lemon Grove appeared first on Tin House.
4/24/201331 minutes, 10 seconds
Episode Artwork

Monica Drake : The Stud Book

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, […] The post Monica Drake : The Stud Book appeared first on Tin House.
4/18/201329 minutes, 4 seconds
Episode Artwork

Sam Lipsyte : The Fun Parts

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 […] The post Sam Lipsyte : The Fun Parts appeared first on Tin House.
3/14/201326 minutes, 28 seconds
Episode Artwork

George Saunders : Tenth of December

“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 is a complete original, unlike anyone else, thank god—and […] The post George Saunders : Tenth of December appeared first on Tin House.
2/14/201329 minutes, 52 seconds
Episode Artwork

Chris Kraus : Summer of Hate

Writer, filmmaker and art critic Chris Kraus talks with host David Naimon about her latest book, Summer of Hate. Her other books include the novels I Love Dick, hailed by Rick Moody as one of 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, […] The post Chris Kraus : Summer of Hate appeared first on Tin House.
11/30/201227 minutes, 13 seconds
Episode Artwork

Alexis Smith : Glaciers

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 […] The post Alexis Smith : Glaciers appeared first on Tin House.
11/15/201228 minutes
Episode Artwork

Jess Walter : Beautiful Ruins

Host David Naimon talks with Jess Walter about his sixth novel, Beautiful Ruins, a deeply human rollercoaster of a novel, spanning fifty years and nearly as many lives. Walter is also the author 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 […] The post Jess Walter : Beautiful Ruins appeared first on Tin House.
10/25/201229 minutes, 34 seconds
Episode Artwork

Junot Diaz : This Is How You Lose Her

Host David Naimon speaks with Junot Diaz, who the New Yorker calls one of the top 20 writers for the 21st century. He’s the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a Creative Writing professor at MIT, the Fiction Editor at the Boston Review, and a founding member of Voices of […] The post Junot Diaz : This Is How You Lose Her appeared first on Tin House.
9/27/201234 minutes, 1 second
Episode Artwork

Sheila Heti : How Should A Person Be?

Is How Should a Person Be? a novel, a memoir, a self-help manual, or a book of philosophy? It is all of these things and more.  Host David Naimon talks with Sheila Heti about her new book, which Bookforum dubs “a raw, startling, genre-defying novel of friends, sex, and love in the new millennium—a compulsive read that’s like spending […] The post Sheila Heti : How Should A Person Be? appeared first on Tin House.
8/31/201227 minutes, 59 seconds
Episode Artwork

Karen Thompson Walker : The Age of Miracles

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, and the environment is thrown into disarray. Yet as she […] The post Karen Thompson Walker : The Age of Miracles appeared first on Tin House.
7/14/201227 minutes, 31 seconds
Episode Artwork

Vanessa Veselka : Zazen

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 […] The post Vanessa Veselka : Zazen appeared first on Tin House.
6/22/201229 minutes, 5 seconds
Episode Artwork

Adam Levin : Hot Pink

Adam Levin’s debut novel, The Instructions, published by McSweeney’s in 2010, arrived with a lot of buzz. An inventive, experimental book of over 1000 pages, its protagonist was Gurion ben-Judah 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 […] The post Adam Levin : Hot Pink appeared first on Tin House.
6/14/201229 minutes, 9 seconds
Episode Artwork

Jon Raymond : Rain Dragon

Host David Naimon talks with Portland author, Jon Raymond, about his new novel Rain Dragon.  Raymond is the author of the novel The Half-Life, and the short story collection Livability, which won the Oregon Book Award and contained two stories that became the critically acclaimed movies Old Joy and Wendy & Lucy. Jon Raymond was also the screenwriter for the film Meek’s Cutoff and […] The post Jon Raymond : Rain Dragon appeared first on Tin House.
5/24/201229 minutes, 27 seconds
Episode Artwork

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

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 […] The post Nathan Englander : What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank appeared first on Tin House.
3/14/201229 minutes, 47 seconds
Episode Artwork

Ben Marcus : The Flame Alphabet

What if the words your children spoke to you actually made you sick? Physically sick. And what if the children themselves relished in this newfound power over their parents? This is the setting of Ben Marcus’ new dystopian novel The Flame Alphabet. Ben Marcus is Chair of Creative Writing at Columbia University and the author of […] The post Ben Marcus : The Flame Alphabet appeared first on Tin House.
3/1/201225 minutes, 47 seconds
Episode Artwork

Colson Whitehead : Zone One

Host David Naimon speaks with award-winning writer Colson Whitehead about his new novel Zone One, described as a “wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel.” The world has been devastated by a plague. There are two types of survivors: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. Colson Whitehead is the author […] The post Colson Whitehead : Zone One appeared first on Tin House.
12/29/201121 minutes, 6 seconds
Episode Artwork

Justin Torres : We The Animals

Host David Naimon interviews debut novelist Justin Torres. His book, We the Animals, has been heralded for its beautiful, concentrated prose. NPR likened it to a diamond, brilliant and brilliantly compressed. Esquire called it a “knock to the head that will leave your mouth agape.” Justin Torres is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, with work in the […] The post Justin Torres : We The Animals appeared first on Tin House.
11/3/201125 minutes, 40 seconds
Episode Artwork

China Miéville : Embassytown

Science fiction and fantasy writer China Miéville has won nearly every award in the genre and has caught the attention of mainstream publications from the New York Times to the Guardian with the depth of his imagination and the height of his erudition. David Naimon interviews him about his new, much anticipated book, Embassytown. “Embassytown is a […] The post China Miéville : Embassytown appeared first on Tin House.
7/21/201128 minutes, 18 seconds
Episode Artwork

Scott Sparling : Wire to Wire

Host David Naimon interviews Portland writer Scott Sparling about his debut novel, Wire to Wire, from Tin House Books.  A pick of the week by Publisher’s Weekly, they call Wire to Wire, “well-crafted and thrilling, tying together an obvious love for both Michigan and railroads with an expert sense of timing and plot. The world he has created is both overwhelming […] The post Scott Sparling : Wire to Wire appeared first on Tin House.
6/30/201128 minutes, 7 seconds
Episode Artwork

Anthony Doerr : Memory Wall

Host David Naimon speaks with writer Anthony Doerr about his latest book, Memory Wall. Doerr is the author of three other books: The Shell Collector, About Grace, and Four Seasons in Rome. Doerr’s short fiction has won three O. Henry Prizes and has been anthologized in The Best American Short Stories, The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Fiction. […] The post Anthony Doerr : Memory Wall appeared first on Tin House.
1/13/201126 minutes, 20 seconds
Episode Artwork

Nicole Krauss : Great House

Host David Naimon speaks with Nicole Krauss about her newest novel Great House, which tells a story haunted by questions: What do we pass on to our children? How do they absorb our dreams and losses? How do we respond to disappearance, destruction, and change?  Great House was a finalist for the National Book Award for fiction this year. […] The post Nicole Krauss : Great House appeared first on Tin House.
12/14/201025 minutes, 12 seconds