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

Lance Olsen returns to Between the Covers to discuss his two new books, his uncategorizable multiverse fiction Absolute Away, and his new collection of philosophical essays and interviews on writing Shrapnel:Contemplations. Lance’s latest novel engages with the life of Edith Metzger, an improbable footnote in two momentous events in history: 1)as the woman in the backseat of Jackson Pollock’s car on the fateful day he crashed it and ended both their lives, and 2)as a German Jewish three-year old at the infamous Nazi book burning. When Hermann Göring mistook her for an Aryan, picking her up, little Edie bit his lip until it bled. Employing the notions of quantum physics as well as the notions of home and exile of Jacques Derrida, Lance imagines many otherwises for Edith Metzger. In this life and others. Together we explore the philosophic underpinnings of Lance’s writing, as evidenced in Shrapnel: Contemplations, and use his novel Absolute Away as the test case. For the bonus audio archive Lance contributes an extended reading from his forthcoming novel about the outsider artist Henry Darger. It’s provisional title is An Inventory of Benevolent Butterflies. You can find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and all the other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter at the show’s Patreon page. Here is the BookShop for today’s conversation.

For nearly twenty years Amitav Ghosh has been writing about opium and the opium trade, first in his fictional Ibis trilogy, and now in nonfiction with Smoke & Ashes. This is a story that brings together many of the preoccupying themes from Ghosh’s career: the legacies of colonialism and extractive colonial economies, the intelligence of plants and the ways plants are actors and agents within history, and the strategies that can be gleaned from the story of opium in today’s battle to address climate change. But given that he has now engaged with the opium trade in both nonfiction and fiction, we also discuss another of his interests: the factors that led to the rise of realism in fiction, that shaped and defined what we.call the literary novel today. It turns out what shaped the realist literary novel are the same forces that have led to our opium and fossil fuel addiction, and we look at both. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. There are innumerable potential benefits and rewards of doing so. You can explore them all at the show’s Patreon page. Lastly, here is today’s BookShop.  

Today’s guest, poet, playwright, novelist, translator, publisher, editor and critic, Joyelle McSweeney discusses her latest poetry collection Death Styles. She talks about the juxtaposing of “death” and “style” and the seam to the underworld that opens when you do, about style as survival, about writing after and into death, about eyes that spill Art, and ears that make sound, about poetry, performance, prophecy and more. We also do a deep dive into McSweeney’s aesthetics and poetics as exemplified by her landmark book of eco-criticism The Necropastoral: Poetry, Media, Occults. For the bonus audio archive, McSweeney contributes an almost twenty minute incredible performance from her libretto Pistorius Rex, her operatic and Oedipal reimagining of the trial of Oscar Pistorius (the double-amputee Olympic athlete who murdered his girlfriend). This joins bonus audio from many past guests, from Douglas Kearney to C.A. Conrad to Jorie Graham. To find out about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other possible benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the BookShop for today’s conversation.      

One might ask, just what is Danielle Dutton’s latest book, Prairie, Dresses, Art, Other? A collection of stories, a philosophical essay, a sequence of nested dreams and memories, an act of loving citation, a one-act play of silent animals, a meditation on the human in the more-than-human world, on the end of the world, on writing, on reading, on visual art, on black holes, on subterranean forests and the landscapes inside us? Somehow, as we leap from one section to the next, from Prairie to Dresses to Art to Other, this book is about all of these things and much more. And yet, mysteriously, magically, improbably it all holds together as one. Everything echoing off of and deepening everything else. We talk about finding form, about creating work that best reflects the unique and weird way one sees the world, about the generative power of making the world strange again, about opening spaces in fiction, and writing into them. Many of the people mentioned today, from Bhanu Kapil to Sabrina Orah Mark to Caren Beilin have contributed readings to the bonus audio archive when they themselves were guests on the show. The bonus audio archive is only one possible benefit of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. You can find out how to subscribe to it and all the other resources and rewards available at the show’s Patreon page. Lastly, here is the BookShop for today’s conversation.

Today’s guest is one of the most important and celebrated writers in Australia today, Alexis Wright. We look together at the ways Wright reshapes the novel form to honor Aboriginal notions of story, of time, and of scale. To find a different sound and voice for the novel, one that is multiple and collective. both ancestral and visionary, one that invites us to walk back into relationship with other beings and the land itself, and shows us where we are headed when we don’t. Her latest novel Praiseworthy is set in a world like ours, of extreme weather events, of unchecked white supremacy, of the inexorable pull toward assimilation, erasure and the demanding present-tense of the internet. But the book is also one of aboriginal invention, adaptation, and vision, a novel of both biting humor and wisdom, as people, in the face of it all, search for Aboriginal sovereignty. For the bonus audio archive Alexis reads a favorite poem of hers by Bei Dao which joins an immense archive of supplemental material—readings, craft talks, long-form conversations with translators—from everyone from Layli Long Soldier to Dionne Brand, Naomi Klein to Richard Powers. You can find out more about the bonus audio archive and the many other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the Bookshop corresponding to today’s episode.  

Over the past fifteen years, Nam Le has published a book in each genre. Best known for his phenomenal 2009 debut story collection The Boat, he followed it with his 2019 debut nonfiction On David Malouf, and now, this year, his debut poetry collection 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem. What is remarkable about these three books, is how, in a way, they are three different strategies aimed at the same goal—how to avoid the flatness and fixity of representation of identity, how to create enough elbow room, to push back against the assumptions, presumptions and expectations that come with one’s identity, and assert one’s sovereignty as a writer. Nam has suggested that 36 Ways of Writing a Vietnamese Poem could be viewed as one long poem, one poem that consists of many stand-alone poems, but where each individual poem, through your encounter with it, affects, changes, and deforms all the others, and the longer poem as a whole. We look at his three books in a similar spirit, looking at each through the vantage point of the others, to see what we discover about questions of identity, representation and art-making as we do. If you enjoy today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. To find out about all the possible benefits and rewards of doing so, from the bonus audio archive to the Tin House Early Reader subscription, head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally, today’s BookShop.  

Writer, interdisciplinary artist, editor and publisher Anne de Marcken discusses her new book It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over. Winner of the Novel Prize, and thus published simultaneously in the U.S., U.K., and Australia, by New Directions, Fitzcarraldo Editions and Giramondo respectively, de Marcken’s new book is a deeply philosophical and metaphysical, heartbreakingly funny book about life and death, love and loss. Join our undead protagonist, in search of herself, as she loses one body part after another, yet fills herself with one thing after another. How much can we lose and still be ourselves? How much of our sense of self is built from what we’ve lost? How much of who we are is really ‘other’? Perhaps the crow inside her chest, dead but communicative, speaking human words but not a human language, can tell us. For the bonus audio archive, Anne contributes a reading from her book The Accident: An Account, which joins supplemental readings from everyone from Dionne Brand to Jorie Graham, Natalie Diaz to Christina Sharpe. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is today’s BookShop.

Award-winning poet Canisia Lubrin talks about her debut fiction, Code Noir. The fifty-nine stories in this collection are each prefaced by one of Louis XIV’s fifty-nine “Black codes,” the rules of conduct in France and its colonies regarding slaves and slavery. And each of these codes, each of these edicts, is also engaged with, manipulated and remade by the abstract artist Torkwase Dyson. Together they unmake history, unmake the edicts, one in language and one with a brush. Canisia tells stories that are as short as a line, or told in footnotes, or that take place one thousand years in the future. Stories that remake other stories, and stories that aren’t stories at all. And ultimately, through storytelling, Canisia asks us how we place ourselves in relation to the stories we’ve inherited, the histories which themselves are fictions, and in the ways she herself does and doesn’t engage with the codes, she enacts a different way of living, sounding a future for Black life. For the bonus audio archive Canisia reads from Dionne Brand’s upcoming book Salvage: Readings from the Wreck, from Christina Sharpe’s remarkable “What Could a Vessel Be?” and more that I will leave as surprise. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the many other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is today’s BookShop.

Today’s conversation, with poet and multimedia artist Diana Khoi Nguyen, is not to be missed. Both of her books, Ghost Of and Root Fractures, engage with and are shaped by her brother’s absence and the family silence surrounding it. Two years before his suicide, her brother quietly removed the family photos from their frames on the walls, carefully cut himself out of each photo, and returned them to their frames without him. The redacted photos remained on the walls like this for years before and after his death. In different ways, Diana’s books write into and around the empty space that her brother left in these images, and in her family. We talk about her process of radical eulogy, the ways her work outside of language informs her poetry, how she uses photography—redacted by her own sibling—as a form and constraint in her work, about ghosts and hauntings, rivers and bees, about the Vietnamese declarative and the English subjunctive, about alternate lives not-lived and future ones that might be. One of the topics we cover today is how Diana constructed and crafted Root Fractures as a book, distilling a manuscript of over 200 pages of words and images to a book half that size. For the bonus audio archive Diana discusses this further and reads from some of the body-shaped poems that didn’t make it into the final manuscript, and yet were part of it coming into being. To learn more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is today’s Bookshop with not only Diana’s books but many of the books mentioned today. Everyone from Eliot Weinberger and Jenny Erpenbeck to Bhanu Kapil and Victoria Chang.

Today’s conversation with Álvaro Enrigue about his latest novel, You Dreamed of Empires, translated by Natasha Wimmer, is set during the relatively undocumented first encounter between Moctezuma and Hernán Cortés. The novel dilates the knife’s edge moment when the Aztec emperor invites the conquistador, with his small band of Spanish soldiers, into the palaces of Tenochtitlan as guests. We talk about writing into the gaps of history, fiction’s influence on the “official” record, histories that are actually fictions, and how writing into erased or distorted histories can be a way to speak to the present moment. We talk of hornless deer, ritual cannibalism, psychedelic tomatoes, and a surprising influence of the indigenous cultures of the Americas on all of our lives today. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Find out about all the potential gifts and rewards of doing so at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the Bookshop for today’s episode with all the books, fiction and nonfiction, literary and scholarly, that we reference today.

Is Mathias Énard’s latest book formally influenced by the Buddhist Wheel of Time, by Jewish undertaker guilds, by François Rabelais’s scatological and philosophical prose and linguistic wordplay, by Catholic altarpiece polyptych panel paintings, and by the scandalous diaries of a Polish anthropologist? The Annual Banquet of the Gravediggers’ Guild is dedicated to les pensées sauvages, to the wild thinkers, and today’s conversation is an exploration of Énard’s latest wild book, and of wild thinking itself. If you enjoy today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. There are many potential benefits and rewards of doing so. You can find out about them all at the show’s Patreon page. In the spirit of Énard’s latest book and our conversation about it, today’s Bookshop is just as wide-ranging—with classics of anthropology, Buddhism, modern Arabic and French literature, and of course, Énard’s own books as well.

We are kicking off the new year with a serious blast from the past. A recording from the very first Tin House writers workshop in the summer of 2003 with novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, and screenwriter Denis Johnson. This three-part episode includes a remarkable reading from Johnson’s novella Train Dreams, an interview of Johnson by writer Chris Offutt that is an unforgettable exploration of a writer’s process and philosophy, and finally, after Denis takes a cigarette break, Johnson, Offutt and Charles D’Ambrosio perform the first act of Johnson’s play Psychos Never Dream. Books by all three of today’s writers can be found in this episode’s Bookshop. And you can find out more about all the potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter at the show’s Patreon page.  

Perhaps it is fitting that today’s episode, with writer and founding editor of Witch Craft Magazine, Elle Nash, is launched on the shortest day of the year, the longest night of darkness. Nash’s new novel Deliver Me explores the ways society tries to keep the light and the dark separate, to hide our unasked questions and forbidden desires in the shadows. Nash’s writing insists on bringing them uncomfortably together and we explore what it means to transgress in one’s writing, to risk oneself on the page, to write dangerously and with a burnt tongue. Whether engaging with motherhood under capitalism, industrial animal slaughter, or cross-species kink, Deliver Me leads us into the darkness, crosses the borders of the acceptable, and then looks back at the well-lit world to see it anew. For the bonus audio archive Elle reads the opening of Elizabeth V. Aldrich’s Ruthless Little Things. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio, and about the countless other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is today’s Bookshop.  

Today’s part two of the conversation with Naomi Klein about Doppelganger highlights the Jewish elements in the book, and looks at them through the lens of Palestine and Israel. We discuss Zionism, Marxism, and the Jewish Labor Bund’s notion of “hereness.” We look at the battles over the definition of antisemitism and the ways accusations of antisemitism have been weaponized to silence legitimate political speech. And together, as two people who’ve both been involved in Jewish activism in relation to Palestinian solidarity, we take stock of the current upsurge in organizing, direct action, and civil disobedience on the Jewish Left in relation to Palestine. For the bonus audio archive Naomi reads for us from Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, a book that features prominently in her book. She reads a letter that fake Philip Roth (his doppelganger) writes to the real Philip Roth. It is not to miss. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and explore the other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation, full of the books we reference but also additional books by Palestinian authors on the topics we discuss today.

In Kate Zambreno & Sofia Samatar’s Tone they construct a shared voice, that of the “Committee to Investigate the Atmosphere.” Yes, they do this to investigate tone, in the writings of everyone from Nella Larsen to Clarice Lispector, W. G. Sebald to Franz Kafka, Renee Gladman to Bhanu Kapil. But in chasing the ever-elusive notion of tone, discovering its relational and atmospheric qualities, Zambreno & Samatar end up troubling the notion of selfhood and the individual, and in doing so, they trouble the notion of literary form as well. Tone becomes an investigation not just of tone, but of the collective, of the communal, of the collaborative, and reveals the ways all writing is collaboration. In the spirit of their collaboration they have created a wonderfully robust 40-minute call & response contribution for the bonus audio archive. One where Kate discusses and reads from works important to their project (everything from Bhanu Kapil’s How to Wash a Heart to Renee Gladman’s Calamities) and after each reading/meditation by Kate, Sofia responds with a reading of her own, speaking to Kate’s reading through her choices (from Nella Larsen’s Quicksand to writing by H. Bustos Domecq, the pseudonym of the collaborative writing of Borges and Casares). The bonus audio archive is only one possible benefit of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Every supporter gets the resource email with each episode and can join our collective brainstorm of who to invite on the show going forward. And then there are many other things to choose from as well, from the bonus audio to the Tin House Early Reader subscription. You can check it all out at the show’s Patreon page. Lastly, because Tone is engaging with and indebted to so many books, this is the largest Bookshop ever!

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore returns to Between the Covers to talk about her remarkable new book, Touching the Art. A mixture of memoir, biography, criticism, and social history, Touching the Art is above all a complicated love letter to Mattilda’s grandmother, abstract artist Gladys Goldstein. Through an exploration of Mattilda’s love for Gladys’ art, Touching the Art becomes a book about so many things—women in abstract expressionism, queer identity and homophobia, structural racism and white flight, antisemitism and Jewish assimilation into whiteness, family gaslighting and middle class norms, and dreams and visions of solidarity and liberation both in the world of art and in the world. For the bonus audio archive, Mattilda contributes a reading of the first chapter of their future book Terry Dactyl. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about the many other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page. And here is today’s Bookshop.

Bhanu Kapil’s postcolonial feminist road novel Incubation: A Space for Monsters has long been out of print. The book of hers that most engages with the mythos and reality of America, Incubation follows Laloo, a British woman of Indian descent, who arrives in the US to give birth to a monster. This fictional story parallels Bhanu’s own arrival in the United States, a move that was meant to be a permanent one, a leaving behind of England forever. And yet, now, as Incubation has a second renewed life in the US and arrives for the first time in the UK, Bhanu herself is, decades later, living again in England. We talk about questions of migration, immigration, home, hospitality, performance, ritual, memory, family, and gendered, racialized, and institutional violence, in light of Bhanu’s own return to the place she thought she never would. “What is a monster?” is a question that animates this book and animates our conversation today. How do monsters relate to writing and form, to identity and belonging, and to Bhanu’s own writing and teaching? We talk about all this and more. For the bonus audio archive Bhanu contributes an extended reading for us: of Annie Ernaux, Eunsong Kim, Kate Zambreno, Sofia Samatar, and recent writings from Bhanu’s own notebook. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is today’s Bookshop.

Colleen Burner’s novella Sister Golden Calf is the story of two sisters on the road set in a world without men. Inspired, in part, by Vanessa Veselka’s essay “Green Screen: The Lack of Female Road Narratives and Why it Matters,” Sister Golden Calf by its very existence interrogates the road novel tradition it now becomes a part of. As Leni Zumas says: “In shiveringly beautiful prose, Colleen Burner maps a wild voyage into grief, love, and radical forms of kinship. Their novel unstitches the fixed seams of self and stranger, inviting us to touch the peculiar, precise commotions that link one creature to another. A truly extraordinary book.” If you enjoy today’s conversation, consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Find out all the potential rewards and benefits of doing so at the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is today’s Bookshop.

Essayist and translator Kate Briggs’ first novel The Long Form is a book about, and happening within, the relationship between Helen and her infant daughter, Rose. What does making a novel baby-centric, not a novel about babies, but where the baby is a main character, a vital actor that shapes the story that unfolds, that shapes the experience of time and duration, what does that do to the novel? And what does it tell us about the history of novels, of the biases baked into the ways we traditionally tell stories? What gets considered worthy of characterization and why? What is considered dramatic or utterly banal, and what are the implications of these long-standing sensibilities? The Long Form meditates deeply on what a novel is thanks to baby Rose. And invites us to do so alongside her. If you enjoyed today’s conversation, consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Every supporter gets the resource-rich email with each episode and can participate in shaping who comes on the show going forward and there are many other potential rewards and gifts to choose from. You can check it all out at the show’s Patreon page. And here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation.  

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. Regardless of their length or style, they often raise the questions “is this a story?” and “if it isn’t a story, what is it?” In that spirit, you could consider today’s conversation a deep dive into poetry (syntax and the poetics of the sentence), into nonfiction (the ways autobiographical and found materials are incorporated into her fiction), and into translation as well. And all along the way, we get to hear Lydia read her singular stories of varying shapes and styles. For the bonus audio archive, Davis contributes a discussion of the work of Swiss writer Peter Bichsel and then reads one of her translations of his stories. If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. There are a wealth of potential benefits and rewards of doing so, including the bonus audio archive. You can check it all out at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is today’s Bookshop.  

Naomi Klein’s new book, Doppelganger, is a departure for her. One some of her closest friends even cautioned her against. On the one hand, it is what we’ve come to expect from Klein, a brilliant framing, through the coining of new language, of our current political moment. And yet Doppelganger is decidedly more personal, more vulnerable, more inward-looking than her previous books. And not only does it have a strain of a more literary nonfiction running through it, it also centers literature and the ways the literary history of doubles and doppelgangers can help us make sense of the doubling we are encountering in our lives—whether fake news narratives for everything from COVID to climate change; or AI; or the avatars that we create to represent us on social media; or the friends we’ve lost to what Klein calls “the mirror world” since the pandemic, over vaccines and masks. And the new political terms she is engaging with, from sacrifice zones to shadowlands, are deeply relevant to the choices we make as writers and art-makers as well. And writers from China Miéville to Kim Stanley Robinson are some of the many luminaries singing Doppelganger‘s praises. For the bonus audio archive Naomi reads for us from Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock, a book that features prominently in her book. She reads a letter that fake Philip Roth (his doppelganger) writes to the real Philip Roth. It is not to miss. To find out how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and explore the other potential benefits and rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the Bookshop corresponding to today’s episode.  

You could say that Matthew Zapruder’s Story of a Poem is about the revision of a poem, that it follows the life of one poem, from its first phrase to its final draft, and invites us, in the most mesmerizing way, behind the curtain of the creative process of composition. And you wouldn’t be wrong. But really it is also the story of the revision of the poet as well, a revision of the stories that make up his own sense of self, that situate him in the world. When his son is diagnosed with autism many of the things that Zapruder had organized his own sense of identity around—a facility and quickness with language to name but one—were called into question. To show up as the father he wanted to be for his son, to truly see him on his own terms, he had to revise his notion of himself. He had to find a new form of being. Zapruder’s new book is also a new form, part prose, part poetry, and is the story of this journey, one that looks at how a poem comes to be, how the poet enters a place that is provisional by welcoming a certain unknowingness, as a guide toward doing the same for himself. Story of a Poem is about poetry and story, revision and self-becoming, coming together and coming undone, and more than anything about building a world where the people and things you most love can thrive. If you enjoy today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Find out about the many possible benefits and rewards of doing so at the show’s Patreon page.

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 music, to race, to selfhood, to inheritance and community. We place these two career-spanning works side by side, prose and poetry, and explore them together in today’s conversation. We look back across his work, considering how his poetry and his thoughts on poetry have evolved over the years, and what looking back does to moving forward. It’s a conversation that looks at identity, voice, and the mysteries of selfhood, at multiple ways of evoking the ecological and nonhuman within ones work, at fraught questions of race and nation, and at questions of influence, lineage, and reaching across difference. For the bonus audio archive Major Jackson introduces us to and contributes a reading of John Ashbery’s “More Pleasant Adventures” which joins readings from so many iconic contemporary poets, from Dionne Brand to Layli Long Soldier, Arthur Sze to Rosmarie Waldrop. The bonus audio is only one potential benefit of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Find out about all the possible benefits and rewards at the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is the Bookshop for today’s episode with many of the books mentioned, from Sonia Sanchez to Evie Shockley, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge to Brenda Hillman. And of course the books by Major himself.

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 by Martin’s 6×6 gridded abstract paintings that so appealingly keep out the clutter of life, and by Martin’s life philosophy—her notions of “positive freedom” and her pursuit of inner perfection. Because of this, today’s conversation becomes a dual exploration of both Novak’s own artistic journey and that of Martin’s. In addition, we look at the various ways Novak uses constraints and experimental techniques as part of her writing practice, about the different ways she has portrayed pregnancy in her poetry versus her prose, about writing into the unspoken stigma of prenatal depression, and much more. For the bonus audio archive JoAnna contributes a reading of the children’s picture book Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present, written some sixty years ago by Charlotte Zolotow, illustrated by Maurice Sendak, and loved by JoAnna’s now four-year-old son. The bonus audio archive is only one potential benefit of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. You can find out about all the potential rewards and benefits of doing so at the show’s Patreon page. And here is the link to today’s Bookshop.  

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 conversation that many other guests on the show since have told me is now part of their syllabi at the universities where they teach. And yet as rich and deep as it was, even after those many substantive hours spent together, there was still so much left to explore about Jorie Graham’s poetics, which makes her return to Between the Covers, to discuss her latest collection, To 2040, particularly exciting. Both of these conversations are stand-alone episodes, and yet, I think to fully grasp Jorie’s poetics, both conversations are necessary to do so, as they approach her body of work from opposite vantage points. Whereas the first explores how to be present to and embodied before one’s life and one’s art, the second looks at how to make art, and to live an embodied life within a deeply and increasingly disembodied world. Today’s conversation is about the body—the body in relation to self and other; the body politic in relation to truth, fact, and shared reality; and the body that is the planet we call home. The body in relation to the virtual, the body in relation to language, and how to find a language in a world where we’ve lost our way. The last time Jorie was on the show she contributed a remarkable bonus reading of several poems about rain (by Robert Creeley and Edward Thomas). The bonus audio archive, which includes bonus readings from everyone from Alice Oswald to Arthur Sze to Layli Long Solider to Dionne Brand, is one of many potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. To find out more head over to the show’s Patreon page. Lastly, here is today’s Bookshop with many of the books mentioned today. photo credit: Alvaro Almanza

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 his own work, at not only what effects they have, but what they open up for him as a writer. Adjei-Brenyah is the bestselling and critically-acclaimed writer of the story collection Friday Black and the dystopian novel Chain-Gang All-Stars.

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. . . . a desire for the outside, for a playing or being outside, an outlaw edge proper to the now always already improper voice or instrument,” how does writing fugitively effect a writer’s orientation to self and selfhood, to one’s own community and people, to nation and nationhood, to the canon and canon formation, to otherness and the stranger, to life and living in the ever-unfolding apocalypse? We look together at what a poet writing essays tells us both about the essay form and about Roger’s poetry and poetics. Deep dives into questions of time, progress, repetition, metaphor, history, ancestry, futurity, presence, sound, and silence. For the bonus audio archive, Roger contributes an extended reading from Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanafani’s novella Return to Haifa. This joins an ever-growing archive of supplemental audio from everyone from Natalie Diaz to Dionne Brand, Isabella Hammad to Christina Sharpe. You can find out more about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the many other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter at the show’s Patreon page. The Bookshop for today’s episode contains many of the books mentioned, referenced, or read from.

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 Hamlet? We look at the unique history of this play within the Arab world, its history of being both performed and banned, but also at how the very act of striving to create a shared performative space, while living under occupation, is a political act in and of itself. Today’s conversation covers many things, from writing against essentialism to the revolutionary potential of art-making. For the bonus audio archive Isabella contributes a reading of a prison letter that Palestinian political prisoner Walid Daqqa wrote twenty years into his still-ongoing incarceration. This letter, called “Parallel Time,” was adapted for the stage in 2014 and performed in Haifa. The theater that performed it was then defunded by the Israeli government, threatening its ability to continue as a theater (a topic we discuss in the main conversation). Daqqa’s letters have yet to find publication in English. This translation is by Dalia Taha. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and the other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the Bookshop for today’s episode.

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 books and how his choices on the page engage with the crisis that is contemporary masculinity. We talk about fatherhood and parenting, the extra-literary influences on his writing, whether comics or music or visual art, about the mythic and the wild in relation to the human and language, and much more. Today’s conversation was recorded live in Portland, Oregon, at the downtown location of Powell’s Books in May of 2023. Don’t miss Max’s first appearance on the show in 2019 for his book Lanny. Back then, Max contributed a reading of a poem of his to the bonus audio archive. The singer-songwriter Joan Shelley had reached out in admiration of his books. They began a correspondence (which eventually resulted in some of his words becoming lyrics to her songs) and part of that correspondence included this poem he wrote for her. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and the other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page. Lastly, here is the Bookshop for today’s episode.

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 and boundaries—of self, of nation, of species. We talk about questions of home and belonging, community and solidarity, how we might create kinship across difference both on the page and in one’s life, creating a sense of shared living through a poetics of diaspora and dislocation. We also talk about time and how to live, love, and create art within an ongoing crisis. Personal, poetical, and geopolitical, this is a conversation not to miss. If you enjoy today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers as a listener-supporter. Find out about all the potential rewards and benefits of doing so at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the Bookshop for today’s episode.

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 battles and high-stakes art openings, but also high-stakes moral quandaries. Set in the institutional art world of museums and galleries, Your Love Is Not Good looks at making art (and love) under capitalism, at a mixed-race Korean American painter striving for universality (and whiteness) and yet wanting to be authentic, to build community and solidarity. When forced to choose, where and with whom will she stand? Johanna Hedva is also a musician and a performance artist. And their contribution to the bonus audio archive is one of the most unique ones ever, and one created specifically with us in mind. After we recorded this conversation they went on book tour and, while traveling from city to city, recorded themselves moaning, grunting, screaming, and breathing; recorded themselves reading text they wrote while touring. They then sent all these voice files to LA audio engineer Henry Glover along with the voices of the universe itself: sonifications of a black hole and the helix nebula, raw audio of the sun, a field recording of the aurora borealis. Hedva explained to Glover the vibe and scenario they imagined as he mixed and mastered a layering of voices, personal and “universal,” into this unique track: “The Saddest Thing of All Is When a Lone Astronaut Falls in Her Suit—Who Is There to Help Her Up?” To learn about how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and the many other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page. The Bookshop for today’s episode.    

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 life of trees. Irish visual artist Katie Holten has created a new contemporary tree alphabet, gathered the voices, thoughts, poems, and meditations of some of the great thinkers about trees and the natural world, and translated their writings into “tree.” A book of image and a book of text, the wisdom of Ursula K. Le Guin and Richard Powers, Ross Gay and Robert Macfarlane, Amitav Ghosh, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Ada Limón, and many more, is transformed into tree language as they each, in their own way, evoke the complex beings that are trees, and argue, as Richard Powers does, that “this is not our world with trees in it. It’s a world of trees, where humans have just arrived.” If you enjoy today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Find out about all the potential rewards and benefits of doing so at the show’s Patreon page. Today’s conversation was recorded at Powell’s Books in downtown Portland before a live audience.

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 distinctly different interviews, but also because this was Powers’ first visit to Oregon for The Overstory, a book not merely set in the Pacific Northwest but one that deeply engages with the longstanding history of forest defense in the region on behalf of the last remaining stands of old growth forest. Because Powers hadn’t been to Portland for his hardback or paperback tours and had since won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for this very book, and because of the deep connection the Portland community has to the stories within this novel, the atmosphere was electric at this sold-out event, overflowing with anticipation, excitement, and joy. I’m so happy to be able to now share this with you and want to thank Richard Powers, W. W. Norton, and Powell’s Books, the host of the event, for making that possible. And whether or not you’ve heard the podcast conversation that aired with Powers in 2019, it is a great complement to today’s episode. Two conversations on the same day, one with just Richard and me, the other celebrating the book in community, quite different in tone and content and yet interwoven and speaking to each other. For the bonus audio archive, Richard contributes a reading of an incredibly moving W. S. Merwin poem about trees, which joins Jorie Graham reading poems by others about rain, Kaveh Akbar reading about worms, Forrest Gander reading poems about lichen, and much more. The bonus audio is only one possible benefit of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. You can find out about them all at the show’s Patreon page. Lastly, here is today’s very tree-centric Bookshop.  

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 phases not as sections but as movements? How does writing from or toward love change the music of our sentences or lines, the shapes of our stories, the way we represent others—whether other people or other nonhuman beings? Thon suggests a relationship between attention and attentiveness and this question of love. By quoting Simone Weil, who says, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love. Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer,” Thon speaks to what she calls the “ethics of perception,” that we can avert our eyes or risk compassion, in our lives and on the page. A conversation that is as much about living as writing, and one that speaks as deeply to questions of poetry, music, silence, spirit, and yes, love, as it does to story. In today’s conversation Melanie also speaks generously about her approach to the teaching of writing. In that spirit she offers to all Between the Covers supporters two of her teaching documents, “Memory & Adventure” and “The Gospel of Grief, Grace, and Gratitude.” In addition, for the bonus audio archive she gives a craft talk of hers called “The Ethics of Perception.” This joins craft talks from Marlon James (“The Nine and a Half Rules of Seduction”) and Jeannie Vanasco (“How to Write Memorable Lines”) as well as readings by everyone from Teju Cole to Lance Olsen, Carmen Maria Machado to Jenny Offill. You can find out about all of this and the many other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation.

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 for one (conversations as wide-ranging as those with Viet Thanh Nguyen, Monica Youn, Claire Schwartz, Cristina Rivera Garza, and Charif Shanahan), Sharpe’s scholarship has been a crucial part of some of the most dynamic conversations on the show. Her work has always been more than academic work however. It has always been a hybrid, scholarly and literary, visual and textual, personal and structural. But her latest book, Ordinary Notes, is the most personal to date, and among the many things it could be considered (John Keene suggests it combines memoir, memorial, literary criticism, and political and cultural critique) is as a love letter to Sharpe’s mother and how she cultivated and nourished, in the face of all the brutalities of our world, an atmosphere of Black life, Black art, and Black thought within their home. Of how she pursued, in Christina’s words, “beauty as a method.” This is a rare book that will work on you if you work your way through it. Ordinary Notes is both generous and challenging, envisioning an elsewhere and otherwise of shared risk and care. For the bonus audio archive Christina contributes readings from Dionne Brand’s The Blue Clerk, Victoria Adukwei Bulley’s Quiet, and Canisia Lubrin’s forthcoming Code Noir. These join bonus material from everyone from Nikky Finney to Layli Long Soldier. And the bonus material is only one of many potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Find out more at the show’s Patreon page. Today’s Bookshop is the largest and deepest yet, with Christina’s books, of course, but also with many of the Black writers and thinkers and artists that she has been shaped by or writes alongside.

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, a topic that is quite personal for him, and central to his writing life. During his year in a maximum security prison in the Kenya of the 1970s, he decided to stop writing his novels in English and wrote his fifth novel, Devil on the Cross, on squares of toilet paper in Gikuyu, his mother tongue. Ngũgĩ suspects that he wasn’t jailed simply because he wrote and put on a play that was critical of the Kenyan government (his recent novels in English had been just as critical of the government) but because it had been written and performed in Gikuyu. Thus, every novel he has written since, he has written in Gikuyu, and then later translated into English himself. You would be right to think that writing in one’s mother tongue should be the most natural and obvious thing to do. And yet the obstacles to doing so continue to be immense and speak to larger questions around the status of the African continent today and postcolonial Africa’s relationship to its colonial past. Today we look at the histories and legacies within languages as well as the power dynamics between them, and how collapsing the hierarchies between languages is crucial to doing the same geopolitically, that the beginnings of true sovereignty begin with our languages. If you enjoy today’s episode consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Every supporter gets the resource-rich email with each episode with things referenced during the conversation in question as well as places to explore once you’ve finished listening, and there are many other potential benefits to choose from. These include the bonus audio archive with readings from everyone from Dionne Brand to Layli Long Soldier; the Tin House early readership program, receiving twelve books over the course of a year months before they are available to the general public; rare collectibles from past guests; and more. You can check it all out at the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is today’s Bookshop, full of the books we mention today.  

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 seen and heard by others, make art about oneself in language, when language itself does not capture one’s identity, when the available categories do not describe your life, when one’s identity is defined by its instability or uncategorizability? Today’s conversation looks at complex intersections between Arabness and Blackness, between North Africa and North America, between a mother’s self-conception and a son’s very different one, and the ways different legacies of race—historically, geopolitically—can ripple through the most intimate of spaces, within a family, between lovers, before one’s therapist, among one’s peers. Shanahan’s very particular journey around finding a language, a poetics, that can more fully evoke his embodied life experience tells us all something about the construction of self more generally, about the relationship of language to self-making, and about what possibilities the ways we are categorized, or categorize ourselves, either open up or foreclose. For the bonus audio archive Shanahan contributes a reading of a long excerpt from what will be his next book, a polyvocal, epistolary project called Dear Whiteness. In addition, Mizna, the journal of Arab American art, literature, and culture, has also contributed copies of issues related to today’s conversation, or which might be of particular interest to listeners of the show, for new supporters of the show. These are only two of many possible benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener supporter. You can find out more at the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is the Bookshop for today’s episode, with Charif’s books but also books by everyone from Safia Elhillo to Chouki El Hamel.

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 and always enduring, ancient and contemporary at the same time, Sabrina’s essays refuse to be only essays, somehow becoming fairy tales themselves. Our conversation about this essay collection is about fiction, fantasy, memoir, and poetry, about childhood, motherhood, and step-motherhood, and how they all magically coexist in the alchemy of Sabrina’s prose. Ultimately these tales, these surreal dreams, are not ways to look away from the world, but ways to be in it, to cope, confront, and engage with the unimaginably difficult, whether the raising of two Black Jewish boys in the United States today, unspeakable ancestral rupture, a global pandemic and climate apocalypse, or the anxieties and uncertainties of the everyday. Happily takes our hands to walk into the forest together. For the bonus audio archive Sabrina contributes a reading of the Bruno Schulz story “Birds.” This joins a vast archive of material from Jai Chakrabarti reading poems by Bruno Schulz’s biographer, the Polish poet Jerzy Ficowski, to Jen Bervin reading the letters of Paul Celan, to Rosmarie Waldrop reading Edmond Jabès or Alice Oswald reading from the Book of Job. This is one of many possible benefits to joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. You can find out about them all at the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is the Bookshop corresponding to today’s conversation.

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 violence is situated structurally, of the racial triangulation of Asian Americans, of how, in Dorothy Wang’s words, “there’s no way to talk about Asian immigrants or the Asian American experience as separate from the Black American experience or the Indigenous experience or the Latinx experience because of the relation to whiteness.” From From engages with everything from Greek mythology (and the construction of the Greek self in relation to the Asian other) to the 1992 L.A. uprising and the murder of Latasha Harlins by Soon Ja Du. And ultimately with what it means to call a place “home” that never seems to see you as part of its history, that is always asking “but where are you from from?” For the bonus audio archive Monica contributes the reading of two electrifying long poems. The first, “A Guide to Usage: Mine,” was commissioned by the Boston Review for the anthology Poems for Political Disaster (a book conceived in response to the election of Donald Trump). The second is a draft of a poem, one that hasn’t yet fully come together (and which she has never shared before), but was originally meant to be part of the series of magpie parable poems in the new collection. Partially inspired by the landmark 1948 Supreme Court case Shelley v. Kraemer, which abolishes racially-restrictive housing covenants, this never-before-seen poem is called “Parable of the Magpie’s Nest.” To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive (which includes readings from everyone from Victoria Chang to Nikky Finney, from Ada Limón to Dionne Brand), and about the many other potential rewards and benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is today’s Bookshop. photo credit: Beowulf Sheehan

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 questions of class, gender, race, religion, and nationality, particularly in relation to families and family making, and the tensions between our individual dreams and the countervailing realities of the people we share lives with and among. We discuss questions of story shape, characterization, point of view, and the role of the reader in order to look deeply at how to tell such stories in ways that feel nuanced, lived, and embodied. For the bonus audio archive Jai reads two poems by the Polish poet and translator (and biographer of Bruno Schulz) Jerzy Ficowski. The epigraph to Jai’s novel comes from one of them, and the second poem is dedicated to the memory of Janusz Korczak (who we discuss quite a bit in the main discussion). To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and about the many other potential benefits and rewards from joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter, head over the the show’s Patreon page. Finally, here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation.

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 fantastical literature, but, even more, we look at the remarkable ways her writing departs from it, the ways Anglophone horror writers have inspired her to write an Argentinian horror that is similarly place-based, that comes up from the land and the events that happened on it (and still haunt it today), that engages with the stories, customs, rituals, fears, and politics of the place where the story is set. We also talk about her assertion that Latin America, while it has a long and deep history of fantastical literature, as well as a few examples of horror, doesn’t, in her mind, have what amounts to a horror tradition, and she theorizes about why England and the U.S., by contrast, have such a deep engagement with horror as a genre. We talk not only about horror in relation to place and literary tradition, but also horror in relation to gender, and the gothic in relation to gender. About the role of women as characters in the horror genre and about the new wave of Latin American women writers attracted to horror as a lens through which to create their work. We also talk about the politics and aesthetics of portraying violence, and how her work does and does not map itself in relation to the brutal dictatorship she grew up under and which is the setting of her new novel, her first in English, Our Share of Night. Many writers get mentioned and discussed in this conversation, from Jorge Luis Borges to Stephen King to Ursula K. Le Guin, but I want to mention one writer who we discuss several times, the Mexican writer Fernanda Melchor. Melchor’s past appearance on the show to discuss her book Hurricane Season is the perfect pairing with today’s episode with Mariana. For the bonus audio archive, we’ve added a long-form conversation with Mariana Enriquez’s translator Megan McDowell. There is also a long-form conversation with Megan from when Alejandro Zambra was on the show as well. They make a great pairing as Megan was translating both of their books simultaneously during the first years of the pandemic and she makes some revelatory comparisons between their books, and between Chilean and Argentinian literature in relation to the fantastic and the real. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio archive and about the many other potential rewards of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener supporter, head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is today’s Bookshop.  

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 story, and by extension to time, and to the image and the mysterious relationship between words on the page and images in our minds. In her own words Bates describes Judas Goat as follows: “Within the book I see a woman wrestling her various hauntings: the specter of sexual violence, anxieties around attachment and marital commitment, motherlessness, queerness, Biblical figures, education, her reliance on (and distrust of) the visual. What haunts the speaker of Judas Goat most is what she’s been taught, how she’s been trained.” For three lucky new supporters of Between the Covers, Gabrielle Bates is offering two 30-minute poetry consultations and an annotated advance copy of Judas Goat, containing anecdotes about the poems, background about them, and the poet’s own inside scoop about how they came to be written. These are only a few of many possible rewards and gifts for joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. The bonus audio archive (with contributions from everyone from Jorie Graham, Dionne Brand, Nikky Finney, Layli Long Soldier, Alice Oswald, and more), the Tin House early readership subscription, collectibles from everyone from Ama Codjoe to Ursula K. Le Guin and much more. You can check it all out at the show’s Patreon page. And here is today’s episode’s Bookshop.

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 notion that stories themselves can not only comfort and console, but sometimes save a life. His latest novel, Time Shelter, translated by Angela Rodel (who is part of today’s conversation), is about the comforts and dangers of the past, of nostalgia, and what happens to a country, to a world, when the future feels canceled and we look backward for somewhere to live. As Bulgarian translator Izidora Angel said in her review of the book: “Beneath the book’s speculative façade, it’s also clear the author is meditating on his own legacy as a man of words within it. Real, bloody conflict exists but something else is eating away at us too—a critical depletion of empathy, a critical mass of meaninglessness, as Gospodinov has called it, and it is the job of writers to counter these metaphysical but no less real dangers. Words are time shelters too—living, breathing portals to memory, experience, and history, archives and blueprints all at once.” For subscribers to the bonus audio archive, there is a supplementary interview with Georgi’s translator, Angela Rodel, about the questions and conundrums of translation that arose with Time Shelter, about how Gospodinov’s work is distinct within Bulgarian literature, and about her own artistic pursuits beyond translation, from starring in Bulgarian films and television to performing in a Bulgarian folk-rock band and more. This joins other long-form conversations with translators of other previous guests including Megan McDowell translating Alejandro Zambra, Ellen Elias-Bursać translating Dubravka Ugrešić, and more. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is today’s Bookshop.

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 called the structure like that of Matryoshka dolls but its inspiration comes directly from an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin called “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” an essay that reaches toward a different future for the novel. In Ives’ book we spend just as much time reading the things inside our protagonist’s bag as we do with the protagonist herself. At any moment what we are reading might seem like a #MeToo novel, a book of fictional history, a book of real history, a fantastical adventure of magical statuary, an autofiction, or a “systems novel,” one that looks at how individuals act and are acted upon within structures and institutions, whether a marriage or a university. As Percival Everett says “If Lucy Ives is as smart as her novel Life Is Everywhere, then I am in complete awe. . . . How many books in one and yet one book. This is great writing.” And Jesse Ball aptly adds about this erudite and sly invention, Ives “slays enemy and friend alike.” For the bonus audio Lucy Ives contributes a reading of a five-part writing exercise called “Exercises for Writing from Memory.” This joins contributions from writers as varied as Ted Chiang, N.K. Jemisin, Dionne Brand, Arthur Sze, Max Porter, and more. To learn about how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the other many potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation.  

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 and the real, the fantastic and reality, and the ways we seem hardwired, from childhood onward, to be adept at finding the enduring truths within stories that others have “made up.” Today’s conversation, as the final one in the Crafting with Ursula series, serves a double purpose. Yes, we do a deep dive into word magic, into the power and purpose of creating and telling stories, into the spells they weave and why. But we also celebrate Le Guin, the intelligence and music of her words, her spells, by having Neil Gaiman, one of the most mellifluous and recognizable narrative voices today, read excerpts of Le Guin’s work for us, from A Wizard of Earthsea to The Lathe of Heaven to Always Coming Home. Whether you’ve been following the Crafting with Ursula series from the beginning, or whether Neil Gaiman is what brought you here for the first time, don’t miss the many other science fiction and fantasy conversations within the main Between the Covers show. You can go to the show’s homepage and sort the archive for “SFF” and not only find the three conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin herself, but also conversations with many others including Ted Chiang, Jeff VanderMeer, N.K. Jemisin, China Miéville, Nnedi Okorafor, William Gibson, Sofia Samatar, Neal Stephenson, Marlon James, Jo Walton, Kelly Link, Daniel José Older, David Mitchell and more. If you enjoyed today’s conversation consider transforming yourself from a listener to a listener supporter. Each supporter receives a resource-rich email with each episode, can join our collective brainstorm, our collective dreaming of who to invite as future guests, and there are a wide variety of other possible benefits from the bonus audio archive to rare Le Guin collectibles. Check it all out at the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is the Bookshop for today’s conversation. photo credits: William Anthony (Le Guin), Beowulf Sheehan (Gaiman)

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 poetry collection, Pink Waves, is a perfect example of this, poetry written within a durational performance, one that involves “microtranslations” of the syntax of the works of others. As Fred Moten says about Pink Waves: “In a deliberate lyricism of regathering, tethering, and receding precedence, in a perpetual canon that keeps spilling and sifting and replenishing what feels like dancing, in a series of breaks weaving wave and snap into writing that listens, Sawako Nakayasu takes the measure of the enjoyment we derive from sensing and making sense of this wasteland of bandwidth and access. Pink Waves is a delicate instrument. Its spare beauty picks up everything.” Much of Sawako Nakayasu’s genre-transgressive work calls into question our notions of originality and selfhood, as she herself explores questions of race and gender and sexual orientation within her poems. By bringing together these various elements, Sawako Nakayasu creates generative questions: How can queer theory speak to translation practices? How can we engage with questions of power between nations and languages and cultures by the choices we make in translation? What does performance tell us about ourselves, and the notion of a self to begin with? And how do these performative and translational activities manifest in poetry, in poems? If you enjoy today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter. Each patron receives a resource-rich email with each episode and can participate in the collective brainstorm of who to invite in the future, and choose from a wealth of other rewards and gifts from rare collectibles to writing consultations. There is also the possibility of subscribing to the bonus audio archive which includes contributions from such luminary poets as Rosmarie Waldrop, Forrest Gander, Dionne Brand, Natalie Diaz, Nikky Finney, Arthur Sze, Layli Long Soldier, and many more. Check it all out at the show’s Patreon page. And don’t miss today’s Bookshop!  

“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 outside of language but with language, poems that look at how artists look when making art. But more principally Bluest Nude is engaged with looking at how the Black female figure has been (mis)represented in art and asking how a Black female poet can write a poetry that claims a sovereign point of view, that reclaims a Black female subjectivity much as Lorraine O’Grady and Simone Leigh, two of the artists she engages with in her collection, have done in their own work in performance and visual art. These questions of how we see and how we are seen, both by others and by ourselves, call into question notions of selfhood, and the mysteries of how we construct a self, something that only happens in engagement with others, how they see us, how we see them seeing us. For the bonus audio archive Ama Codjoe presents us with three different strategies to write ekphrastic poetry, poetry that engages with visual art. And much like Dionne Brand did when she contributed readings of forthcoming work from 2023 books by Canisia Lubrin and Christina Sharpe, Ama first reads and discusses a poem by Evie Shockley from her forthcoming collection suddenly we, then she reads one of her own poems, and finally she ends with a long poem by Terrance Hayes from his forthcoming collection So to Speak. To learn how to subscribe to the bonus audio and the many other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page to check it all out. Here is the Bookshop for today’s episode.

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 can both honor, connect, and reflect something true, or reduce, dismiss, and cause harm speak to deep questions about both language and identity. These are topics Bellot explores in her own writing, both about others—from Edward Gorey to Neil Gaiman, James Baldwin to J.K. Rowling—as well as about her own identity as a multiracial transgender writer from the Commonwealth of Dominica. We take Le Guin’s interest in class, gender, and race down to the level of the sentence and look at the many different ways she has explored names and naming across novels and stories as a means within language to both address the world and listen to it, to both hear the world and speak a new world into being. Today’s episode of Crafting with Ursula might be most in conversation with the first episode of the series with Becky Chambers, on creating aliens and alien cultures. For one, we return again to explore the world of The Left Hand of Darkness, but we also return to vital questions, as writers, and simply as people, around the importance of how we describe “the other,” “the stranger,” the person or being who we feel is not like ourselves, and what that description, what the names and words we choose, say about us. If you enjoy today’s conversation, and Crafting with Ursula more generally, consider joining the community of listener-supporters. You can check out all the many potential benefits of doing so at the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is the Bookshop for today’s episode.    

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, that she would never write about, let alone go to, the German town of Osnabrück from which her mother and mother’s mother escaped (to Algeria) before the town’s entire Jewish population were murdered. But in the last thirty years, to her surprise, these have increasingly become the topics of her work. First writing about and returning to Algeria, and then, in the last twenty years, writing an increasing number of remarkable books about Osnabrück, her mother’s life there, her mother’s return to that city, Cixous’ “return” to it, as well as about her mother’s ultimate expulsion, the second of her life, now from Algeria. We focus today on two of these books, these novel-memoirs: Well-Kept Ruins and Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem. This strain of Cixous’ work, her novel-memoirs, are not books of autofiction like we’ve come to know them. Yes, they blur the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction but they are as concerned with the borderlands between the conscious and unconscious, waking life and dreams, between history and memory, and literature, imagination and experience, where the present moment in one of these narratives is likely to be inhabited, at the same time, by the seen, the imagined, the dead, and the literature one has read. In her latest book Cixous describes writing as a form of archaeology, historical and literary and ancestral, yes, but I think we could say it is also a psychological archaeology as well, a relation of the writer to her writing and herself. Today’s contribution to the bonus audio archive is a long-form conversation with Cixous’ longstanding translator Beverley Bie Brahic. It is an in-depth conversation about the pleasures and challenges of translating Cixous’ work that also, additionally, further illuminates Cixous as a person and writer, adding further texture and nuance to the main conversation with Hélène. To learn how to get access to the bonus audio and the other potential benefits of joining the Between the Covers community as a listener-supporter head over to the show’s Patreon page. Finally here is the Bookshop for today’s episode.

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 limitations, according to Belcourt, can’t accommodate the reality of an indigenous queer life, this novel is both about the searching for a new form (and a new way of living) and a very example of it. Scholarly and sexual, joyful and citational, embodied and theoretical, A Minor Chorus is somehow a polyvocal narrative of self-making (and unmaking), written for the future, that arrives to us, a new form, as if from the future. If you enjoy today’s conversation consider joining the Between the Covers community of listener-supporters. Receive the resource-rich email with each episode, participate in the collective brainstorm of who to invite in the future, and check out the many possible gifts and rewards at the show’s Patreon page. Here is today’s Bookshop with all of Belcourt’s books and most of the books mentioned today, from Saidiya Hartman to José Esteban Muñoz to Judith Butler.