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

“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.

“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, explosive talent.”—Nylon Magazine

“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

“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 amnesia and wall. If someone asked me, where are you from? I would answer, from The Grave on the Wall.”—Don Mee Choi

“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

“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, and artmaking—all of it a brilliant defense of the outsider’s tenuous foothold in society.” —Ocean Vuong

“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 as often as advertised. This is the real thing.”—Blake Crouch, author of Dark Matter

“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 Greek tragedy as a contemporary Western novelist can come.”—Lauren Groff

“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 about, trauma but at a pitch that’s witty, dry, sad, and laconic. I love America, her narrator declares. It’s broken, like me.”—Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick

“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

“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 notably Juan Rulfo. But this is not a religious state of purgatory. It’s more like Apocalypse Now fused with the worlds of Clarice Lispector and Jorge Luis Borges. In other words, there is no one writing novels as phantasmagorically exquisite as Cristina Rivera Garza’s. The Taiga Syndrome, which is both quietly poetic and narratively unhinged, is a crucial addition to her distinguished oeuvre.”—Daniel Borzutzky

Rebecca Solnit says Lacy M. Johnson’s The Reckonings gives us something essential: “a vision of who and where we are that’s both scathing and generous.” Kiese Laymon says “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 my life, I felt like everything would be okay — like we will make and sustain justice — because a book I needed but never imagined reading was in the world.” Lacy joins David on Between the Covers to talk about justice and art, justice as art, about #metoo accountability, about what it means to be against whiteness and accountable to one’s complicity in white supremacy, about making art in a time of global climate apocalypse, and how joy is an essential part of the equation.

In eleven captivating tales, Pure Hollywood brings us into private worlds of corrupt familial love, intimacy, longing, and danger. From an alcoholic widowed actress living in desert seclusion to a young mother whose rejection of her child has terrible consequences, a newlywed couple who ignore the violent warnings of a painter burned by love to an eerie portrait of erotic obsession, each story in Pure Hollywood is an imagistic snapshot of what it means to live and learn, love and hurt.

“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, which serves as both inescapable character and villain. . . . It’s Jackson’s history, but it’s also a microcosm of too many black men struggling both against their worst instincts, and a society that often leaves them with too few alternatives. . . . His virtuosic wail of a book reminds us that for a black person in America, it can never be that easy.”—Boston Globe

“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 all Marlon James. It’s something very new that feels old, in the best way. I cannot wait for the next installment.” —Neil Gaiman

“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

“How does a body do what it does: make love, mistakes, create life, exist after life; how does a body evolve, celebrate, regret, reconsider its big and small moments: these are the passionate concerns of Alicia Rabins’ Fruit Geode, a book that I could not stop reading once I started, a book that drew me in with intimacy and force and then grabbed my heart hard, which is to say, if you have a body, this book is a must read.”—Lynn Melnick

“A terrific collection of stories. There are echoes here of Flannery O’Connor, Barry Hannah, and Denis Johnson, but Genevieve Hudson is her own writer—impressively and gloriously so. Her eye for the clinching detail is unnerving and her sympathies are fascinatingly conflicted. I hope, and suspect, this book will be the start of a long and inspiring career.” —Tom Bissell “Full of blood and dust and stars and light, Hudson captures the beauty and horror of the everyday and makes it all seem like magic.” —Leah Dieterich

“Yang rebuilds for the reader a town that is notable for its many stark contrasts: restored & ruined buildings, wealth & poverty, international art & border enforcement. Hey, Marfa makes a remarkable poetic accounting of the ways imagination is currently working with & against the histories & myths of the US/Mexico borderlands & the American West.”―Tim Johnson “Hey, Marfa a commonplace book, memoir, & hybrid obituary for things: following a trail of ‘last words’ & communal losses, here is a History learning to listen with eyes & Mourning recovering the dead travelers on the road. Hey, Marfa transmits voltage or vitalized matter as words reach to words.”―Susan Howe

“Bhuvaneswar is unflinching about the lives of those for whom identity is a constant battle & the act of being is an unavoidable challenge, but she doesn’t ignore the beauty in their strength . . . White Dancing Elephants is a necessary book — & one that introduces a gifted voice to contemporary literature.”―NPR “White Dancing Elephants is a searing & complex collection, wholly realized, each piece curled around its own beating heart. Tender & incisive, Chaya Bhuvaneswar is a surgeon on the page, unflinching in her aim, unwavering in her gaze, & absolutely devastating in her prose. This is an astonishing debut.”―Amelia Gray

“Long Soldier reminds readers of their physical and linguistic bodies as they are returned to language through their mouths and eyes and tongues across the fields of her poems.”—Natalie Diaz for The New York Times Book Review “Layli Long Soldier’s movement between collective and personal makes this book intimate and urgent. She has charted new ways to write in what’s left out—and not merely in the margins either. WHEREAS offers a powerful reckoning.”—National Book Critics Circle Award judges’ citation

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

“Every explosive requires a fuse. That’s R. O. Kwon’s novel, a straight, slow-burning fuse. To read her novel is to follow an inexorable flame coming closer & closer to the object it will detonate—the characters, the crime, the story, &, ultimately, the reader.”—Viet Thanh Nguyen “Kwon’s multi-faceted narrative portrays America’s dark, radical strain, exploring the lure of fundamentalism, our ability to be manipulated, and what can happen when we’re willing to do anything for a cause.” —Atlantic.com “A God-haunted, willful, strange book written with a kind of savage elegance. I’ve said it before, but now I’ll shout it from the rooftops: R. O. Kwon is the real deal.”—Lauren Groff

“Reading Tommy Pico’s Junk I kept thinking of Heather McHugh’s pronouncement that the main discipline of poetry is “to keep finding life strange.” Pico is the master of making the stone stony, or returning the sheer absurdity of being to everything, from grief to intimacy to dating apps to donuts. Junk insists on the urgency of the quotidian, of, to borrow a phrase from Pico, ‘vibrant inconsequence.’ It’s rare to read a book that makes living feel so alive.”—Kaveh Akbar “A visceral exorcism of personal & collective demons . . . Pico demonstrates that a person’s many selves, traumas, anxieties, hookups, & breakups can become a marker of courage and survival.”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Dubravka Ugrešić is considered one of Europe’s most distinctive novelists and essayists. She is the 2016 winner of Neustadt International Prize for Literature for her body of work, joining literary luminaries from Gabriel Garcia Marquez to Elizabeth Bishop to Octavio Paz. In 1991 when war broke out in the former Yugoslavia, Ugrešić took a firm antiwar stance, critically dissecting retrograde Croatian and Serbian nationalism, the stupidity and criminality of war, and becoming a target for nationalist journalists, politicians, and fellow writers in the process. Subjected to prolonged public ostracism and persistent media harassment, she has lived in exile since 1993.

“Anna Moschovakis takes the reader straight to the terrifying edge: that moment where one ages out of youthfulness & begins to flutter in the debris of middle living, flattened out by technology, wild-goose chasing one’s data. Yet, the deeper we look into Eleanor’s unsettledness, the more we see & the more hope we find in her rhizomic wandering. This is a beautiful slow burn of a novel.” —Renee Gladman “By turns funny, melancholic, & provocative, Anna’s novel undoes & remakes the conventions of realist fiction through repetition & compression of time . . . It is ‘luminously ordinary’ in its progression, where profound shifts are as small as a postcard written or a hand touched.” —BOMB

In Dao Strom’s collection of poetic fragments, You Will Always Be Someone From Somewhere Else, translated by Ly Thuy Nguyen as Mình sẽ luôn là người nọ đến từ nơi nọ, the fragments are wholly filled—with text: English, Vietnamese, drifting, entwined, dense, vanishing—with space: empty, white, solid, black—with images: cropped, multiplied, sliced, erased—& with punctuation: plus, minus, inequality signs, slashes, brackets, & bullet points imbued with as much meaning as entire novels. “After you depart from the cinema of her sea, you may ask, what or who is she? . . . why is she able to dismantle my soul so easily? . . . how is she able to make desolation so compellingly hospitable? What is her secret?”—Vi Khi Nao

“Lacey captures with eerie precision the strangeness of being a person in the world, living alongside other human beings with unknowable thoughts and feelings . . . Reading Lacey’s fiction feels like walking through a dark apartment in someone’s mind, full of winding hallways and unmarked doors. You never know quite where you are or where you’ll end up. Like the work of Clarice Lispector or Rachel Cusk, Lacey seems to be on the verge of inventing a new genre somewhere between prose poem and fugue state.”—Los Angeles Times

“Forrest Gander’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 much pain in this book—perhaps too much, almost too much—but what is poetry for if not for this? And there’s more life in one of these dark words than in most entire books. Reading this book may hurt, but it will help people to keep living through what they thought they could never survive.”—Craig Morgan Teicher for NPR

“Hodson’s essays have such a sexy drama to them—and ultimately it’s the romance of just getting through life; the passion that comes from being a wholly alert woman and living to tell about it. I had a real romance with this book.”—Miranda July “Chelsea Hodson tests herself against her desires, grapples with their consequences, and presents a surgically precise account of what they were to her. These essays are bewitching—despite their discipline and rigor, you can smell the blood.”—Sarah Manguso “A unique collection about being an artist and a woman in a world that doesn’t always value either.”—Booklist

“From the anarchy, torment, and despair of the Syrian war, Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple have drawn a book of startling emotional power and intellectual depth. Many books will be written on the war’s exhaustive devastation of bodies and souls, and the defiant resistance of many trapped men and women, but the Mahabharata of the Levant has already found its wisest chroniclers.”—Pankaj Mishra “A revelatory and necessary read on one of the most destructive wars of our time . . . In great personal detail, Marwan Hisham and Molly Crabapple poignantly capture the tumultuous life in Syria before, after, and during the war—from inside one young man’s consciousness.”—Angela Davis  

“This book is going to change how we think about life and women forever; like ancient Greek philosopher level of describing reality in a way that creates it. So, go or don’t go, read the book or don’t—either way your life will be changed by this thinker. I’m being serious here.”—Miranda July “This inquiry into the modern woman’s moral, social and psychological relationship to procreation is an illumination, a provocation, and a response—finally—to the new norms of femininity, formulated from the deepest reaches of female intellectual authority. It is unlike anything else I’ve read. Sheila Heti has broken new ground, both in her maturity as an artist and in the possibilities of the female discourse itself.”—Rachel Cusk  

“Not many authors are compared to Borges, Cervantes, and Kathy Acker all in one breath, but that is exactly what we’re dealing with here: Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi is a twisted, twisty genius.”—Nylon Magazine “Van der Vliet Oloomi captures the shattered identity of the refugee and the immigrant, the way that literature becomes a lifeline in exile: a movable home, a network of dissent, a genealogy beyond national borders.”—Los Angeles Review of Books “Hearken ye fellow misfits, migrants, outcasts, squint-eyed bibliophiles, library-haunters and book stall-stalkers: Here is a novel for you.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Jen Bervin’s work—all of it—engages the eye, the hand, the ear, and the mind. Her artistry is vast and inclusive, by finesse and intelligence, by curiosity, forbearance, and vision. She knows the unexpected wonder of pattern is everywhere and that the smallest detail contains enough energy to spawn a universe. I think they should send her into space, if it were not for the fact her work has already sent us there. Her poems in themselves, those exhilirated fragments, are the purest form of the art itself—they contain the innate inner gradients of whatever takes our breath away.”—Mary Ruefle

“Cheston Knapp’s Up Up, Down Down has the uncanny, welcome ability to make so-called mainstream or dominant culture—white, masculinist, Christian, frat boy, & so on—appear newly strange, & newly open to analysis. He has the eye & ear of an anthropologist, a joyously expansive vocabulary, a prose style that feels both extravagant & exact, & a big, booming heart.”—Maggie Nelson “This book made me laugh out loud in embarrassing places—a quiet Swedish train, a darkened redeye flight—& its insights will keep echoing in me for a long time.”—Leslie Jamison

“In Counternarratives, John Keene undertakes a kind of literary counterarchaeology, a series of fictions that challenge our notion of what constitutes ‘real’ or ‘accurate’ history. His writing is at turns playful and erudite, lyric and coldly diagnostic, but always completely absorbing. Counternarratives could easily be compared to Borges or Bolaño, Calvino or Kiš.”—Jess Row “Keene’s story collection is truly radical—in its politics, in its stylistic restlessness, in its rethinking of the myths we tell ourselves about race and sexuality in the history of the Americas.”—Anthony Domestico

“These pieces are elaborate piecework—perforated, whip stitched, and distressed field-dressed dissections of language. Tortured? Maybe. But lusciously junked & juxtaposed, turned inside out & every which way but . . . No, in every way they make way.”—Michael Martone “Imagine an entity composed of sheep, wheat, assholes, clitorises, stars. Why not? That would be this poem, this world—a perfectly recognizable post-human world which is also post surreal. Vi Khi Nao is making it new, no, she is doing the old job of making us see what’s already here in a new way.”—Rae Armantrout

Micheline Aharonian Marcom’s The Brick House is a place where people dream of love and loneliness, of the world’s beauty, and of ongoing environmental degradation. Travelers confront their lives in the strange, elemental language which dreams allow for, a strangeness mirrored in the accompanying illustrations by Fowzia Karimi. Inspired by Calvino’s Invisible Cities and Kawabata’s House of Sleeping Beauties, and following in the tradition of Armenian illuminated manuscripts, The Brick House is in Rikki Ducornet’s words “Fierce, fearlessly erotic and always unforeseeable.”

“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 indication, the work to come will not just surface suppressed stories; it might give birth to new forms.”—The New York Times

“Cross-pollinating fairy tales, horror movies, TV shows, & a terrific sense of humor, Machado’s work reminds me at different times of such wildly divergent figures as David Lynch, Jane Campion, Maggie Nelson, & Grace Paley; which is a way of saying, Machado sounds like nobody but herself.”—John Powers, NPR “Fresh Air” “The book abounds with fantastical premises that ring true because the intensity of sexual desire, the mutability of the body, & the realities of gender inequality make them so. These stories stand as exquisitely rendered, poignant hauntings.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“In Gospel of Regicide, Eunsong Kim develops a thrilling method for unwriting lyric even as she reimagines it, creating a socially engaged poetry of & for our time. Anticapitalist, feminist & anti-racist yet critical of non-intersectional understandings of identity & selfhood, she is unafraid of drawing the sacred from the pedestrian, & unbeholden to whiteness as foundation. These poems, mutable in form & style, yet cohesive in their vision, suggest a complex & different order allowing us to ‘complete the story.’ Kim kills the king, & blesses us with a superlative collection as a result.”—John Keene

“Leni Zumas here proves she can do almost anything. Her tale feels part Melvillian, part Lydia Davis, part Octavia Butler—but really Zumas’s vision is entirely her own. Red Clocks is funny, mordant, political, poetic, alarming, and inspiring—not to mention a way forward for fiction now.”—Maggie Nelson “Move over Atwood, Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks is a gender roaring tour de force. The bodies of women in Red Clocks are each the site of resistance and revolution. I screamed out loud. I pumped my fist in the air. And I remembered how hope is forged from the ground up, through the bodies of women who won’t be buried.”—Lidia Yuknavitch

“Biespiel’s supple memoir of becoming a poet will surely inspire other writers to embrace the bodily character of writing & feel the power &, sometimes, the emptiness of the act of writing poetry.”—Publishers Weekly, starred review “Whether he is writing about poetry, politics, competitive diving, or the glories of great conversation, Biespiel’s recurring subject is the tension between freedom & discipline―between the sublime release of our own wildness & the precision that comes only from exquisite self-control. Part memoir, part ars poetica, The Education of a Young Poet is a feast: of language, of memory, & of insights into how one young writer came into his own.”—Patrick Phillips

“For nearly 40 years Armantrout has made a poetics of not finding the right words–of finding, in fact, the ‘wrong’ ones . . . Armantrout restores the strangeness of experiences we take for granted.”—Michael Robbins, Chicago Tribune “Hoopskirts, star jasmine, synchronized swimming, Russian icons, a ceramic fish face, electrons & photons: in these poems, everything is interconnected, thought through, deeply felt & expressed in the most precise and necessary words. Armantrout is one of our most inventive & magnetic poets, & she never disappoints: with inspired patience, she embraces the strangeness of our familiar world & refashions it into something new & utterly transporting.”—Lydia Davis

“What is a dog if not god? In Afterglow, Eileen Myles steps up to the challenge for writers to function as prophets. Ghostwritten in part by deceased pit bull Rosie, this ‘dog memoir’ explores—among other things—geometry, gender, mortality, evil, aging, and plaids. Myles makes new rules for what prose writing can be. Afterglow is Myles’s funniest, profoundest work yet.”—Chris Kraus “Only Eileen Myles could reinvent the memoir again so stunningly; Afterglow is the sort of multidimensional love story you could only expect from one of our greatest experimental writers living today!”—Porochista Khakpour

“I read Little Fires Everywhere in a single, breathless sitting. With brilliance and beauty, Celeste Ng dissects a microcosm of American society just when we need to see it beneath the microscope: how do questions of race stack up against the comfort of privilege, and what role does that play in parenting? Is motherhood a bond forged by blood, or by love? And perhaps most importantly: do the faults of our past determine what we deserve in the future? Be ready to be wowed by Ng’s writing—and unsettled by the mirror held up to one’s own beliefs.”—Jodi Picoult

“Spells is a fascinating hybrid text, not simply illustrated by a collection of photographs but created in response to them, a collaboration between Peter Rock and five photographers. The result is a novel unlike any I’ve read before, that weaves elements of realism, fable, prose poetry, and essay through the supporting structure of images to create something beautiful and unsettling.”—Cari Luna “Rock’s prose calls to mind Kazuo Ishiguro, not just for its spareness but also for its mix of wonder and creepiness.”—New York Times

“Sinclair crafts her stunning debut collection around the beauty & brutality of the word cannibal, whose origins derive from Columbus’s belief that the Carib people consumed human flesh. Attacking this dehumanizing judgment born from white entitlement & denouncing the idea that blackness is synonymous with savagery, Sinclair ponders such questions as, How does a poet get inside the head of Shakespeare’s Caliban? How would Caliban define blackness without the filter of a white man’s bias? . . . Through her visceral language Sinclair paints the institution of white supremacy as not just an individualized phenomenon, but as a ruthless & menacing force.”—Publisher’s Weekly, starred review

In Why Poetry, award-winning poet, translator, and editor, Matthew Zapruder argues that the way we have been taught to read poetry is the very thing that prevents us from enjoying it. Anchored in poetic analysis & steered by Zapruder’s personal experience of coming to the form, Why Poetry is engaging & conversational, even as it makes a passionate argument for the necessity of poetry in an age when information is constantly being mistaken for knowledge. He takes on what it is that poetry—and poetry alone—can do. Most important, he asks how reading poetry can help us to lead our lives with greater meaning and purpose.

“As a descendent of Chantal Akerman and Unica Zürn—among others—Yanara Friedland reimagines the origin myth. Friedland’s permeable pages allow the reader entryway into a ‘mirror [that] becomes an open door,’ a door through which we hear the echo of Ana Mendieta telling us ‘There is no original past to redeem: there is the void.’ Uncountry is an invitation to that void, and Friedland serves as dream guide through this blend of the personal, political, and stunningly poetic”—Lily Hoang Uncountry: a Mythology is winner of the Noemi Press Fiction Prize